Meet Your Gay (or Possibly Honorary Gay) of the Week: Johnny Weir

Johnny Weir won, and while many of us were only too happy to cast a vote for the androgynous skater, there's also a very vocal minority of AfterElton.com readers who felt that nominating him (and casting a vote for him) amounted to "celebrating and rewarding the closet".

The AE editorial staff does not see it that way. There's a major difference between Weir and, say, a pre-coming out Clay Aiken. Aiken was trying to convince everyone he was straight, and since it was painfully obvious he wasn't, the terrible inference was that he viewed his sexuality as something to be publicly shameful of and embarrassed about. 

Not so Weir. He may be coy about coming out explicitly (possibly for fear of being punished by the skating powers that be), but he's never denied being gay and if anything he's invited people to assume he's gay and not straight. And there is absolutely nothing about his coyness that reads as shameful or embarrassed. To us, he seems like a pretty good role model for kids, regardless of orientation or gender, who feel like they don't fit into traditional gender norms.

Admittedly, Weir's official status (Gay? Straight? Bi? Transgender?) is a gray area, which has made him difficult in the past for us to cover here on AfterElton.com. But ultimately he is too important, too influential a cultural figure not to cover. In that, he is a lot like Adam Lambert prior to his Rolling Stone interview – never denying his orientation and giving every outward appearance of living his life as a gay man.  

And so we have chosen to treat him much as we did Lambert. Our official position at AE with respect to Johnny Weir is to assume he's gay until he says otherwise. As one commenter so aptly put it, we're "going for 'Gay' until he says 'Nay'."

Weir received almost half the votes this week, so clearly he has many fans around here. Whether honorary or not, he is your Gay of the Week. 

Join us Friday when we present four new contenders for the throne!

Note: If there's someone you think should be nominated this week, please comment with your suggestion here – or private message me.