BmoreArt

One morning early this fall, I spotted a new face during a skating session at Mt. Pleasant Ice Arena in northeast Baltimore. These morning sessions are blissfully populated with adult skaters working on pattern dances and skating skills. If no one has put their music on, the rink is silent, save for the sound of blades against the ice. 

The new skater wore all black—shirt, pants, skates. Over-ear headphones anchored the chin-length brown curls that framed his face. A Freddie Mercury-esque mustache cinched the look. And lord, could he skate. Soon, I recognized the young man as the kid who had made the Baltimore Figure Skating Club proud with his rise up the competitive ranks, the kid who now made the viral skating videos.

Sharing an empty sheet of ice with an elite figure skater is humbling, obviously, but also daunting. You try to play it cool, but you can’t help but gawk. You pretend not to gawk by practicing your own skating, but you’re terrified you’ll get in their way. And keeping cool is nearly impossible when you’re sharing the ice with a skater whose movement has mesmerized millions of viewers.

“You have the most gorgeous posture of any skater I’ve ever seen,” I told Ryan—probably the first thing I said to him. Maybe I said “lines” instead of posture. Both are true, and having grown up in the skating and ballet worlds, I’m cool lavishing such truths on a stranger. But what I couldn’t yet articulate—what I’d come to study in watching Ryan’s skating over the next few months—was that his lines—his port de bras, his épaulement, the stretch of his legs—crackled with joy. An electrifying joy. And during my conversations with Ryan, I’d come to learn how hard-won that joy was.

In his top pinned video on Instagram, Ryan bursts with this joy skating to Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club.” The joyful movement is Ryan’s now, but his caption tells the story of obstacles that stood between him and this joyful expression. “Throughout my skating career, I had so many people spew homophobia my way,” Dunk writes.

Ryan recounts coaches who wouldn’t let him skate to music with a female vocalist, coaches who told him to “skate like a man.” A coach who “ridiculed and bullied [him] for [his] style of skating and the music [he] liked.” He was told as a child that people “didn’t want to see [his] sexuality on the ice.” As a teenager, a skating judge told him, “Watching you skate makes me uncomfortable.” His litany is heartbreaking, and you might think it’s unexpected in the skating world. But in a sport where boys and men are often ridiculed from the outside, harmful defenses go up on the inside. Boys and men—both straight and gay—are pressured to present as masculine. 

Coaches and judges steer skaters toward music, costumes, and choreography that codes masculine. This world often pressured Ryan to present as a skater he didn’t want to be. And the world adjacent to or outside of figure skating was also hostile. “I remember wanting to hide during training sessions when the nearby schools’ hockey teams would arrive for their practices. The boys would yell out at me while I was trying to practice, calling me slurs and mocking my movements,” Ryan’s Instagram caption continues. Ryan tells me that he was first called the “F-slur” in first grade.

But his love for skating kept him on the ice. It’s a love that has run deep since day one. Ryan’s mom, Terri, tells me the story after she drops Ryan off at the airport to travel to an ice show in West Virginia. When Ryan was eight-years old, Terri took her two sons to a public skating session the day after Christmas. Ryan hadn’t really skated before, Terri tells me, “And he could skate. Like right away.” He flocked to the figure skaters in the center of the rink. “He’s talking to them, trying to do little jumps and spins with them.”

She tried to convince Ryan to leave them alone and skate around the rink with his family, but Ryan told her to leave him alone. Soon, a coach approached Terri and asked if Ryan had skated before. Terri and her husband Joe followed the coach’s advice and put their son in lessons.

Ryan worked his way up the competitive ranks, qualifying for his first US Nationals in 2014 in the Juvenile level, and then qualifying at every subsequent level (Intermediate, Novice, Junior, and Senior). To qualify for Nationals, a skater must place in the top four at Regionals and advance to Sectionals, where another top-four finish will qualify them for Nationals. In 2019, Ryan won his first National title at the junior level.

The United States Figure Skating Association had already started sending him to international competitions, where he represented Team USA at events in Austria, Slovakia, Armenia, Poland, and China. During that time, he trained with Chris Conte and Priscilla Hill, skating mostly at Ice World in Abingdon and sometimes still Mt. Pleasant in Baltimore. At 17, Ryan moved to Boston to intensify his training.

In June 2022, Ryan defended his title as the US Collegiate Figure Skating National Champion, representing Suffolk University, from which he’d graduated in May. That September, he announced his retirement from competitive skating and put his psychology degree to work as a research assistant at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. During college, he worked as a research intern in the Boston Children’s Hospital’s eating disorder program. His draw to the field was rooted in personal experience. 

In Boston, when an injury kept Ryan off the ice, a coach pushed him to stay in shape through “extra cardio.” This led to a period of Ryan obsessing about food and body image, as he was terrified that time away from the ice would cause him to lose the jumps he’d been training for years. “I wouldn’t say I had an eating disorder, but I had disordered eating,” Ryan says. 

Reflecting on his time in competitive skating, he tells me that “it’s no wonder I had a little blip of time where I had trouble. If you’re going to go into the sport and be high level, unfortunately, I don’t want to say it’s a given, but it almost is.” In Massachusetts, Ryan advocated for passage of a legislative bill that would ban the sale of over-the-counter diet pills and muscle-building supplements to minors (read Ryan’s piece about this for the CommonWealth Beacon).

In most skater’s stories, the end of a competitive career would be the story. But the end of Ryan’s competitive career is how we get to the now. Beyond defending his collegiate title, graduating from college, and retiring, 2022 was the year that Ryan dared to skate to Britney Spears’ “Oops!… I Did It Again.” Dared, you ask? Isn’t this figure skating, the sport of the fun and the flashy? Yes, but also the sport where Ryan’s coaches didn’t let him skate to music by female artists. Even Ryan’s endlessly supportive mom wasn’t sure about Britney. And, as he took to the ice wearing Britney’s iconic red, Ryan wasn’t so sure himself. It was his first time doing what he calls “the unapologetic queer thing, especially in a public forum.” 

He was performing in front of an audience at Harvard, skating in a benefit for The Jimmy Fund of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. “I was so nervous,” Ryan says. “I remember I got in my place. And the lights were off. And I was like, well, I guess there’s no turning back now. And then immediately when the music started, people started cheering. I hadn’t even done anything yet.” 

“When he finished, the crowd went nuts,” Terri adds. It was his “aha” moment, where he decided “I’m going to do what I want to do, let it go, and really put it out there. That was the moment he never looked back.”

At the time, Ryan didn’t have a following on social media. “I had my own private Instagram, and I didn’t even have TikTok.” But thanks to videographer Jordan Cowan—largely known as “On Ice Perspectives,” the name of his social media channels—Ryan had gone viral. Ryan’s friends were sending the clip, telling him that he had a million views on TikTok. The moment was a revelation for Ryan. “Oh my God, you know, I skated to something that I wanted to skate to and did it my way. And not only did people enjoy it in the building, but wow, people around the world are enjoying it. It was kind of mind blowing to me at the time. Because again, the skating world being so toxic, judges have looked at me and said, ‘that was terrible’ or ‘you make me uncomfortable.’”

Ryan came out during his final year of competitive skating. For a long time, male figure skaters waited until after their competitive careers ended to come out. Neither Brian Boitano nor Johnny Weir were out before their multiple Olympic Games. In 2018, figure skater Adam Rippon became the first openly gay man to qualify for a US Winter Olympic team. Ryan remembers lying in bed the day before he came out, terrified but certain he couldn’t wait any longer. He came out in an Instagram post on his 21st birthday. 

“My mom has always been super supportive and open-minded to a lot of stuff, which was really helpful when I came out,” Ryan says. “I always tell people that there’s being gay, and there’s also being queer, which is a kind of nuanced thing. It’s one thing to be like, ‘I’m gay, I’m going marry a man,’ or if you’re a lesbian, ‘I’m going to marry a woman.’ But to go to the club on Halloween dressed as Frank-N-Furter, for example, or skate to Chappell Roan and do very feminine moves or whatever. It’s one thing for people to kind of digest like, okay, my son is gay. And then it’s another thing to see them on stage in heels, you know?” Ryan says.

With competitive skating behind him, Ryan joined The Skating Club of Boston’s senior Theatre on Ice team, Forte of Boston. There, he met Shayna Smith, a former Disney on Ice performer and Boston University film student who would become the camerawoman behind his skating videos. They became fast friends, and now, they describe one another with excited admiration. 

“We kind of became besties, for lack of a better word—we just really clicked,” Shayna tells me. “I think something very unique for both of us is that we really love to just put on music and improvise. That’s not exactly the norm in skating. A lot of people prefer to skate their competition program, to have their choreography made for them.”

Terri tells me about Ryan’s earliest improv sessions. As a ten-year-old, Ryan regularly skated at a public session where an ice monitor turned on swing and big band music for the last ten minutes. Most people left the ice, but Ryan stayed on. “All of a sudden one day I saw him—he was making up moves to music,” she says. What began as Ryan and Shayna’s shared passion for improv on ice became the genius behind their viral videos. “We always joke about the fact that we call it ‘giving the public what they want.’ Mainstream skating is so inaccessible now—you have to know the points and technical terms.” 

Shayna assists Ryan in giving the public what they want by following him around with a camera—usually her phone. And then Ryan films Shayna, who shares most of her videos on TikTok. “We always try to get really close, and we are able to anticipate each other’s movements at this point,” Ryan says. And this unique relationship of anticipating each other’s improv sits at the heart of their videos’ popularity. Ryan notes that Shayna’s ability to capture his freedom is palpable to viewers—and provides a contrast to the rehearsed skating viewers see on television.

My sister and I have compared our Instagram mutuals with Ryan’s. We each found a handful of followers who have nothing to do with the skating world, which felt like a barometer of who’s out there following him. “This Greek deli I like in DC follows him,” my sister says. So does a childhood friend from Wichita. So does a woman I chatted with once at Vision House, my friends’ bar at 25th and Howard. 

I tell Shayna I think it’s fascinating that Ryan has become a name and a character—the guy who skates to Freddie Mercury, the guy who dances to pop music on ice—reminiscent of the way 90s figure skaters became household names. Ryan, and Shayna, came of age as figure skaters during the sport’s waning popularity. To watch skating today, one must subscribe to Peacock and either catch the competition live or within the 48-hour period before the streaming service takes down the clips due to the complex musical copyright landscape. 

Enter Ryan’s videos, available 24/7 at one’s fingertips. “When it comes to giving the public what they want, they want expression and movement and things that look pretty with songs they know,” Shayna says. Comments left on Ryan’s videos are effusive, and I recommend scrolling through them for content that will restore any waning faith in humanity.

I’m so glad you never stopped. Your skating is magnificent and so are you. And it’s just such an absolute privilege to have the opportunity to watch someone skate to a piece of music that they feel in the bottom of their soul. Your art is a blessing to humanity. (@theadventuresofbabz)

You make my day happy when I see you. Because you remind me, there is still good in this world. And sometimes I purposely come here to see you, so I can wash away the bad in the world, and wash it away with your good. (@seashellhunter77)

I can’t put into words how watching you skate makes me feel, but I feel like my heart and soul are being fed. I feel more connected to humanity. Thank you and please keep skating 💜 (@booa_cat_butler)

Why does this feel like therapy 😂 I feel like I should be inserting bills into my screen because I’m seeing something so profound (@jazzminionlife)

That’s why a woman chased Ryan down on the streets of Rome. “Are you the ice skater?” she asked. Ryan breaks into a smile telling me about his favorite comments, like when someone’s four-year-old asked to take skating lessons after seeing his videos. “I got one the other day that said, ‘My three-year-old and I watch you together. She calls you our skater.’”

My skating coach, Bridget Carrig-Brickhouse, who watched Ryan grow up at the rink, showed me a picture of Ryan sitting on the ice, watching a group of his young students rehearse for a show. “The kids love Ryan,” Bridget tells me. Terri says it’s cute watching Ryan teach kids to try things and to “get them to warm up to a big guy with a mustache on the ice.”

Ryan is coaching, choreographing, and in demand for ice shows. In early December, Ryan skated with the Wheeling Symphony Orchestra in Wheeling, WV. He just spent two weeks in New England performing with Ice Dance International. But he eyes the world outside of skating too. He’s interested in legislative work. Maybe law school. Or maybe journalism.

Two weeks after the 2024 election, Ryan reappeared after a brief Instagram hiatus. His post explained that he’d been feeling down since the election but that he was back to announce that he planned to use the platform he’d built to talk about social issues.

“Don’t worry if you are here for the skating,” Ryan reassured followers. “I have lots of new skating videos that I am excited to post and will not be stopping anytime soon; however, I want to also use my platform to talk about social issues.” The post launched episode one of “Go Figure,” a show that will feature interviews with individuals working in social activism, healthcare, sports, journalism, and more. “After the election,” Ryan tells me, “I was crying. So, it would almost be dishonest to come on and be like, okay, ‘Pink Pony Club,’ you know.”

Still, Ryan senses that his videos have a power unto themselves. “My skating itself is almost a kind of activism in a weird way, just being so unapologetically queer and being outspoken about that,” he says.

Transmasc figure skater here! Your content inspires me so much and reminds me that there’s a place for queer people like me on the ice. Never stop being you and doing what brings you joy! (@creatingavery) 

You give so many people a happy moment in their day and inspire so many queer kids (and us older adults too) to live their truth (@stewandfeast) 

Every day, hundreds of thousands of strangers encounter Ryan’s unapologetic queer joy. They’re wowed by his movement and his embodiment of their favorite songs on the ice. He’s made them feel something through their screens.

From Ryan’s earliest days in skates, he knew that’s what ice was for. It was his playground for movement and his instrument for creating feeling. So I revise my original sentence. If Ryan’s joy was hard-won, it was also inevitable. He started there, and he’s found his way back—discovering something more important than giving the judges what they want: giving himself what he wants. “Posting these videos has been healing, in a way, healing my inner child skater,” Ryan says.