Costumes

Okay, tangent. After the discussion directly underneath the post below, I went looking to see how gay and/or flamboyant Brian Boitano dressed in his prime and here's him on the podium at the 1988 Olympics: 

He jumps right out at you as the gay one.

It looks like they got together on the phone before the lp and coordinated their outfits - but what's gayer - red or blue? It's a judgment call - Viktor Petrenko could be sneaking up on the Brians and running away with the title. The flamboyance! Why couldn't these guys have been understated like everyone else in 1988!

Sergei Grinkov:

Sergei may have sprigs of cherry 
blossoms running up the side of his robin's egg blue
costume. And what's at his waist? Is that .. pink?
{{Sergei}}

 Katerina Witt:

Bestemianova and Bukin:

Lovely program.

Dear God those costumes are gay and loud. No wonder nobody watched figure skating back then.

(It's curious that the Besti squat named after Natalia's move is done now mostly by ice dance men. Do they know this in Canada? How it's a Russian girl squat?)

Here's Brian Boitano in other costumes:

Oh how gay.

If the wife-beater were white-gold shredded spandex with sparkles, or red shredded spandex with gold thread like the guys wear in CSOI, or if the darn thing would only be torn into rags after he did his back-flip, it wouldn't seem so gay.

 Here's Brian Orser who shows you how NOT to do what Brian Boitano would do:

Blue, collared button-down and dark skate-trousers. 180 from that gay, black sweater vest, gray, collared button-down and dark skate-trousers the other Brian is wearing above him.

God Brian, you make me sick! Why can't you dress like Brian?

This is a little marginal for me. It's a show program, I get that. But Orser 
needs to pick one color, shrink it to 1/8th this size, slash the fabric so 
the details of his chesticles peek out, tighten up the pants, do some 
pointing and get spray tan. Then he won't be as gay.

I really love Brian Orser and this is not really about him, but about Skate Canada. Shortly after Brian Orser won his Worlds 1988 gold medal (3 perfect 6.0's), In 1998, and as referenced by the comment under the post beneath this, Orser was the subject of a palimony suit which ended up outing him - apparently the first figure skater thus outed. [the original timeline, which I googled after a commentator on another post confirmed to me that Orser was indeed out and how it came about, is from an article I googled that incorrectly stated the sequence of events. The second comment below this post I will assume has the correct sequence.]

Yet fourteen 3-4 years later Skate Canada's Alma Moir singled out America's Brian Boitano - not Canadian, no palimony suit and not nearly as many flowy, billowy shirts as people recall (kind of disappointing) - as perpetuating figure skating's gay image, an image thankfully straightened out by Kurt Browning. You'd think the guy with the palimony suit in Canada, the Canadian figure skater and famous co-star of the epic "Battle of the Brians" held in Canada, would be considered to have furthered that gay image of Canadian figure skating more. But I never took the seminar on how to tell which of two hugely talented, intelligent, personable, masculine, good-looking, tastefully costumed male figure skaters is spewing gay all over the sport's image.

But I know one thing:

It's not him.

 

Perhaps Mrs. Moir cited Boitano over Orser because Boitano won the Olympics and Orser did not. That would also explain why she praised Browning as the man who came along and de-gayed things, because he won

zero Olympic medals, of any color.

Next is Johnny Weir, whose niche-appeal costumes include this black number with the outline of a corset indicated in pink fabric on the shirt. It's not a real corset, it's a motif, but damn it's outlined in pink AND men don't wear corsets (except Alec Baldwin under all his suits on 30 Rock).

Another reason you want to get rid of gay image people like Johnny Weir is you never EVER want figure skating to be entertaining.

Now we come to Scott Hamilton's favorite American antidote to the shame that is Johnny Weir:

That's  more like it.

When I read the comments people inside the sport have about this stuff, I think despite all the hinting around the message could be this:

Don’t be gay. Be straight. If you’re straight or claim to be straight, do what you want. Wear anything you want – if it comes off a little gay just mug a whole lot to prove you’re tongue-in-cheek which always = straight.

If you are routinely on the podium and you keep your sexual orientation reasonably undercover, wear what you want, skate to what you want, spray as much tan on yourself as you want and if your sleeves billow or you’ve got some peek-a-boo mesh going on, but you’re mostly passing as straight, really we don’t care.

If you’re gay, but Canadian, we’ll overlook it. We love you guys too much to notice. We love you in spite of it, we do, and we always will love you in spite of it. We’ll never mention it, promise. We’ll help you out by pointing out foreign gay guys. Just YOU don’t mention it, but even if you do, we’ll probably pretend we don't hear and snicker at Johnny Weir some more.

If you are undecided about being known as straight or gay, or if you don’t want to fool around and want to assert yourself unambiguously on the straight side, wear this on the ice:

Official Straight Man's Costume of the ISU