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It's all a matter of context.

A big, lifeless sea creature laying there, all gray-scaled and glassy-eyed, is a dead fish; a chunk of its tail on a bed of crushed ice in a market showcase is a potential salmon dinner. Sliced and arranged on a black lacquered platter with some wasabi or on black bread with some cream cheese and cucumber, and it's Sushi Sake or Nova Lox.

And even though it's the same fish - same history, same nutritional value, the same ability to please our palates - how we look at it and what we expect of it changes what we believe it to be.

If you show me an athlete who moves across a sheet of ice with such grace, such charm and presence, and such quiet command that you can almost imagine he himself effortlessly coaxed the flooded arena floor to freeze beneath him, it's a World Champion figure skater and Olympic competitor.

But take it's flashy, festooned lycra shirt off, and it's a little gay fuck toy.

I am a big fan of skater, Johnny Weir. And whether he earned a medal or not at this year's Olympic competition is completely beside the point. This young man, who, at 25, no longer qualifies technically as a "Twink" (though I'd still give him artistic points) has brought such personal style and conviction to his sport that he has brought criticism on himself for fluffing up an already highly-feminized sport. We expect grace and flair and a feline fluidity in our male figure skaters, but we want that beauty and poise to stay on the ice. Weir's sexuality has been questioned since he came of age and into prominence, and his HoMoPotential has diminished the respect he should nonetheless be given in spades, by certain factions, particularly because he has not outright denied it. And he's not the sort of gentleman who feels he needs to defend himself, nor that one's sexuality is, either way, an aspect of one's makeup in need of defense. Apparently, though, we don't want our figure skaters to really be gay; we just want them to be gay-ish. The flamboyance and feather-light finesse of the rink is what we expect; but attach that same style and flair to the man's life off the ice, and our salmon fillet is giving us much more frou-frou entree than we can seemingly handle on our narrow-minded plates.

"There are some things I keep sacred," Weir told the New York Times in a 2008 interview. "My middle name. Who I sleep with. And what kind of hand moisturizer I use."

If I didn't want to fuck the kid silly before, I definitely wanted to kiss him deeply and meaningfully after I read that.

Unfortunately, for all of us who want to fly our rainbow flags, there are those who will not allow us to do so as much as demand we do so. And not for our own comfort and pride, but to make examples of ourselves - good or bad - and always for a point that they, not we, are trying to make.

Johnny manages to stay Johnny - the true Johnny - in every aspect of his life as we see it. In his professional life as displayed in competition, and in what little glimpses we're given into his personal life in interviews and profiles, here's a guy who has his idols, but just doesn't want to recreate himself in anyone else's image. He is his own god. And who he is informs how he performs, and he faces the fact daily that sometimes it colors the judges' perceptions and he's held accountable for being himself. And I commend him for being fully accountable to himself for just that.

It's the judges, however, with their own personal agenda, their own prejudices, and their own phobias, who look at a man and allow who he is to overshadow their professional judging criteria. Sadly, there does exist such myopia that an official could look at an athlete after a sound competitive showing and, knowing he is who he is, somehow allow themselves to irrationally interpret his personal life into a perhaps unconscious misconception that such a person could not possibly be such an athlete and, thus, to realign their skewed and inefficient processing of this information, come to sub-par performance as the only logical solution to their perceptual dilemma.

Flash back a few weeks to the Sundance Channel's January premiere of the eight-part reality series "Be Good, Johnny Weir," a show which followed the skater through the rigors of his daily life in training and competition, and which now re-runs like all reality series with a good cult following, almost daily (I think the Latin term is "ad nauseum”") on the cable network.

This bit of TV reality certainly fanned the flames of any homophobia that may exist among officials of the sport. In trying to give the athlete a boost in his status as pop icon beyond just his world ranking as a champion skater, the series may have helped solidify his place in the pop culture as a sought-after personality and de-facto fashion model; but it was also a major kick in the teeth to his bare-bones credibility as the merely gay-ish competitor he was expected to be. In this apparently very accurate glimpse of the man behind the medals, the daily struggles are played out and, if further deified, demystified as we get a very good understanding of what makes this kid a champion. But also demystified, even if never officially labeled with a sexual orientation, is a certain lifestyle that may just have been too much for judges to swallow.

Look at the show's promos: they barely get the title of the series off the screen and off comes Johnny's shirt. A photo shoot with the athlete posing in fur coat and accessories is more about what's being carefully covered of his own flesh than the pelt being featured in the photos. Another prance before the cameras that is documented in the series has him modeling underwear. I loved every delicious minute - the man's an athlete and his body shows he works fucking hard to stay as taut and lean and muscular as he is - but I was no longer looking at a world champ figure skater; I was looking at a Go-Go dancer in all his nude-boy glory as he strutted before the cameras. In this context, the guy being shown was not the athlete through-and-through, but the lithe, sexual creature, inside-and-out, whether in or out of the closet. This wasn't Johnny on the rink; it was Johnny in the locker room.

This is who Weir may be inside. It sure as hell looks like he lives to let it bubble to the surface at every turn. And I applaud him, not only for his uncompromising athleticism, but his total and uncompromising Johnnycism - he is who he is and doesn't care who cares. But while we can expect to see plenty of this fine athlete both on and off the ice (and while I look forward to seeing more of him with the costumes off), I think this may be a case of having to accept that being who you are doesn't always make you everyone's Fair Haired Boy.

Though in Johnny Weir's case, it seems he is totally down with taking a few less medals home in exchange for making more than just a few less compromises in his character and his craft. Maybe the Sundance series, and his relative candor, and his style and gloss and adherence to his own rules weren't the many defiant acts of shooting himself in the foot as so many have accused them of being. Maybe there is a greater context in which he wants to be recognized, and one with an ultimately greater social importance than that which comes from hanging a chunk of metal around a man's neck. He knows he has longevity far beyond the rink and that, long after the ice melts, he'll still be in our vernacular in some unique and substantial way.

If the judging criteria in the sport at which he excels were in any way shaped or bent by the judgments that inarguably swirl around the lifestyle Weir so loudly embraces, then that sucks for all of us - athletes and enthusiasts, gays and those unbiased by orientation, the intellectual and the decent and the affirming alike - and the sports history books, especially. But, it's also a major pat on the back to each of us who rally around him and clear the high center platform on the medal stand for him to take his due credit as a proud individual who would rather say, "fuck you", than, "I'm sorry" when it comes to questions of his character or his abilities in light of his style and confidence.

The one thing, however, about which I now publicly demand he come clean and for which he be held fully accountable: I've simply got to know which coveted moisturizer it is that he uses. "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" has no more place in Olympic competition than it does in the military. But, it's absolutely unthinkable in the cosmetic realm of staying moist and youthful.

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