When I was a High School student, one of my classmate was Alessandro Reani. In 1994 he and his partner Laura Bonardi won a silver in the Italian Championship. Alessandro is the brother of Alberto Reani, the first partner of Barbara Fusar-Poli. Laura and Alessandro ended twentieth in the European Championship, the Italian Federation didn’t send them at the Olympic Games (nor did send Fusar-Poli/Reani, even if Italy could send two Ice Dance team) and they ended at the 22° place at the World Championship. Alessandro and I graduated in 1987, when Alessandro was at his best we weren’t classmates anymore. I started to watch Figure Skating in 1989, so during my High Scool years I knew nothing about Figure Skating. I knew only that Alessandro, not one of my closest friend, was a skater.

But I remember a classmate (not Alessandro) discriminated because, according to someone, was gay, and I remember also a conversation on Alessandro. Someone was perplexed because he skated, for him it wasn’t a serious sport, and was a sport full of gay. I don’ remember well the conversation, it was a lot of years ago, I wasn’t partecipating in the conversation, simply they were near me and I heard their words. None of the boys involved were really my friend. But I remember that one of them said that Alessandro wasn’t a single skater but that he was the half of a couple, and another said “Ah, almeno c’è una ragazza”. “Ah, At least, there’s a girl”. For a boy, only the presence of a girl make the sport acceptable.

Probably I was 15 or 16 years old. Despite being completely out of Figure Skating, and at that time not interested in it, I noticed the prejudices that were circulating. The male skaters experiences these things on their skin and experiences them constantly. They know that sooner or later someone will make stupid comments. At best there will be no bad intentions, just curiosity, many other times the comments will be aimed at hurting. No skater can grow up without having thought about it, and without having found a way to answer questions that he will have been asked who knows how many times. If his response is aimed at defending himself even at the cost of humiliating others, it means that he does not care about the suffering of others. He is not disarming those who attack him, he is only directing them to someone weaker.

Lys, who is an inexhaustible mine of information, reminded me of two books I read. That she cites my posts in her tweets in which I comment on some books, prompting me to pick up those books again, is a remarkable game of cross references. The first one she mentioned is Mary louise Adams’ Artistic Impression, but now I can’t go back to that book. There are speeches that take time to get right, and right now I don’t have that time. The other is Jon Jackson’s On Edge, with a mention on Rudy Galindo. Lys tweeted a screenshot from this post:

Jon Jackson: On Edge/3. National bias e preconcetti | sportlandia (wordpress.com)

My text is in Italian, but the quotes are in English.

Jackson is homosexual, and one of the things he recounts in the book is the discovery of his homosexuality. He also talks about his competitive path in Figure Skating, his law degree, his training as a judge and about the competitions he judged … Okay, at one point at work he was excluded from an activity that interested him. Which activity is not important to me, what interests me is the rest:

I realized that everyone around me already knew what I had publicly ignored. I still hadn’t admitted my same-sex attraction, yet my manager decided I was gay.

This was my first barefaced with homophobia, or was it? How could it be homophobia when I hadn’t even come out as a gay man? Can a person be homophobic toward someone who they just think is gay?

I later learned that the asshole manager who made that comment was gay himself! How can a person be both homophobic and gay? I would later experience first-hand, in the skating world, that instances of homophobia by gay men toward other “suspected” gay men are not unusual at all. (Pag .102)

Okay, a judge is telling us not that there are no homosexuals but that, regardless of their number, skating has a homophobic problem. I go forward several pages. Jackson remember a conversation among Morry Stillwell, at that time president of the U.S. Figure Skating, him and a lady of which he does not name, and which he indicates only as “Ms. Chairperson” because she is the organizer of the competition where this conversation took place. First there is a short passage on Stilwell’s misoginism, then Ms. Chairperson clearly tells Stilwell that

In her opinion, many of the male skaters were probably gay, yet the sport’s hierarchy continued to be dominated by straight men. She also believed that the judges were prejudiced against the gay skaters and gay coaches. (Pag. 151)

Follows a brief passage on AIDS, a very serious problem (among others, the Canadian Rob McCall, ice dance partner of Tracy Wilson, winner of an Olympic bronze and three bronzes at the world championships, and the British John Curry, winner of an Olympic gold and a world one) which, according to Ms. Chairperson, the federation had not dealt with enough and which Stilwell dismissed as not important.

As for homophobia in figure skating, Morry was much more to the point. “It simply doesn’t exist,” he claimed. “Nobody cares about that crap any more.”

Ms. Chairperson wasn’t buying it.

“Why then do gay skaters have to hide their sexuality, when straight skaters flaunt theirs?” She said, not letting him off the hook with his dismissive statements.

“You will have to ask them. I can’t tell you why, and it’s none of my business, and quite frankly, it’s none of yours!” he spat.

Irritated, she turned to me and asked, “So, Jon, tell me what it’s like being a gay judge in the homophobic sport of figure-skating.”

Up until that question was directed at me, I was listening intently and silently cheering her on.

I answered her, “There’s no question that homophobia has run rampant in skating. But among the ranks of the judges, it does seem to be disappearing,” I responded, thiking back to a night in Minneapolis where the judges’ hospitality room more resembled a gay bar than a stuffy judges’ soirée, filled with so many openly gay judges. “I think figure-skating has to find a way to push that acceptance down into the ranks of the coaches and the skaters.”

“But it’s not the coaches and the skaters that are the problem,” she argued back. “Te judges must do more than just be accepting between each other. They need to reach out to the coaches and skaters and let them know it’s okay to be gay.”

At this point, Morry jumped back in. “No judge or official is ever going to talk to a young skater about being gay! It will never happen. They are too young!” He took the “we have to protect them” road of reasoning.

Ms. Chairperson was not giving up that easily. “Morry, I’m not talking about adolescent teenagers here. The elite level men are all adults, most in their twenties. What’s wrtong with a judge talking about it with them? It has to start somewhere,” she reasoned.

“It’s not the judges’ problem. It’s not a skater’s problem. If we had more positive role models among coaches, we wouldn’t have this problem at all,” Morry countered.

“Positive role models.” That is where I first learned figure-skating’s code word for straight male coaches. You see, it’s simply a matter of having more straight male coaches. Then figure-skating would have more straight male skaters, or at least according to Morry’s queer manner of thinking on the matter. (Pagg. 151-152)

A few pages later Jackson tells of Galindo and his victory at the national championship, with words that I transcribed in the post of which I inserted the link. I report only the last passage, we are in 1996:

when the assigments were handed out for the next season’s International competitions, Rudy was not invited to Skate America. Every other National Champion headlined the event, and had done so every previous year, but this year the U.S. officials were not going to allow the openly gay Rudy at their premier first-of-the-season event. (Pag. 158)

I do not remember if the Jackon contains any passage on how difficult homosexuals are in skating, book be said more re-read it but, like, I don’t have the time for everything. One thing is certain: with the image that the skating management wants to present to the world, an athlete who declares himself homosexual risks that it will backfire, with judges’ evaluations lower than what he deserves. And even those who are only suspected of being homosexual run the same risk. Therefore an athlete may be fed up with hearing the same comments over and over about the sport he practices, but the answer cannot be to declare himself better than the others.