Thank you, Micheline Maynard, for your thoughtful and insightful comments!

That skating clubs are marketed as “family environments” puts them at odds with gay men due to lingering historical associations that gay people, but gay men in particular, are “sexual psychopaths,” “child molesters,” etc. Anita Bryant’s anti-gay “Save Our Children” campaign, in the late 1970s, was centered on the idea that gay men were attempting to “recruit” children into their “deviant lifestyle.” Thankfully, these associations appear to be diminishing in skating clubs and in our culture as a whole.

Your observation about pairs skating conveying notions of heterosexual romance — perhaps both on and off the ice — has me thinking about how the ice dance pair Maia and Alex Shibutani are viewed because they are siblings. Certainly they disrupt the way ice dance pairs are typically seen. And Galindo’s coming out was perhaps seen as additionally transgressive because he had formerly competed in pairs skating with Kristi Yamaguchi.