Skating Too Gay?

From ABC World News and PlanetOut:

Last Friday, ABC World News aired a story that has been brewing for about three months and now it seems poised to explode.

In February, Skate Canada, Canada's Figure Skating Governing Body, announced a new Public Relations campaign to make skating in Canada look "tough."

Skate Canada wasn't helped when two-time Olympic Silver Medalist, Elvis Stojko, went on a self-appointed mini press tour, speaking on behalf of what Skate Canada was looking for. Stojko told the Toronto Sun "If you're very lyrical and you're really feminine and soft, well, that's not men's skating. That is not men's skating, ok? Men's skating is power, strength, masculinity, focus, clarity of movement, interpretation of music."

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If you're very lyrical? First off, Stojko, let's have a reality check. Figure skating has been pretty kind to you as a career, and you've been surrounded by LGBT folks and queer-allies within that sport for the last 15 years or so. If you can't man up and actually say something positive about your queer friends, colleagues, and co-workers within the sport, then at the very least don't slag them by contemptuously linking 'effeminacy' with 'softness,' and masculinity with 'grace.'

Basically, Skate Canada seems to be suggesting that there are two types of figure-skaters, the gay ones and the straight ones, and they need to pay more attention to the straight ones in order to butch up the sport. So, historical skating luminaries such as Brian Orser, Rudy Galindo (who quotes from Rocky Horror on his website), Brian Boitano (WWBBD?)...I guess they're soft, but not graceful, not manly. I seem to remember Boitano, Galindo, and Orser all doing triple-jumps, flips, death-spiral spins, but hey, those are just the gay spins, ignore them. Concentrate on Stojko's precious quad jump, which apparently takes so much raw heterosexual strength that only he can pull it off.

I distinctly remember watching Stojko skate in the late-1990s, with my mom (of course), to the soundtrack for the movie "Dragonheart." He was wearing leather wrist cuffs that looked suspiciously like gauntlets, a tunic, and a necklace simulated to look like a dragon's tooth. It was probably the gayest ensemble I'd ever seen him in, but he was still out there, puffing away, making mechanical arm-gestures and trying to communicate the indomitable spirit of his masculinity to the crowd. He pumped his arms like Messier scoring from the hash-marks.

Toller Cranston is graceful; Emile Sandhu is graceful; Sergei Grinkov was graceful when he skated romantic duets with Gordeeva, and still graceful when he skated alone, without pumping his arms like he'd just scored in OT. Figure skating may not be a 'gay sport' per se, but it's a sport where norms of masculinity and femininity become crucially blurred, transformed, and even renovated. I know that the many gay and straight figure-skaters I watched as a kid taught me a lot about both masculinity and femininity, movement and grace, music and silence.

Stojko may not have considered the fact that he was borrowing, even modeling his own style of masculinity from other queer skaters, or female skaters. He should thank them for the lessons on strength and grace rather than selling them out to the press in a cheap attempt to ingratiate himself with Skate Canada.



Orser, 1988 Tour of Champions