A deeply adorable thing happened on Instagram on Sunday night. It was also a deeply important thing. Karina Manta, a member of the USA National Team in ice dance, came out as bisexual in a bedroom spoken-word-and-guitar confessional that resounds with the kind of baby queer girl purity that would make all of Autostraddle instantly melt in a puddle of nostalgia. She is, to my knowledge, the first high-level female figure skater to come out.1
With more and more male figure skaters speaking openly about their sexuality, this might not seem like a radical move, but the environment is different for those of us who wear white skates. Everyone knows that a lot of male figure skaters are gay, especially in North America and Western Europe, where the rink shelters boys from bullying while channeling their athletic talents. Queer girls, on the other hand, are mostly invisible, and often hide behind sparkly dresses and extra makeup. When gay men come out in figure skating, it’s a confirmation of what everyone already knows, or thinks they know. When a bisexual woman comes out, she’s asserting a reality that many fans of the sport had never seriously considered.
Manta’s skating partner, Joseph Johnson, has been open about his sexuality on social media for a while now, which means that her revelation makes her part of another first. Manta and Johnson are now the first high-level partnership in a team discipline in which both members are out of the closet. I’m excited not only because I will now be waving a Team Rainbow banner for them in perpetuity, but because it blows a giant hole in the fallacy that ice dance has to be about straight romance in order to be artistically effective.
Of course, plenty of teams have succeeded in ice dance without relying on standard heterosexual romance narratives. The judges generally respect teams who embrace their fraternal or friendly chemistry. Sibling teams like the Duchesnays and the Shibutanis have done just fine for themselves. Others, like Jana Khokhlova/Sergei Novitski or Piper Gilles/Paul Poirier, have simply recognized that their on-ice presence lends itself to other kinds of stories. Openly gay male pairs skaters – Eric Radford and Timothy Le Duc are the most prominent examples – have seen their scores and reputations stay the same or even rise after coming out. Figure skating has room for all kinds of teams and all kinds of on-ice and off-ice relationships.
But there’s a certain kind of ice dance fan who gets weird about teams without conventional romantic chemistry. Accusations of incestuous subtext are a lazy way for fans to complain about sibling teams they don’t like. (Sometimes I feel like the only skating fan who has ever hugged their brother.) At the height of the rivalry between Virtue/Moir and Davis/White, fans of the former team liked to claim they were more authentic because it could be proved, beyond the wildest fan theory, that Davis and White were not romantically involved off the ice and never would be. It’s hard for some parts of ice dance fandom to get their heads around the fact that even married couples are just acting, because when you’re alone in a giant, freezing rink with thousands of people watching, and every ounce of your energy is devoted to keeping your edges clean and your timing precise and for the love of God not falling down, the last thing you want to do is have sex. Ice dance is always theater, whether a skater is gazing into the eyes of her one true love, or picturing the spouse she’ll share the hotel room with that night, or just thinking about puppies.
If the simmering romantic subtext of ice dance is your favorite thing about the sport, there’s nothing wrong with that – as long as you can acknowledge that teams with other kinds of chemistry, and programs with other stories to tell, can still be of high quality and worthy of high scores. My own favorite teams have always been the ones with a range that includes romance and sexual tension but doesn’t stop there, and who can explore other kinds of relationships when their music and themes pull them in a different direction. It’s all theater, and I like a team who can act.
One of Manta and Johnson’s built-in advantages is that acting is their strong suit. They’re not the most technically accomplished ice dance team in the United States, and probably never will be, but they’ve become fan favorites because they are such fun to watch. That means they don’t have to change anything to bring positive queer representation to the sport. Just by showing up, they’re proving that ice dance chemistry comes in many forms, and that athletes can do more with the chemistry they have when they’re open about who they are.
My limited checking of figuring skating social media had not brought this to my attention and I am thrilled to have seen it. Thank you! I have been looking for this team since Madison HUbbell interviewed them. I really loved their free dance at the US Classic. This beautiful video gives me another reason to cheer them on. A wonderfully positive way to start my morning. I hope she is showered with love and support.