On Top of Glass: My Stories as a Queer Girl in Figure Skating begins with an image that, thanks largely to her, no woman in skating will experience again: searching the internet for queer role models and coming up empty."My initial search [for lesbian figure skater] didn't conjure any names," she writes. "I altered my search: bisexual female figure skaters.
Still nothing. I revised again: gay female figure skaters. Google offered me a list of men."Manta, now 25, came out as bisexual in November 2018, posting a YouTube video of a spoken-word poem with her girlfriend Aleena a few weeks before her first performance at Skate America.