“We are members of the Human Rights Campaign, and I have been keeping an eye on the New York decision. My partner, Terrence and I are inching closer to a decision to become parents,” he shared. When asked how he has celebrated Gay Pride month, Mattis jokingly responded with ‘leather pants’, but quickly corrected himself. There is nothing wrong with having lots of gays in the sport.” If people think that figure skating being known as a gay sport is a bad thing, that’s just homophobic. “Most people assume that the male skaters are gay, and they still watch.
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“If people think that viewers are going to turn the TV off because they think that the skaters are gay, they are crazy,” he said. Mattis is disappointed with the notion that figure skating being a gay sport has contributed to the decline of the popularity of the sport. Being gay never adversely affected my career.” “I was invited to skate in the Gay Games, be the Grand Marshall in Gay Pride parades, and was still getting work professionally. “When I was younger, I thought about keeping my sexuality under my hat, but I didn’t want to disappoint my market,” Mattis said. Mattis believes that being out never hindered his career as an athlete, but instead he believes that everything increased with his coming out. “At the time (golfer) Muffin Spencer-Devlin and I were the only athletes who were willing to talk with the media about our sexuality,” Mattis recalled. A 1996 article in The Advocate solidified Mattis’s status as one of a handful of openly gay athletes. Throughout his career Mattis never kept his sexuality a secret, but was thrust into the gay spotlight in 1994 when he was invited to skate an exhibition at the Gay Games in New York City, which he considers to be one of the biggest honors of his career. Mattis did skate clean, threw in the back flip, and earned one of the only standing ovations of the night. “It was more about giving something to the audience.” “I don’t know that I was being a rebel,” he said. Mattis told himself that if he skated a clean program that day, he would throw in a back flip at the end of his program. I realized that the game had changed, and I realized that I just wanted to entertain.” “It was then that I knew it was time to move on, but it had nothing to do with the judges.
“A man and his wife came up to me and said that they didn’t understand why I was placed so low, and how can an entire arena of people have a different opinion than the judges,” he remembered. The next 24 hours gave Mattis time to think, and after a chance meeting on the concourse in the arena, he knew that it was time to move on from amateur skating. I landed all of my jumps, got a standing ovation, and was in 14th place.
For example, (the 8th place finisher) fell on his triple Axel and popped his Lutz. In the competition, there were only four clean short programs, and most of the other skaters missed two jumps. I was used to being in the medal hunt after the short program, and then all of the sudden I was completely out of it. “I did have a little issue with my combination spin, but I landed all of my jumps. “At nationals in 1991, I skated last in the short program, and I skated a relatively clean program,” he recalled. What Mattis did have was the ability to pull the crowd into his programs, as well as a one-footed back flip. I was hitting one in about every 18 or 19, so I never put it in my programs.” “I was training with Frank Carroll at the end of my eligible career, and his school of thought is that you have to have the numbers to put an element into your program. “My triple axel was horrible,” Mattis said with a laugh. An artistic sort, Mattis’s kryptonite was the triple Axel, which was fast becoming a required move to have any hope of standing on the podium.
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Championships, winning the junior men’s title in 1985, and skating in the final flight of the senior men’s free skate several times. In the late 1980s and into the early 1990s, Doug Mattis was a staple at the U.S.
With so much to celebrate this year, Golden Skate proudly honors the LBGT (lesbian, bisexual, gay, and transgender) community with uplifting stories of gay pride from some of our favorite skaters. More than 50 years later, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed State Bill A08354 into law late Friday evening, making the Empire State the sixth and largest, to allow same sex couples the right to marry. Brave men and women at the Stonewall Inn caught up in a police raid early that morning inspired a community to resist the anti-homosexual establishment and fight for change. On June 28, 1969, the gay rights movement was born in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City.
On June 2, 2000, President Bill Clinton declared June "Gay & Lesbian Pride Month".