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From left: Chung Sung-Jun / Getty, Cameron Spencer / Getty, Jared Wickerham / Getty, Claudio Villa / Getty, Jared Wickerham / Getty, Jonathan Daniel / Getty
When I ask figure skater Jeremy Abbott how athletes should respond to Russia's anti-gay laws, his eyes widen. "Um," he says, and stops. He shrugs a little and glances over at the U.S. Figure Skating (USFS) handler who's standing nearby.
"You don't have to answer that," the handler reassures him.
Abbott takes in a breath, glances down. "Yeahhh," he sighs, almost inaudibly. Then — "I'm going to walk away from that one."
We're backstage at the 2014 U.S. Figure Skating Championships, which serve as an unofficial qualifier for the Olympic team, and Abbott's a favorite. He's 28 years old, planning to retire at the end of the season and cautious; he was criticized last year for comparing Russia's laws — which have motivated the rape, torture, and murder of gay men and women — to bad interior design. (“I’m not going to go into somebody’s house and be like, “Um, the way you decorate is hideous.”) A bunch of athletes had been cornered on the topic, and the less media-savvy skaters hadn't yet mastered the art of expressing compassion while sidestepping responsibility. Abbott just happened to come up with a particularly inept metaphor.
Later, when I pass him in the hallway, he apologizes twice.
To outsiders, men's figure skating is widely perceived as the Gayest Sport Ever, the butt of endless jokes — consider last weekend's SNL cold open about the “U.S. Men’s Heterosexual Figure Skating Team." The direct action group Queer Nation has recently protested figure skaters Brian Boitano and Johnny Weir for not speaking up against Russia’s anti-gay laws. One of the group's representatives, who asked to not be named, tells me, “Everyone assumes all male skaters are gay. So what? ... I have a hard time believing that figure skating is a particularly homophobic sport. I don’t understand this impulse, particularly from figure skaters, to hide their sexuality. You can’t tell me that if Jeremy Abbott came out as gay that it would affect his standing in the skating world.”
To insiders, though, it's no surprise that skaters are reluctant to speak out on LGBT rights, let alone come out themselves. Most male skaters and officials are committed to keeping their sport in the closet, whether that means choosing "masculine" music, hinting about a girlfriend, or outright denying any connection to homosexuality. A figure skater can never quite outskate the judges' opinion of him, and judges and institutions, it turns out, are notoriously conservative — as some would say, "family-friendly." At the National Championships, which took place this January in Boston, a phrase I heard often was "don't ask, don't tell."
It's not that skating hasn't had out gay athletes. There's Rudy Galindo, a ready-made hard-knock story who grew up in a trailer, abused alcohol and drugs, and lost two coaches and a brother to AIDS. Galindo came out publicly a few weeks before the 1996 U.S. nationals; he skated last in his group (a position that made it harder for the judges to artificially deflate his scores), and to everyone's surprise, he won, becoming the first out national champion. When he was finally inducted into the U.S. Figure Skating Hall of Fame last year after having been rejected three times, his sexuality was not mentioned during the ceremony.
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Johnny Weir
Jonathan Ferrey / Getty Images
A decade later, skater Johnny Weir brought exquisite technical and artistic performances on the ice, but he also brought a reality-television show, a pop song (“
Dirty Love”), and an outspoken diva-worship of Lady Gaga; a word often used to describe him was "
flamboyant," despite the fact that, until 2011, he kept his sexuality private. And last month, after 1988 gold medalist Brian Boitano was named to the U.S. Olympic Delegation to Sochi, he announced that he, too, was gay. Boitano's enough of an established legend to be on the safe side, but it seems that in general, gay skaters are just a tad too implicating of the male skaters around them to be seriously endorsed. They are dismissed in countless subtle ways. One pump-up video montage at nationals showed clip after clip of top male skaters performing one enormous jump after another, but depicted Rudy Galindo crossing himself and Johnny Weir bursting into tears.
So what exactly is male figure skating — which has the potential to be a gay haven in the world of sports — so afraid of?
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Until the early 1900s, figure skating was mostly a way for wealthy men to show off their aristocratic grace and ample spare time by skating elegant figures and positions on the ice. It wasn't really until three-time Olympic champion Sonja Henie came to Hollywood in the '30s — bringing with her short skirts, white skates, and a whole lot of sultry cuteness — that skating became, in the public eye, a primarily girls' sport. Already by mid-century, Skating magazine worried about the lack of boys. These days, boys are so rare that it's common practice, in pairs and dance, for the girls' parents to cover both partners' training expenses — or, for older partners, to offer rewards like a living stipend and a car to the rare man who will skate with his daughter.
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Sonja Henie in 1944
Keystone / Getty Images
And yet, of course, there are still boys — and by the looks of them, they’re
good. It's day four of the eight-day championship, and the juvenile boys — the lowest competitive level, most of them between ages 10 and 13 — are training at the Skating Club of Boston's frigid and charmless rink. Even in their leggings and training jackets, the boys seem distinctly feminine, perhaps because they're younger and more flexible than the top male skaters. They're doing moves that are often reserved for women, layback spins and spirals, curving their arms and cocking their wrists. One boy spots his upright spin, whipping his head to face the same wall with each rotation, a move classic to ballet but atypical in skating. Another pulls his leg up behind his head while he's spinning, arching his back into a Biellmann position. They swing their arms and exaggerate their facial expressions, gaping at one another's double axels or pressing their lips flat in concentration. They're young enough that they still glance around when they fall, checking who saw.
Their mothers watch from the sides of the rink, clenching their mittens without looking at each other. There are very few fathers. They're probably at work, one tells me, earning money; he estimates that he's already spent two to three college educations paying for his 13-year-old's training.
Across town, the junior men — the second-highest level, eligible for some international competitions but not the Olympics — compete in the short program. They're older, in their late teens, and fighting to control themselves: Where the juvenile boys seemed precociously unwieldy, these men's movements are careful, decided. I skated for 10 years growing up and have spent a lot of time in ice rinks, but I’m still surprised, somehow, by how fast these guys are — I can hear the wind as they pass, and their blades leave inch-deep slices in the ice. There are skaters with straight arms and puffed chests, the skating version of men's men, jumping with their jaws clenched. As if — no, because — they have something to prove. And there are skaters whose shoulders don't square into place so much as roll languorously back, who seem to luxuriate in their graceful fingers and loose hips.
Off the ice, a cluster of male skaters in slim-cut jackets keep a running commentary, snapping their fingers and rolling their eyes at one another. "That's my baby!" they shout. "Who run the world?!" They call the men on the ice "Princess" and "Beyoncé," as in, "I love you, Beyoncé!" Gracie Gold, soon-to-be-ladies champion, watches nearby, and someone yells to her, "Gracie! They're not red enough!" Then, to his friend, "her lips." When one guy wears fingerless gloves and performs to music with the sound of engines in it, they snort with laughter: "What is this, the Cars soundtrack?"
If you've heard anyone talk about skating, you'd be forgiven for thinking that there are two kinds of skaters: athletic and artistic. But these are coded butch/femme terms, ones appropriate to an activity that still can't decide where it falls on the gendered spectrum between art and sport. For male skaters, athletic means manly, muscular, stoic; artistic means elegant, graceful, showing emotion. Athletic means tight T-shirts, fists, and military beats; artistic, flowy shirts and delicate fingers. Athletic seems straight. Artistic seems gay. Never mind that some of the best skaters are both athletic and artistic, by standard definitions: In men's skating, as in any high school locker room, a drop of femininity will negate any quantity of testosterone. That's why some skaters are considered artistic even if their technical abilities are higher than their competitors’ — and why others are considered athletic, even if theirs are not. For ladies, of course, the pattern runs in reverse, with athletic reserved for muscular, less-than-ultra-feminine skaters, or, often enough, women of color.
To the outside world, the idea of a butch male skater may seem ludicrous. In a 2010 story for New York magazine called "The Less Flamboyant One," "athletic" skater Evan Lysacek models a bejeweled snake in Vera Wang's showroom. But the characterization belies an odd truth. In addition to outwardly policing outfits — say, forbidding men from wearing tights — the world of skating has created its own hierarchy of masculinity, which is subtle to the point of being near-indiscernible from the outside. For instance, twirling is masculine but arm-flapping is not. Sheer sleeves are only dangerously feminine if they come to a point at the wrist. Sequins are fine. Cutouts are not fine. Lunges are more macho than spirals. Fewer feathers are manlier than more feathers. It's a clever, unspoken system, based on the premise that it's a lot easier to prove a skater's manliness by comparing him to another skater than by comparing him to some other kind of athlete.
I'll note here that without exception, the parents I spoke to at nationals expressed pride and support of their boys' achievements in the sport. But I noticed something else too. Almost all the parents, including those whose sons were "living the dream" as international competitors, offered a list of other sports their sons participated in: hockey, lacrosse, soccer, martial arts, hockey, gymnastics, running, downhill skiing. Offered proudly, as if amazed by their children's breadth of achievement, as if compelled to justify their sons as real athletes — not just the most elite skaters in America.
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If the skating world is particularly cautious of its reputation at the moment, it may be because the sport as a whole is in trouble. Weir and Lysacek, whose brazen, venomous rivalry gave everyone a chance to pick a side, both dropped out of competition last year. The remaining American men aren't landing enough quadruple jumps — the sport's most difficult elements — to make them truly internationally competitive, and the ladies' team lacks an icon with real star power.
It seems in the beginning of the week that someone's trying to make CoverGirl Ashley Wagner into that icon — she's commercial enough, appearing in ads for Hilton HHonors, BP, and Nike, many of which feature throughout the arena. Maybe. Then there's Gracie Gold, who just started working with famed coach Frank Carroll (who's worked previously with Michelle Kwan and Evan Lysacek, to name two) and is more sprightly and feminine than ever; when a positive tweet about her is displayed repeatedly on the Jumbotron before the ladies' long program, people murmur that maybe the judges plan to favor her and are priming the crowd to agree.
People are grumbling, too, about the complex "new" scoring system, adopted 10 years ago to account for charges of bias in the old 6.0 system, whose impacts include making scoring incomprehensible to casual observers and reducing accountability by keeping individual judges' scores anonymous. The new system also leaves little room for, you know, artistry; skaters get more points for performing a string of technical elements with few connecting moves, a process one coach likens to Pac-Man chomping down dots. It's enough to make you long for the good old days after Tonya Harding's husband had Nancy Kerrigan attacked with a baton, an incident which earned the USFS $70 million in media and sponsorships and, more vitally, brought skating an explosion in popularity that lasted a good six or seven years. Sure, 2014 is the 20th anniversary, so maybe the USFS can leverage a little '90s nostalgia for a media boost. Some of the volunteers keep joking that they should slip batons into the skaters' swag bags as a hopeful suggestion: "Maybe we can save the sport again, 20 years later."
Some blame the sport's gay reputation for its drop in popularity, despite the fact that that reputation is nothing new. One senior coach and former Olympian, who requested anonymity, thinks he knows the problem: "No straight man wants to see a man in sequins or crap like that," he explains. American figure skating, in his opinion, is skewing artistic. "Europe has more masculine-type skating. Even Japan has a little more" — he makes a fist — "power."
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Brian Boitano in 1994
Shaun Botterill / Getty Images
The coach and I are standing in a hallway at TD Garden, the primary arena for senior practices and competitions. Nearby, an amorphous line streams toward a book-signing table. Brian Boitano and Dick Button are both repping new books this week (
What Would Brian Boitano Make?: Fresh and Fun Recipes for Sharing with Family and Friends and
Push Dick's Button, respectively), but the crowd, mostly women over 50, seems less interested in books and more interested in taking selfies with Boitano. I waited in that line after buying my cookbook, hoping to thank Boitano for coming out, and when I did he pressed one hand to his chest, looking almost sad. "Sending the message to Russia, that's a big message. That's why I did it. I think for people your age, people now, there's less of a stigma." As if, rather than thanking him, I had asked what took him so long.
The coach follows my gaze, shakes his head a little, more to get my attention than anything else. "In the past we had a couple [top skaters] that were so out, flamboyant ... especially [Johnny Weir], he was bad for the sport, really, because for a while he was, you could say, the face of the federation. I'm talking about mainstream America." He laughs. "I literally know like 50 people who would not turn on the TV and watch it because of that. That's a problem." His own top skater, he tells me proudly, is "a true-true guy. The straightest they come."
The thing about skaters who seem gay, the coach points out, is that they attract a gay audience, whereas straight skaters "attract everybody. Entertaining, fun, man. Women like [them], straight men can look and say, 'Hey, that's cool.' Everybody's OK." He smiles. Problem solved.
Others have argued that skating is less gay than it appears. Scott Hamilton, a 1984 Olympic champion who has been criticized as homophobic, explains to me later on the phone that skaters aren't necessarily gay — they just seem like it. "I think that at times, guys in skating may or may not take on some feminine characteristics because the people they're with are girls." He sounds apologetic. "That has happened in the past."
According to Lorrie Kim at Outsports, “unofficial insider estimates” place the number of gay skaters at roughly 25% to 50%. But, notably, a number of gay men have claimed the percentage is much lower — perhaps because, in being out, they feel alone in their communities. Rudy Galindo told Salon in 2002 that he knew hardly any gay skaters, and that the guys he toured with were "basically 98 percent straight." Brian Boitano once said that "the majority of people in skating are straight. That's a fact. Nobody in skating would deny that." Even Doug Mattis, a gay coach and former competitor who makes a point of reaching out to young LGBT skaters, believes the sport is less gay than people think it is. "I've been asked out by more pro football players than skaters," he says, grinning. He's a short guy in a smart gray suit, at once warm and mischievous. He lowers his voice: "I tell them, 'Please! You'd crush me.'"
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