So I wake up this morning - still tired after last night's 3 hour dress rehearsal for our Spring Ice Show....and on ABC there's a story on ABC about how Skate Canada (the governing board for figure skating in Canada) wants to make Figure Skating more "masculine" and appeal more to the guys.Oh Puleeze. This is nothing new. Every once in a while some macho guy will take up figure skating and then decide he doesn't like skating to music or pointing his toe (or getting ribbed by his macho buddies) and then whine that this sport is "too feminine" Elvis Stoiko complained he didn't win because he was too masculine. Actually it was because his posture was crappy but if you want to call good posture "feminine" - whatever.
This new move has not set well with the gay community and I don't blame them and as a woman I'm a little miffed as well. That's right. This sport appeals to women and gay men. OH NO! I've done the unthinkable - nobody in figure skating is supposed to admit there are a lot of gay men in figure skating. Well, there are and we aren't fooling anybody by pretending they're aren't. That makes it hard on all boys - gay and straight who love to figure skate. The answer isn't to pretend nobody's gay - the answer is to make it - gay men in figure skating - so what?
Figure skating is hard - it is very athletic - you come take my power class with me and tell me it's not! But it's also beautiful. You skate to music. You hold your body just so. You point your toe. You wear beautiful sparkly clothes (I'm Auntie Em in our show tonight and even her dress has rhinestones!) and you smile while you do things with your body that make you want to grimace and cry. And that is all why the people who excell in figure skating love it. Art and pretty clothes tend to appeal to women and gay men (not always but enough to make the stereotype generally true) So what?
Do you see women and gay men saying that football shouldn't be so rough and that boxers should smile more?
Right.
More about my show later.
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