Roy Blakey’s collections shows the intersection of ice skating and LGBTQ history

Keri Pickett didn’t really know her uncle when she was little. She’d met him once at age 6, and he gave her photographs from his international travels, some foreign dolls, and a photo of himself, dressed as a clown.

“I had that photo on my dresser growing up my entire life. It was a mystery to me. Who he was, and what the heck he was doing dressed like that?” Pickett said. “Was he in the circus? I didn’t really know. I made up a bunch of stuff about him in my head over the years.”

Uncle Roy wasn’t a clown, it turns out. Roy Blakey was an ice skater who performed in shows around the world, a renowned portrait photographer and pioneer of male nude photography, and caretaker of the world’s largest ice show archive.

Blakey’s ice show collection has over 33,000 items, including costumes and skates worn by three-time Olympic gold medalist, Sonja Henie. That collection, as well as his extensive photography archive, has now found a home at the Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies at the University of Minnesota.

“Roy Blakey’s collection is the largest collection in Tretter. Full stop,” said Aiden Bettine, curator of the Tretter Collection. “It’s truly a treasure. It’s a gift.”

Why is the world’s largest ice show archive in an LGBTQ archive? For Bettine, there’s a large intersection between the ice skating history and LGBTQ history, and Blakey stands in the center of it.

“I do not see these as distinct collections at all. There is no separation,” Bettine said. “Gay figure skaters are just part of the figure skating world, and I think that’s actually quite normative … People have to reckon with the queerness of it all.”

‘This is magic.’

The next time Pickett met her uncle was on a high school field trip to New York City. She took the subway from the Commodore Hotel to Blakey’s apartment and photo studio in Chelsea. There, the allure of his photography took hold of her.

“I saw his photos of people leaping in the air, frozen in time and space, and it was a total mystery to me. I was just like, ‘How is he doing that? How does he get them to hold up like that? This is magic,’” she said.

Pickett went to college and studied photography. From the moment she got her first camera and stepped into her first photojournalism class, she caught the photo bug, “and the way Roy really influenced me is that my mom never said, ‘No, that’s not possible,’ because her brother was a professional photographer.”

She moved to New York City after graduating to start her own career in photography, and she stayed with Blakey for the first two weeks until he politely kicked her out, she joked, because she was hogging the landline, while calling every photographer in the city for a job as a photo assistant, and Blakey couldn’t get any business without his phone.

But during that time, she saw just how lively, passionate, and funny her uncle was. His home was always filled with colorful people: interior designers, architects, Broadway actors and crew members, costume designers, and fellow figure skaters, of course.

Eventually, Pickett and Blakey moved back to Minneapolis and set up a photo studio together, just off Central Avenue in Marcy-Holmes, seven minutes away from the Tretter Collection. Blakey lived in the back of the building, while the front held a space for portraiture.

Over the course of her career, Pickett has published three photography books and directed four documentaries. Her most recent film, “Uncle Roy,” debuted this year and tells the story of Blakey’s life. She’d wanted to make a documentary about her uncle for more than 20 years, and as he was getting older, the need to complete the film felt more and more urgent.

“Born in 1930 and being gay, Roy was never in the mainstream, but he found ways to live authentically through his passion and career choices, where he never compromised his life path,” Pickett said.

“There’s a lot of people like Roy out in the world, who are unsung, fantastic examples of being a human and maybe their stories aren’t known because they lacked tragedy, or they lacked stardom,” she added.

Pickett’s first film, “The Fabulous Ice Age,” was released in 2013 and is the prequel to “Uncle Roy.” It covers the history of theatrical ice shows and uses materials from Blakey’s collection. Originally she wanted the film to feature more of his personal story, but since the history of these shows hadn’t been covered before, she decided to save it for a separate piece.

Uncle Roy…. On Ice!

Blakey, raised in Enid, Oklahoma, was the oldest of three siblings. At age 11, he discovered his love of figure skating while watching the 1941 movie, “Sun Valley Serenade,” starring Sonja Henie. He started collecting memorabilia then and would travel all the way to New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, just to ask for programs.

His collection has photos, scrapbooks, posters, flyers, handbills, ticket stubs, costumes — “so many sequins, so many feathers,” Bettine said — drinkware, lunchboxes, popcorn buckets, and even a pinball machine.

“If there was a branded cup from an ice show, we have it,” Bettine said. “It’s an abundant collection. But I think that says a lot about Roy as a collector, both in his passion and commitment and obviously true love and care for, and delight by, the history of ice show performances.”

There wasn’t an ice rink in Oklahoma, so Blakey started roller skating instead. He fell in love with the roller troupe, the “Skating Vanities,” and specifically its leading performer, Gloria Nord,” dubbed the “Sonja Henie of roller skating.”

Blakey’s first time on ice was at the University of Tulsa. He went to college there for figure skating, but he was rejected from the program because he was too short (men are often required to be taller than their female partners). So after two and a half years in college, he decided to drop out.

In 1952, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and was posted in Germany, working as a mail clerk for an antiaircraft unit. He found an ice show at a nightclub called the Casa Carioca in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the same town that hosted the 1936 Winter Olympics where Henie won her third consecutive gold medal in women’s singles.

Blakey finagled himself into the ice show, not as a figure skater in singles or pairs, but as a comedian, playing “the funny old lady on ice,” Pickett said. He skated there for 19 months. That was the start of his long career as an ice skater.

Back stateside, Blakey landed a gig at the Boulevard Room of the Hilton Hotel in Chicago, performing in shows like “Frosty Frills” and “Icerama.” He skated there seven days a week, two shows a night, for five years. In 1961, he joined Holiday on Ice International and traveled around the world for the next seven years.

Blakey wasn’t the only gay man in the ice skating world; in the pre-Stonewalll era, ice skating offered queer men a certain kind of mobility and freedom, a livelihood away from prying eyes, sharp glances, and legal scrutiny.

“Roy could live a life traveling the world, being himself, and being in community. He found a way to surround himself with other gay men through the world of figure skating,” Bettine said. “That was a tangible way to live a happy, fulfilling, and hopefully affirming life in the ‘50s and ‘60s.”

The Roy Blakey ‘eye and touch’

During this time, Blakey got interested in photography and began documenting his fellow skaters, both on and off the ice. He also photographed show attendees, like the king and queen of Thailand.

In 1968, Blakey settled in New York City after his stint abroad and skated in a seasonal exhibition at the Rockefeller Center for two years, before hanging up his skates and becoming a full-time freelance photographer.

Blakey wasn’t trained as a technical photographer, but nonetheless, his compositions, lighting, printing, and film processing was very meticulous, Pickett said. He placed an ad in the paper for nude models, and after that first batch of photos, never had to advertise again.

“He’s got just a very clean, crisp, classical style … It’s hard to describe, but he elicits a life in people’s faces for his portrait work. And he just finds the classic beauty in his male figurative work,” Pickett said. “He’s got a great eye, and yet they don’t feel pretentious. They don’t feel overthought in a way. They feel felt.”

Blakey’s is one of the more diverse photograph collections in the Tretter. Operating in the 1960s and ‘70s, a time when erotic photography was still quite segregated in publishing, he photographed a wide variety of bodies and skin tones (though usually his models were lean, and athletic).

“When I first saw Roy’s photographs, his male nude photographs, I immediately knew and was aware that these looked different from other male nudes that are abundant in the Tretter Collection,” Bettine said. “There’s a Roy Blakey eye and touch that stands out.”

His portraiture work suddenly clicked after Bettine learned about his skating background. Blakey posed his models like figure skaters, capturing movement as well as posture. He often photographed people leaping in the air.

“It’s a different kind of visual approach that is incredibly tied to figure skating,” Bettine said. “It’s about the art of the body, appreciating the male body. His photos aren’t particularly erotic or pornographic at all … The beauty, the form, the way that he’s posing men, the way that he’s using light, it’s gorgeous.”

In 1972, Blakey published his first photo book, entitled “He,” a collection of “men wearing only light,” Pickett said, (the book was re-imagined by Reed Massengill in 2002 as “Roy Blakey’s 70s Male Nudes”). The book was groundbreaking, being the first book of strictly male nude photography that could circulate through the United States Postal Service without scrutiny by postal inspectors.

The laws governing the distribution of sexually explicit gay materials through the postal system had just been loosed, thanks to the 1971 court case, Lloyd Spinar and Conrad L. Germain, Doing Business As Dsi Sales v. United States of America.

Spinar and Germain had been charged in Minneapolis with 29 counts of producing and mailing obscenity and faced up to 145 years in prison and up to $145,000. The two were convicted and appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, where a three-judge panel overturned their conviction, finding that their male nude pamphlets did not meet the definition of obscenity.

 

“Roy’s book is significant in that landscape. He faced no scrutiny from the post office, and that’s really because of that case here in Minneapolis,” Bettine said.

Blakey became well-known in New York City’s photography scene. He photographed celebrities like Divine, Candy Darling, and the Village People. He did headshots for Broadway stars and other aspiring actors.

His work was published in male magazines like “After Dark” and “Dilettante,” and was included in a 1973 exhibition at the Continental Baths, a gay bathhouse in Manhattan that launched the careers of Bette Midler and Barry Manilow.

“His collection enables us to elongate queer history backwards, especially for younger people,” Bettine said. “How did people live a gay life before gay liberation?”

Preserving decades of history

When Pickett released “The Fabulous Ice Age,” she hoped it would inspire some archive to acquire and preserve the collection, but because of its size and scope, it took a long time for the collection to find a home. During the production of “Uncle Roy,” Pickett learned about the Tretter Collection and reached out to Bettine about Blakey’s photo archive.

During a tour of Blakey’s studio, Bettine saw the ice show collection in the basement, and he knew right away that both collections needed to come to the Tretter, both as a representation of Blakey’s life, and because the queerness of ice show history might get erased otherwise.

“Aiden came and met us just five weeks before Roy passed. And he was very tender and compassionate with us about the process, and made it feel absolutely like the right thing to do,” Pickett said. “It was great for Roy to know where his archive would be housed. He always wanted it to be accessible to the public. He was never going to monetize or resell it. His goal was to preserve it.”

While acquiring the collection was a massive undertaking, the process went relatively smooth. Blakey diligently organized and labeled the ice show archive, writing handwritten notes for nearly every item. At minimum, Blakey listed the date, show, location, but for many others, he describes where the materials came from, who owned them, how much it cost to buy it off eBay, etc.

The albums and scrapbooks are organized either by show, venue, or skater. Bettine and the team have maintained the organization structure, preserving things exactly how Blakely gave it to them. Around 70 to 80 percent of those materials have been processed, which would not have been possible without Blakely’s work, Bettine said.

His photography archive and personal records are less meticulous; “You can tell his heart was in the ice stage archive and that was where his collection focus was,” Bettine said. The team hopes to finish processing the entire collection by the end of 2027.

“I’m really happy that the University of Minnesota’s system is so secure with the Tretter Collection and that it’s really protective of it, and it’s not going to be lost in a changing political climate,” Pickett said.

In the future, Bettine and Pickett want to organize an exhibit around the significance of ice shows in Minnesota’s history and how they originated out of St. Paul in the 1930s, and another exhibit on LGBTQ photography in the Tretter Collection.

“Roy’s incredibly kind. He’s just like a freaking sweetheart, and that is clear from everybody who knew Roy,” Bettine said. “The beautiful thing about Roy, at 94 with dementia, was he was still doing what he loved and making pictures.”