“It was something that freed me,” says Glenn told NBC in an article posted Thursday. “I felt like I wasn’t being pressured to fill anyone else’s shoes.”
Glenn, 26, won her third consecutive US title this month and is now poised to become perhaps the first American woman to win an Olympic medal in the individual event since 2006. According to to outdoor sportsa site that has been tracking LGBTQ+ athletes since 1999, will also be the first woman to figure skate at an Olympics.
In 2019 the Plano, Texas, born was quoted in a Dallas outlet in support of Timothy LeDuc, an avowed athlete who had won a national title in pairs, NBC noted. Glenn subsequently publicly announced that she identified as bisexual and pansexual. “I don’t want to put my sexuality in people’s faces, but I don’t want to hide who I am either,” she said at the time.
The news spread a little faster than she expected.
“I thought, ‘Okay, this is my little baby step, and… hardly anyone will see it.’ It was a local newspaper,” Glenn told the station. “Yes, it didn’t stay local. The next day it was international news.”
However, there was a silver lining.
‘I didn’t expect it to blow up like this’ she told ESPN earlier this month. “But I’m grateful because they got my message across. I was able to represent a lot of people in the skating world, especially gay women.”
