“It was something that did set me free,” Glenn told NBC in an article posted Thursday. “I was able to feel like I wasn’t being pressured into trying to fill someone else’s shoes.”
Glenn, 26, won her third straight U.S. title this month and is now poised to perhaps become the first American woman to win an Olympic medal in the individual event since 2006. According to Outsports, a site that has tracked LGBTQ+ athletes since 1999, she’ll also be the first out woman to figure skate at an Olympics.
In 2019 the Plano, Texas, native was quoted in a Dallas outlet supporting Timothy LeDuc, an openly out athlete who had won a national title in pairs, NBC noted. Glenn then disclosed publicly that she identified as bisexual and pansexual. “I don’t want to shove my sexuality in people’s faces, but I also don’t want to hide who I am,” she said at the time.
Word traveled a bit faster than she anticipated.
“I thought, ‘OK, this is my little baby step, and … barely anyone’s gonna see it.’ It was a local newspaper,” Glenn said to the network. “Yeah, it did not stay local. The next day it was, like, international news.”
There was a silver lining, though.
“I did not expect it to blow up in the way that it did,” she told ESPN earlier this month. “But I’m grateful because they got my message out there. I was able to represent a lot of people that are in skating, especially queer women.”
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