VANCOUVER — What if Johnny Weir had a press conference and nobody came? It seemed like a possibility yesterday while the Olympic host nation was prepping for a big men’s hockey game with Russia at 4:15 p.m. Pacific time. But when Johnny Weir materialized at the podium in the British Columbia Media Center in downtown Vancouver, the room was still more than three-quarters full. He was there to speak about homophobic comments made by a pair of French-Canadian television commentators after his performance on February 18.
Among the audience, along with reporters from USA Today and the New York Times, was a local celebrity who calls himself “Narduwar the Human Serviette.” Narduwar asked about Weir’s vacuuming habits. “Iggy Pop loved to vacuum, Johnny,” said one, “and I understand that you love to vacuum. Is that true?”
Weir’s response: “I literally vacuumed [agent Tara Modlin’s] condo before I came here. And I cleaned her purse out for her while she was getting ready. That’s the reason I’m late, because my agent was combing her hair. And maybe I was a little bit, too. I was cleaning out her purse and it made a mess on the couch, so I vacuumed the couch.”
The questioner held on to the microphone for a follow-up: “What about food, too? Does that help with negative comments? In the reality series we saw recently, you were pictured preparing food. You were talking with your friend Paris, and you were talking with him about the proper way to cut cheese.”
Weir: “I like you a lot right now. Well, just, when you buy a wedge of cheese, there’s the paper or plastic around the outside, and it’s very important to me that you cut it evenly, so if you cut a slice, you cut the paper off as you go. And he just cut the middle out, so he ended up wasting very valuable cheese. So it offended my sensibilities when Paris didn’t cut the cheese properly.”
He was also asked about the folks who were quoted as saying: “We should make him pass a gender test at this point.” Said Weir: “I’ve heard worse in bathrooms about me, so it’s not a big issue for me that they said it, it’s just that I didn’t want other kids to have that same issue, and other people in the public eye to have the same issue. If I had a chance to sit down with them, I think we’d all be lovely people together. They would see who I really am.”
Also present were two drag queens/burlesque performers who said they had driven from Seattle to “meet Johnny.”