Skating, cultural appropriation, racism and homophobia
I love wizard skating, and quads but Jesus the absolute state of things
Mushroom blading videos got me back on 8 wheels in the early 2010s. The first thing that really caught my attention was the intro to Joey McGarry and Todd McInerney’s Mushroom Blading 1 where they put previous homophobia targeting inline skating on blast, while doing a load of sick aggressive skating in ways that incorporated huge amounts of dance — spins, slides down ramps, utterly frivolous but joyful flourishes — that had in some way been banned from the steeze dictionary in Aggressive Inline’s 90s/00s bid for a slice of elite male supremacist lifestyle marketing.
There have been lots of videos, essays etc made since about toxic masculinity and how it probably killed the rollerblading boom as soon as teenage boys realised that it's actually very hard to hit a massive hammer down a kink rail while slouching your shoulders like it was nothing and looking cool for your friends’ appreciation. That the boom was based on a lie that if you buy these skates they'll make you cool and alpha in that way teenage boys are taught to want (or at least fear being caught lacking for).
So why, as that shift in the fringe of the aggressive scene evolved within a few years into “Wizard Skating” via Leon Basin’s beautiful contributions and the reintroduction of rockers to agg skates to help get the most out of this return to joy in street skating, is there such a problem with recognising the connection to dance styles? Why are “wizard skating techniques” talked about like they're invented whole cloth by some guys in Canada?
The lion and gazelle are one and two foot versions of the 3 turn. They're figure/artistic skating moves. It's great to fuse aggressive with figure skating! It's beautiful. It's high time people who want to explore what their bodies can do get comfortable with fusing these things, with exploring the connections we make between our bodies, the wheels on our feet and our environment in expressive ways. It's really cool.
But it's introductory figure skating and people need to be honest about that and men in particular need to stop worrying you'll be called gay for it. It feels like it's only a matter of time before folks caught up in the wizard skating boom start raiding black skating styles like JB or chop and shuffle street skating and renaming everything so noone can find the 70+years of skate culture they stole it from. If it hasn't already started. Roller skating faces fewer problems than inline with homophobia/toxic masculinity due to having a massive gay and female base but only last year Montré Livingston was robbed at the quad cup for reasons that seem pretty clearly to do with him being a black man and not lining up with the commercial interests of the roller skate vendors putting the event on in terms of marketing a lifestyle to their target demographic.
The urge to sell skates to the white cisgender and often heterosexual male middle class needs to take a breath and step the fuck back. People will still want to do this if we have a community that isn't just robbing ourselves of our history. Many of us got back into skating specifically because of the fringes of street skating becoming more appealing outside of an elitist unsustainable masculinist bubble.
Racial capitalist patriarchy frequently kills roller sport subcultures through creating commercial incentives to hurt those we draw influence from for cash. Agg skating isn't the only boom/bust like this, roller disco has had similar historically (especially with the reactionary anti disco movement that came later). And those who praise themselves for resisting homophobia frequently end up colluding with the sorts of racism that give homophobia in skating a way back in. But it's just not necessary at all. We can build skate communities that are inclusive, that honour the origins of our forms and innovate new ones with full respect for what we're drawing on. It's a choice.