This documentary follows Johnny Weir, the brilliant ice skater, through his achievements, his under-achievements and his bubble baths.
There is a long tradition of male dancers putting on their tutus and toe shoes and dancing as swans in gender-bending Swan Lake ballets. Johnny Weir is famous for having put the male swan into ice-skating.
Weir has been hovering at the edges of men's ice-skating superstardom for some time. Despite big achievements in USA competitions, including three successive gold medals in the Nationals, he just hasn't been able to nail down world titles, not the least the Olympics.
The documentary Pop Star On Ice, filmed between 2006 and 2008, has been featured at a number of gay film festivals, despite the fact that the very camp Johnny Weir quite explicitly refuses to discuss his sexuality. He struts fashion show runways, does photo shoots in stilettos and is filmed taking a bubble bath with his best boy-pal Paris Childers. This is enough to provoke open horror from the skating officialdom, the executives of which like their men butch and their women sweet. While any gay person can spot Weir as a friend of Dorothy's from a mile away, he clearly feels his behavior alone, without coming out in words, gets him in enough trouble.
He misbehaves in other ways, too. There are his erratic press conferences where, instead of giving the canned comments expected of sports stars, he mixes rebellion with inappropriate comparisons that puzzle or offend. He is not a simple lad: he can be a petulant spoiled brat one moment and a generous, gracious star to his fans, known as Johnny's Angels, the next.
The two central relationships in the documentary are between Johnny and Paris - he says they're so close they're like a married couple without the sex, and between Johnny and his coach from age 12, Priscilla Hill. From his late start in skating at age 12, Hill spent many years cajoling him to train with discipline, but when he loses his Nationals title to his very "masculine" rival Evan Lysacek, he leaves Hill for Galina Zmievskaya, the Russian who worked with Oksana Baiul, Weir's first skate idol.
For a film that opens with caressing close-ups of his naked legs, his nipple, his back and his pelvis, there is a vacuum where Johnny Weir's candid discussion of his sexuality and its impact on his career could be. He is a complex mix of diva and athlete, of costume designer and technician, but in Pop Star On Ice we never learn from him what makes his heart do a triple axel.
This piece first appeared on Edge Publications portals.
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