How figure skating became a comfort zone for the LGBTQ+ community

By DAVE SKRETTA, AP Sports activities Author

The second Amber Glenn stepped onto the ice at determine skating’s world championships, followers started to wave American flags, from the bottom rows inside TD Backyard to the very best rafters, the place the jerseys of Boston’s sporting greats hold in honor.

It appeared a becoming backdrop to her program: Glenn is the three-time reigning U.S. champion, one of many present faces of determine skating, and because the daughter of a police officer and a proud native Texan, patriotism flows by her as thick as oil.

But the stars-and-stripes weren’t the one flags flying excessive that evening.

Scattered all through the sellout crowd on the final worlds earlier than the Milan Cortina Olympics have been the equally conspicuous rainbow flags that for practically 50 years have signified pleasure inside the LGBTQ+ neighborhood. They began popping up at Glenn’s competitions a yr earlier, when she carried one throughout her shoulders in celebration of her nationwide championship.

“I noticed them,” Glenn acknowledged later, lengthy after her efficiency, “and I used to be proud to see each of these flags flying.”

Glenn, who identifies as pansexual, by no means sought to be an icon inside the queer neighborhood.

In reality, she didn’t come to grips together with her personal sexuality till she had been by the wringer, together with a stint in a psychological well being facility spent working by despair, anxiousness and an consuming dysfunction. Glenn didn’t come out publicly till letting it slip throughout an interview a half-dozen years in the past, after which thought with horror, “I haven’t even instructed my Catholic grandma but!”

But because the 26-year-old Glenn reflected on her journey in an interview with The Related Press, she expressed a profound sense of gratitude for having skilled it inside the tight-knit determine skating world. For many years, the game has supplied a progressive sort of safe space for these inside the LGTBQ+ neighborhood, a few of whom nonetheless could also be making an attempt to appreciate their genuine selves.

“I’m so, so grateful that I grew up in skating, as a result of I grew up in Texas, and by chance it was Dallas, which was nonetheless a bit extra ahead,” Glenn stated. “Plus, I used to be homeschooled. So I had to determine a number of issues alone, coming from that background.

“However as I ventured out to competitions, you understand, exterior of Texas,” Glenn continued, “I ended up seeing this neighborhood and these folks round me, and so they have been among the prime coaches and actually good skaters. I used to be like, ‘Oh, OK. That is OK.’ It made me understand, ‘OK, there are people who find themselves followers of me that may in all probability really feel much more linked in the event that they noticed somebody like them.’”

The lengthy and winding street

It hasn’t all the time been that means in determine skating, a sport the place success and failure is kind of actually a judgment name, and appears, angle and mannerisms all matter within the scores. All through the 1900s, and even into the ‘80s and ’90s, girls usually have been inspired to be extra effeminate, and male counterparts have been instructed to embrace their masculinity.