Story on Matthew Hall, gay figure-skater
Joe Clark
He's here, he's the only openly gay high-level figure skater in the whole
wide world, get used to him
by Joe Clark
More or less as published in the Village Voice, December 14, 1993 (though
thepublished version is more tightly edited and has a nice photo)
I first heard about Matthew Hall in cyberspace. While E-sashaying through
various queerocentric Internet newsgroups last February, I happened upon
this gossipy posting:
Yeah, Matthew's a decent sort if you can dig past the attitude. And that
seems to be mellowing a bit in the last year or so. He's adamant about
being out, and disturbed by the degree of closeting in professional sports,
'specially figure skating. At the competitions to get on the National Team
several weeks ago he wore a dashing all-white one-piece with a smart
sequined red-ribbon motif on the front-left. Very out, and tasteful.
Ah, yes, very out31 January 1994 17:19 and that makes Matthew a
rarity in a sport that's simply crawling with fags. (At least, that's the
popular myth; see sidebar.) Growing up in small-town Ontario, Matthew was a
Typical Canadian Kid. He played hockey from age 2.5 ("I quit when I was
six. I just couldn't stand it. I was goalie") and dallied with soccer,
diving, gymnastics, and track. He quit each of those sports eventually; the
flesh was willing, but the spirit was weak. Then one day, he recalls, "I
saw this girl skating, and she had tons of these ribbons and badges on her
jacket. And I said to my mom, What are those?' Because I was really into
medals, really into ribbons, really into, like, getting my badges from
really any sport."
Skating. Medals. The young Matthew had found his calling.
Remember that photo of swimmer Mark Spitz with a rack o' Olympic
medals around his neck? Step into the expansive master bedroom of Matthew's
spare, vertiginous high-rise apartment near Toronto's fag district and
you'll find a numismatist's dream: A mother lode of medals, ribbons,
trophies, and photos piled atop his dresser (and a wardrobe full of glitzy
er, tasteful skating outfits). Spitz's medals would get lost in the pile
here.
But Matthew is not the Gretzky of figure skating. The awards are
deceptive: They're not all golds, silvers, and bronzes, and besides, the
triple Lutz (one of Matthew's best moves, and one of the toughest in
skating) is not a cakewalk. Matthew's ascension through the skating ranks
has been rocky. When he wasn't breaking an elbow (in 1980) or a knee (in
1984 and again in 1990, with a severe ligament injury later that year),
thereby knocking himself out of competition for months at a time, Matthew
was placing just outside the gold_silver_bronze medal range, or placing
just a bit too far down the list to make it to the championships, or
getting "fucked" by fickle skating judges.
Some examples:
Skating Disaster 1: It's 1982 and Matthew, 15, is at the Ontario Divisional
competition in Owen Sound. The tournament consisted not only of the events
that TV coverage has caused everyone to associate with skating but also
figures, a now-eliminated event which puts skaters' coordination and
steadiness to the test by requiring them, among other things, to make like
a Spiro-Graph and trace and retrace a perfect circle on ice. Matthew placed
fifth in figures, eleventh in the short program, and fifth in the long
program; he finished a disappointing fifth overall, which put him fourth in
the rankings of the junior division-- just out of medal contention. "Right
then, I was just like, I don't want to skate,'" Matthew says. "What did I
do wrong that I deserve these marks? All this pressure is being put on my
shoulders, and I'm 15. My mother's screaming, my father's screaming, my
coach is freaking out."
Skating Disaster 2: Around Christmas 1987, Matthew had burned himself out
badly enough ("Bred to train. I was like a horse. I was bred to train.
That's all I knew how to do well") to land in bed with pneumonia, but was
forced to compete two weeks later at Divisionals and Nationals. Though he
won the Divisionals, he finished fourth in Nationals, which kept him away
from the Calgary Olympics-- and he ruptured his spleen in the process. "I'm
always just missing the medal," Matthew recalls, "and that's starting to
get to me."
From '88 to late '91, Matthew's skating was perfunctory; after so
long as an also-ran, his heart wasn't in it, and besides, he had Met
Someone. Like so many other kids whose maturation takes place in parallel
with a burgeoning athletic career, sexuality reared his head late-- around
age 19 in Matthew's case. "I ended up meeting somebody in Barrie [Ontario,
where his coach lived] and fell in love totally. I don't like skating [at
the time] because I've been fucked so many times, and all of a sudden I
meet this person and I'm totally feeling things I'd never felt before--
head over heels, sick to my stomach, and what's wrong with me?'" Getting
barely any money as a skater on Canada's national team, he worked three
part-time jobs and was about to graduate from high school. Skating? What
skating? "I was skating maybe two hours a week. I didn't know what I was
going to do [with my life] yet."
Then, at the Nationals in 1990, Matthew skated "the worst
performance of my life-- going out there and falling nine times on national
television. People remember that. If you see a great performance, you
remember it, but if you see a skater after a great performance fall nine
times, you'll remember that."
He couldn't walk away from the sport entirely; as with other
high-level athletes, that would require deprogramming. "I stay with it. I
don't know why I stay with it, but I do. It's all I know how to do." Now
living in Toronto, he cut back to a couple of hours of practice a week,
taking courses at the Ontario College of Art and getting used to the life
of a freelance downtown homosexualist-- and a semifamous one at that.
"Every fag watches skating. And as soon as I go to the bar, [it's like] New
meat! Cute kid! It's Matthew Hall!' It got to the point where the second
time I went to Chaps [a now-defunct fagbar], it's like, Just go on up,
Matthew!' Didn't have to wait for coat check: Here, Matthew, let me take
your coat!'" Ironically, Matthew now works as a waiter at Badlands, a
country bar that's the latest incarnation of Chaps.
These days, though, Lillehammer is staring him in the face, and
from his current berth as seventh seed on the Canadian team, Matthew has
spent the last year and a half pushing himself to the wire for figure
skating. But things have changed. He's out now, and incredibly enough, he's
getting support from all over. "If I was going to come back into skating, I
was going to come back as myself, and I was not going to let anybody treat
me differently. If they didnt like who I was back then, they can kiss my
ass now, you know what I mean? If there's a 17-year-old in the rink having
trouble with their sexual feelings, [snaps fingers] I'm going to be the
first one there to talk to him not to sit in a room like I did and
contemplate suicide like I did because I'm an embarrassment to my family.'"
His teammates, even straight guys like Kurt Browning and Elvis
Stoyko, "are totally amazing about it. You know, Elvis said to me, he goes,
You know, it's so nice to have you back on the national team.' Kurt's like,
You're just so much fun.' I was with these people for six years of my life.
You do things together. It's like a fraternity these people watch you fall,
they watch you grow, and go through what I went through and [I] still push
and fight, and my parents kicked me out of the house, and I have no money,
and my mother passes away, my father goes to jail, and here's Matthew still
forging forward no matter what the hurdle is. I think people respect that.
"I will make the Olympic team," he says, though he won't find out
for sure until early January. "I'm tired of saying to myself, Oh, I want to
make the Olympic team.' I will make the Olympic team. It's like, I'm not
going to try, I'm going to do it. You don't try something, you do it. You
either do it or you don't. I'm very blunt that way."
And if you get a medal, for example? "Oh! Could you imagine?"
[END]
Note: Matthew didn't make the team. He finished seventh. He's disappointed
and doesn't know what he's going to do with himself. Badlands also laid him
off, claiming that he was "away" too much! (Honey, get with the program!
This is an ATHLETE we're dealing with!)
The "Myth" of the Gay Skater
Sidebar by Joe Clark
Modified version (cleaned up the mistakes) of what ran in the Village
Voice, December 14, 1993
Last year, Michael Clarkson of the Calgary Herald conducted research for a
feature on AIDS in figure skating. After polling some 50 skating coaches
across the continent, Clarkson wrote that the "consensus" among coaches is
that 30% of the high-ranked skaters were gay. Clarkson didn't ask the same
questions to a control group _ speed-skating or ice-hockey coaches, say _
so his numbers must be taken with a grain of salt. But however many gay men
there are in skating, it's certainly odd how so few of them are out.
Apart from Matthew Hall, the only high-level fag skater to be
officially out of the closet was England's John Curry _ and as in the case
of other out jocks, Curry waited until his athletic career was over before
breaking down the closet door [note: since this article ran I have heard
that Curry came ou tnonchalantly on a British TV interview, but haven't
confirmed that]. So many competitive skaters have died of the disease _
Damien Coi, Brian Pockar, Rob McCall, Shaun McGill, Tim Brown, John Carrell
_ that one begins to wonder if IV drug use, tainted blood transfusions, or
the notoriously difficult female-to-male transmission of HIV could really
have been the cause of so many infections among athletes in a single sport.
It's a topsy-turvy world indeed when fighter pilot Tracy Thorne can come
out of the closet, get booted out of the superbutch Air Force, and end up
as a poster boy in Swatch advertisements while fag figure skaters, ahem,
keep it in the family this late in the century.
Why are so few skaters actually out?
"It's like asking why anybody doesn't want their private personal
lives to be a topic of discussion," says Claire Ferguson, president of the
U.S. Figure Skating Association. "Everybody does their own thing, and it
depends on how they want to express it. In some cultures, having five wives
is a great thing. It's just as pertinent as being gay or whatever, isn't
it? I mean, there are a lot of people who don't tell everything about their
lives. They just don't think it's important.
"It's going to have to be up to the people who are involved in that
issue to change it. I'm not going to change it. I have enough trouble
changing my issue. If they feel it's important not to come out, then that's
their decision. It's not something I can expound upon personally, I don't
think. This is a struggle for everyone. There are a lot of people who hide
things from society because it's a problem for society to deal with it. Why
are we trying to force something onto people when it's not really
necessary? I don't think it's necessary to beleaguer people on this point."
Olaf Poulsen of the International Skating Union is less defensive.
"Open or not open, I think most people knows about it in any case in the
skating family. There is no secrets about the gay people. They're mostly
known. I see no problem with that."
And how about Matthew Hall's own governing body, the Canadian
Figure Skating Association? Director-general David Dore declined all
comment, but CFSA president Doug Steele says, "I'm not sure that sexual
preference has a major role in any sport. I mean, it isn't only within the
figure skating are that you'll see this sexual preference. You're going to
see it in other sports as well. If Matthew has come forward and declared
that he's gay, then that's his option. It's not my business to pry into
private lives of athletes, and I couldn't tell you whether other skaters
are gay or not."
Oh, really? "I'm not sure that there are a lot of other gay skaters
out there to come forward at the moment. I mean, I would be very hard
pressed to tell you another name. I just don't think they're there."
[END]
--
Joe Clark
joec...@scilink.org