Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir’s “Romance” is Just a Drag Show – let’s embrace that

In a fortuitous coincidence, I saw my first episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race the same day that Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir closed for the team figure skating gold in PyeongChang. Watching Virtue and Moir do their exquisite and undeniably sex-soaked sparkly ice-show I couldn’t help but think — if this isn’t hetero drag, then call me Ru.

I had never watched RuPaul’s iconic show for the two perfectly solid reasons that I don’t care for either reality shows or makeup. But what a show I’d been missing! Yes, there is the usual reality tv nonsesne of transparently manufactured interpersonal drama, but there is also regular showcasing of some of the most brilliantly transformative and rigoursly physical performace I have ever seen.

The boys/girls are diverse, dynamic, fluid, and insanely talented. In the space of a few minutes we see them moving between shy boy, grumpy girl, sweet man and fierce beautiful queen. There is no sense of rupture between their various roles — the agile performance of sexuality and gender is embraced as a joyful, sometimes grueling, always gorgeous, challenge.

Watching ice dancing, the parallels are striking. The athleticism is decidedly more formidable — although you should see the backflips some of those queens can do in four-inch heels and a waist-cinch — but, like drag shows, contestants are judged on style as well as skill, and with pairs skating in particular, also on their performance of gender and sexuality.

The rules for sex and gender performance in figure skaing and ice dancing are stringent. The International Skating Union’s rule books stipulate not only that an ice dancing pair must be composed of “one Lady and one Man,” but also that “Men must wear full length trousers and must not wear tights….in Ice Dance, Ladies must wear a skirt.”

Technical skills are also defined in terms of gender roles: the rule book details all types of jumps, twists, and spirals done by ice dancing partners, and each specifies that “the Man” is to do the lifting, holding, and protecting, while “the Lady” must be held, lifted, and dipped. As Reina Green put it in a recent paper on the gender theatrics of ice dancing, “heteronormative performance is integral to the sport.”

Virtue and Moir seem to understand this quite well. When asked to comment, in a recent Macleans interview, on the fact that “a lot of people think you’re married,” Moir responded “Yeah. Maybe that means we’re doing our job? We’re always telling stories.”

What is fascinating to me is that, unlike with drag shows, we don’t openly acknowledge the pivotal role of gender performance in ice dancing. We affect to ignore the drag — that is, the conscious performing of gender roles — crucial to the success of its best practitioners, although, as a dip into those rule books will show you, it is all the while being silently and rigidly enforced.

The collective fantasizing focused on Virtue and Moir, who are the subjects of a dedicated romantic fandom, shows the power of this sexual make-believe. Fan theories range from the sweetly hopeful — deep down they love each other and soon they will realize it and live happily ever after — to the fantastically conspiratorial: they’ve been secretly married with children for years and everything they say or do to the contrary is a smokescreen.

There is one notable boundary to this wild speculation on their secret sexual lives: it is very straight. Figure skating attracts a relatively high number of gay men, but no one seems to even consider that homosexuality might be part of Virtue and Moir’s story.

This commitment to a mainstream — that is, hetero — sexual narrative is of course only possible because that narrative is mainstream. Drag queens have not had much of a choice in calling their gender performance a performance — that is, one possible sex-and-gender narrative among many. The world does not allow them to simply walk out of the theatre and keep up that narrative — doing so means facing serious violence, ostracism, and abuse.

Those of us who enjoy cis heterosexual narratives have the luxury of living in our fantasies if we want — of pretending that Virtue and Moir’s exquisite performances hold true beyond the arena. But perhaps we shouldn’t. RuPaul’s famous line — “we’re born naked and the rest is drag” — applies to straight stories and lives as much as anyone’s — it’s just a truth we aren’t used to facing.

If we want to keep enjoying skating pairs tell explicitly heteronormative romances on the ice, then let’s acknowledge that what we’re enjoying is a story — a fun, beautiful, sexy, sparkly story — no more or less real than those crafted by the queens on RuPaul’s Drag Race.