“THE SNOWBALL OF INCLUSIVITY HAS STARTED ROLLING... AND NO ONE CAN STOP IT”
Skateboarding is for everyone but its discourse – like so many – has long been dominated by the white, male and straight. At last that is changing to reflect skate culture’s greater diversity.
The night before the launch of Skateism issue 1, on 6 Jan 2018 in Berlin, the magazine’s founder Moch Simos didn’t get a wink of sleep. “We were aware that launching a new print publication focused on diversity in skateboarding was a crazy experiment. Queer topics in skateboard magazines were taboo until then, and we had no idea how the skateboarding world would react. We didn’t even know if we would find enough material to sustain a second issue, since we knew so few queer skaters like us back then.” But in the days after the launch, to his surprise, Simos started receiving DM messages from LGBTQI+ skaters from all over the world.
“We quickly realised that the global queer skater community was much larger than we thought, albeit almost completely invisible. And it was eager to find its voice and make itself heard.”
The situation today – just over three years (and six issues of Skateism) later – is radically different. Queer skaters are now a fixture in skateboarding publications; the biggest names among them are regularly collaborating with major sports fashion brands such as Adidas and Nike; and in 2020 a trans non-binary skater, Leo (aka Lacey) Baker, were appointed to represent the US at the Tokyo Olympics, and also became a playable character in the remastered Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater video game. Simos credits Brian Anderson’s coming out, in September 2016, as “the event” that kicked off the global queer skate movement. “It was a historic moment: a professional skater publicly announcing his homosexuality.” Just as crucial in the birth of a queer skateboarding scene, Simos says, was the work in the field carried out by Jeffrey Cheung and Gabriel Ramirez and their grassroots collective Unity. “By promoting the concept of ‘safe spaces’ – LGBTQI+-friendly skate meet-ups – and by offering free skateboards to gay people, Unity has contributed like no other initiative to making
skateboarding, traditionally a sport for straight cis men, suddenly popular among queer people, too.” Founded in 2017, Unity quickly evolved into a vast international network known for organising “queer skate days” – gatherings of hundreds of LGBTQI+ skaters from different cities united by the desire to skate together. (In 2019, during one of these joyful and noisy happenings in Paris, Cheung and Ramirez teamed up with Gucci to collaborate in the latest campaign for Gucci Grip, the Italian luxury brand’s collection of streamlined watches inspired by the world of skateboarding).
“Safe spaces have been around for a while,” says Simos. “In the late ’80s, the queer black community created protected environments around vogue dancing known as ‘voguing balls’, where they could have fun and be safe at the same time. Today, queer skaters are creating their own protected environments, too.” And the phenomenon is gaining momentum: “Over the past few years, safe spaces for queer skateboarding have mushroomed all over the world. This will lead more and more queer skaters to feel more comfortable, get to know the sport and be open about it.”
One of the first gay skaters to attend a Unity meeting in the organisation’s formative days in 2016 was photographer Ross Landenberger. “Getting to know other gay skaters that day changed my life,” he says. “It made me realise there was a whole community out there that I belonged to. The following year, I decided to start touring the United States to discover it.” The result is the Queer Skateboarding project, which aims to document the intersection of LGBTQI+ culture and skateboarding. “I started skating when I was 12 years old at a local park in suburban Tennessee – a hyper-masculine environment that I never felt comfortable in as a young gay guy. During my adolescence, I had convinced myself that my queerness and my passion for skateboarding were two irreconcilable aspects of my persona that I had to live out separately.” That was until September 2016, when he heard of Brian Anderson’s coming out. “That was a life-altering moment: it made me realise I was neither strange nor alone. I immediately set out to find other gay skaters like me and I discovered Unity.”
Things have progressed considerably since then. “Compared to when I started the project, queer skateboarding today has exploded as a topic of discussion. You now have skate magazines and podcasts constantly reporting on it. Skate companies have also included queer skaters in their teams and produce video content starring them. Queer skateboarding is part of the industry now.” Landenberger notes that the revolution initiated by queer skateboarding has now extended to many social issues, such as racism, ableism and sexism, that were totally absent from the conversation back in 2017. “It feels like the snowball of inclusivity has started rolling, and no one can stop it.”
Over the same period, female skateboarding has become a global scene, too, with many active collectives supporting women’s empowerment through skating. Examples include Grlswirl in Los Angeles, FroSkate in Chicago and the New Yorkbased Skate Kitchen, the female collective that inspired the eponymous movie and the HBO series Betty. As with queer skating, the combination of safe spaces and social media has played a crucial role in incubating the female skate scene, allowing it to grow into a veritable movement. “When I started skating back in the ’90s, I was the only female skater I was aware of,” says Lucy Adams, a long-time advocate for female skating from the UK. “Five years ago, I had the idea of organising a girls’ skate night at a small skatepark in Brighton. It started very slow, but over a few months it got hectic. Thanks to social media like Facebook, the word spread and within six months a whole community had come into existence.” Most girls told Adams that the major obstacle discouraging them from going to skateparks was not the fear of being harassed by guys, but the dread of being ridiculed if they fell. “Girls’ skate nights allowed them to familiarise with the sport. Now that they feel more secure about their skating skills, girls message each other and go to the skatepark any day of the week, together with the guys.”
The arrival of girls, Adams observes, is contributing to an aesthetic transformation at skateparks. “Female skaters are bringing a whole new grace to the way tricks are performed, as well as their own fashion, making the skatepark a far more colourful and diverse place. Let’s face it, straight male skaters’ fashion, with all those black hoodies and jeans, is pretty monotonous! It was time for a change.”
The prize for the most audacious outfits in skateboarding surely goes to Peach Sørensen, aka Blondemohawk on Instagram. “I’ve always enjoyed both skateboarding and fashion, so it only seemed natural for me to mix the two,” says the Norwegian skater, who first gained international visibility in 2018 with a video of her ollieing (jumping down) a staircase wearing a flashy Halloween costume and high heels. “At the time, no one knew I was trans other than my partner. Then that video went viral, and everyone just assumed I was. And so I came out – although the video in itself was just me dressing up and having fun.” She goes on to explain: “After that encouraging beginning, I kept dressing up while skating. Why high heels? Because it’s a fun challenge to skate in them. Some people say it’s attention-seeking, and I suppose that’s partly true, but I mainly want to reach out and inspire.” Another video she posted about a year later clocked up tens of millions of views through over a hundred Instagram and YouTube accounts. “Skateboarding can be so much, so why not a fashion show too? I want to express my style freely and show that there’s room for everything in this sport. And more importantly, for everyone.”