Gay skateboarders
'Queer Skateboarding': Photographer documents gay skater culture
Ross Landenberger first got into skateboarding at the age of 12, and can still remember his first experiences with the sport while growing up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a city about 30 minutes west of Knoxville.
“We only had one skate park in the area, and it was just a blue piece of concrete on the ground,” he recalled. “All that was there was one or two little ramps that kids had built and brought.”
Landenberger admits that as a lgbtq+ kid skateboarding at his local skate park in a suburban Tennessee, he never felt all that welcomed by other skateboarders.
“It was just a very hyper-masculine environment, especially in smaller southern towns,” he said. “Once I was a little bit older, and knowing I was lgbtq+, and people throwing around slurs all the time, just being around that, I had no interest in becoming friends with these people.”
As a product, Landenberger thought of his queerness and his skateboarding as two separate parts of his culture that could never intersect. It wasn’t until professional skateboarder Brian Anderson came out as lgbtq+ in 2016, that Landenberger began to realize there could be a spac
Brian Anderson coming out as gay doesn’t let skateboarding off the hook
Let’s be clear, when Brian Anderson came out in an interview with VICE last week, it was the gnarliest thing he’s ever done. Actually, I’d proceed further and speak that it was one of the gnarliest things anyone has ever done in skating.
You can take your Wallenburgs, your Carlsbad gaps and anything done down El Toro, and I’d still wager that no pro has struggled with something harder than he did with his coming out. The Instagram photo he posted after that documentary dropped, of him and his boyfriend chilling on the ferry to New York’s gay paradise Heat island, was a genuine first for skating: an NBD worthy of the cover of Thrasher. Well done, BA, everyone has been shouting.
And quite rightly, too – I can’t say it enough: that guy deserves all the praise in the world for creature the first out gay pro skater. But – and here’s the rub – from where I’m standing, as a gay dude who has been skating for 20 years, I’m not sure congratulations are in order for skateboarding as a whole.
Five years ago, I wrote a piece for Huck about Tim Von Werne, who was an am for Birdhouse in the late ’90s and was same-sex attracted and
When you think about the culture around skateboarding, you might think about the laid-back vibe of acceptance and inclusion that the sport has come to foster. But skaters from the LGBTQ+ community haven’t always felt accepted and included. Violent anti-gay attacks in the early 1980s and 1990s within the male-dominated world of skate led many to mask their sexuality. Brian Anderson, a skater who rose to popularity in the 1990s, remembers regularly hearing gay slurs, which made him think at a young age that it was dangerous to communicate about his sexuality.
Recently, however, skate has made excellent strides in its acceptance of LGBTQ+ skaters. To document this shift, the museum has collected from members of this diverse and fiercely dedicated community.
Brian Anderson
Brian Anderson first gained notoriety in the skateboarding world in 1996 and quickly became one of the most popular skaters in the sport. In 2016 Anderson became the first high-profile professional skater to come out as gay, something he never thought he would undertake. Afraid to come out when he was younger, Anderson put his rage and frustration into his skating.
“I think a part of me was so irritated and angry from holdin
A BRIEF LOOK AT SKATEBOARDING’S Male lover PAST
I’m sure we won’t be the first to tell you that Brian Anderson is lgbtq+. Maybe you heard it first as a rumor at your local skateshop, or maybe you found out two days ago when BA publically came out on Giovanni Reda’s show on Vice. Either way, he’s out, and words and emojis of support have been coming in from every direction. It’s a big step for the heteronormative skateboarding industry, and the sheer positivity of the responses gives hope that other skaters can come out and be admired, even if they haven’t front blunted Hubba Hideout.
As a crew of a few straight dudes (who have admittedly marketed ourselves using heteromalefantasies), it’s difficult for us to really imagine the leap of faith it would take to put ourselves out there in the way BA just did. I mean, growing up was hard and awkward enough without having to aim and account for feelings we’d been implicitly taught were improper or weak or “gay,” so we reached out to someone who might have a petite more insight into what it was like to grow up gay in skateboarding. Meet Max…
My name is