In praise of Johnny Weir

We had a lot of fun at the Feministing retreat this weekend. For me, one of the many highlights – and there really were very many moments when I looked around and thought, “this has got to be the best moment of the weekend,” only to have the very same thought an hour or two later – was standing behind Vanessa and laughing uncontrollably as she watched Bryan Safi of “Infomania” give his cutting analysis of how the media has treated American figure skater Johnny Weir during the Winter Games.
Weir won US Nationals in 2004, 2005 and 2006, but famously did far worse than expected at the 2006 Games in Torino, placing fifth after not completing some of his jumps. This year, he placed third at Nationals and went on to Vancouver, where he finished in sixth place. He is, without a doubt, a world class athlete. But as Safi notes, “athlete” is a word that’s never used to describe Weir. He’s described as “controversial” or “flamboyant”: the mainstream media seems to have a different vocabulary for talking about Weir than for talking about his American rivals and his international competitors.

You can understand why Johnny Weir makes commentators, even figure skating commentators, so very uncomfortable. He’s an especially elegant skater who wears formfitting and sparkly costumes (yes, even more formfitting and more sparkly than one usually sees in figure skating) and who really emotes on the ice. He has his own reality TV show, “Be Good Johnny Weir,” he’s posed for fashion magazines and modeled at NY Fashion Week and in non-competition exhibitions he skates to Lady Gaga. He seems unconcerned with trying to make men’s figure skating more appealing and accessible to the mainstream by making it more “macho,” and unlike Vancouver silver medalist Evgeni Plushenko, he seems uninterested in participating in the figure skating equivalent of a pissing contest over quadruple jumps.
Weir also makes mainstream commentators – from whom we can expect sexist and homophobic remarks – nervous, too. Last week, two Canadian radio personalities questioned Weir’s sexuality and gender identity, saying that “we should make him pass a gender test at this point.” They also argued that Weir’s flamboyance would deter other young men from taking up the sport, because “they think all the boys who skate will end up like him. It sets a bad example,” and suggested that Weir should be competing in the ladies’ competition. Weir, when asked by “Access Hollywood” for his reaction, said “every little boy should be so lucky as to turn into me.” And given that Weir is a three-time National Champion, two-time Olympian and personal friend of Lady Gaga, I have to agree – we should all be so lucky.
One of the real reasons that Weir makes people so uncomfortable, I think, is his refusal to fit neatly into a category – gay, straight, man, woman. Weir famously does not speak on the record about his sexuality: in 2006, when asked by a fan on his blog if he was gay, Weir replied,

I don’t feel the need to express my sexual being because it’s not part of my sport and it’s private. I can sleep with whomever I choose and it doesn’t affect what I’m doing on the ice, so speculation is speculation. I like nice things, and beautiful things, so if that is the only way people are determining that I swing one way or the other, then to me, that’s sad. You can’t judge a book by its cover, ever. . . . I am who I am, and I don’t need to justify anything to anyone.

And Weir is right; people do speculate. People do want to know if he’s gay or straight. It maddens us that he blurs the lines our culture has drawn, that he refuses to play by the rules.
But at the end of the day, those lines are arbitrary. Those rules are constructed, and they’re constructed to serve the interests of some groups and to disadvantage other groups. Johnny – you gotta love him – totally gets this. In a press conference that he held last week to respond to gender-based criticism of him, he said,

“I think masculinity is what you believe it to be. To me, masculinity is all my perception. And I think that masculinity and femininity, it’s something that’s very old-fashioned. There’s a whole new generation that aren’t defined by their sex or their race or who they like to sleep with. I think as a person, you know what your values are and what you believe in, and I think that’s the most important thing.”

He also said that the commentators in question were more than entitled to hold and voice their own beliefs, but that he hopes that more kids can grow up the way he did, with the freedom to express themselves. It was an intelligent, classy and spot-on response to the kind of bigoted comments Weir must hear about himself all the time. It was also an example of what it looks like when athletes take it upon themselves to be role models, not just for young people in their sport, but for people everywhere who feel excluded or oppressed by our culture’s insistence that rules are rules, that categories are concrete, and that life must always be lived between a set of arbitrary and ultimately limiting lines.