A dance with men in dresses paired with men in suits from a broadside entitled “Los 41 maricones encontrados en un baile de la Calle de la Paz el 20 de Noviembre de 1901” (1901) | José Guadalupe Posada / The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Public Domain
Over a phone call a few weeks ago, a childhood friend told me she had found among her possessions a long-forgotten, black-and-gold diary that had once belonged to me—that had now, so many years later, mysteriously appeared in her custody. Curious to hear its contents, I asked her to recite one of its entries, thinking that the juvenile thoughts of a teenager might now serve as amusement for the both of us. The page she read was as amusing as it was confusing, written excitedly on a Saturday night in my boarding school dormitory, following a screening for a film called The Imitation Game (2014).
A controversial choice for a conservative school, the movie follows the life of English mathematician Alan Turing, known as the father of modern computing, whose inventions led Britain and the Allied powers to crack secret Nazi codes. Turing was also, as the film illustrates, a closeted gay man, caught performing then-criminalized homosexual activities in the years after the war, only to commit suicide while undergoing a court-mandated medical treatment for his homosexuality. To the sexually confused 14-year-old who returned to his dorm to write in his diary about the movie he had just seen, the character of the English mathematician was illuminating—a representation of gayness endowed with an emotional depth and complexity he hadn’t before seen on screen. Never mind that Turing died under deeply tragic circumstances triggered by the state he served—he was far from the flattened trope of the ridiculed, mocked, feminine, flamboyant side-characters from American rom-coms and reality shows. He was a gay character articulated and constructed with nuance. “I want to be gay in that British way, like Turing. Not in the crazy American way,” my friend read out over the phone. We wouldn’t stop laughing for the next 20 minutes.
Like so many gay men before me, I have since migrated to New York, where on a Thursday evening last December I arrived at a friend’s apartment for what had become a weekly ritual of dinner-and-a-movie. Except this week, we weren’t watching a movie, but an episode of the surprise hit TV show about two closeted ice hockey players, Heated Rivalry. Little did we know then that we weren’t the only ones hooked onto it. What had started out as a small-budget, relatively unheard-of Canadian show has now become one of the most popular television series of the year, allowing its stars Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams to leave their waitering jobs for the red carpets of Hollywood, late-night talk-shows, and even the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Milan as torchbearers. The show’s sudden rise to popularity, which stunned not only its creators but even executives in the television industry, has given rise to intense speculations as to the cause: How did this hockey-themed gay romance with unknown actors come to leave such a defining mark on the cultural zeitgeist?
Media opinions on the matter have largely offered remarkably optimistic interpretations (and rightfully so, especially in times like these, when queer lives seem increasingly under social and political threat). They talk about the enthralling aspects of its romance, the queer representation it brings for athletes, the depiction of men in nontoxic and tender intimacy, and most notably, the unusually happy ending afforded to its gay characters. “The more personal you make something, the more intimate you make it, the more chance you have of reaching a larger amount of people,” the series creator, Jacob Tierney, said in a Times interview about the show’s surprising success. Personal and intimate Heated Rivalry is, no doubt. In their pining and yearning, in their all-consuming lovesickness, Heated Rivalry’s gay protagonists are dynamic and layered—the kind that would enthrall a sexually confused 14-year-old, compelling him to write about it in his diary.
To watch two men be deeply in love with one another remains an image radical for the screen. Only a handful of blockbuster hits in recent decades have featured richly explored gay romances: Brokeback Mountain (2005), which at one point “sufficed as a dictionary definition of a ‘gay love story,’” in the words of Times critic Wesley Morris; Moonlight (2016); Call Me by Your Name (2017). I’m sure there are more—there are, aren’t there? Heated Rivalry may not be novel for the complexity it affords its gay characters, even if that complexity might be rare. But if emotional profundity and an unusually happy ending for its gay protagonists is what makes it so radical, one is forced to reckon with the politics of who was—and who still is—thought worthy and not worthy of being depicted with such nuance.
The cinematic forebears of Heated Rivalry share the show’s thoughtful investment in queer love. But one could argue they share so much more. As in Brokeback Mountain, Moonlight, and Call Me By Your Name, the protagonists of Heated Rivalry conform to heteronormative conventions of masculinity—in their performance, their personality, their speech, their actions, their behaviors, their mannerisms. Their conforming masculinity allows for them to be closeted, raising the stakes for their forbidden romance. Indeed, the forbidden romance plot in such narratives relies on the protagonists passing as straight. Herein lies my reservation with the celebration of emotional profundity that surrounds coverage about Heated Rivalry: If the character is a rounded gay man, must he, by some cinematic norm, also be conventionally masculine?
A BBC article reporting on the audiences of women driving gay male erotica like Heated Rivalry wonders whether gay male sexuality might become fetishised in the process, only to consider it unlikely. As evidence, the article uses the words of a gay interviewee: “I grew up thinking people who aren’t gay are going to be probably neutral at best or at worst homophobic towards me—like thinking about you and your boyfriend together makes me feel sick. It’s disgusting. So actually, knowing that women are thinking about you and your boyfriend together as hot; I love it.”
But who is really being included under the banner of straight acceptance? If Heated Rivalry and all the other stories with gay characters evoked to bolster their popularity are any indication, the accepted gay figure, the recipient of audience empathy, is someone whose behavior and mannerisms, whose performance of gender, aligns more towards a cisgendered, typically masculine man, who could readily pass as straight.
Many such gay men exist, of course. I know such gay men, and perhaps you do too, in life and in fiction: Jack and Ennis from Brokeback Mountain; Oliver from Call Me By Your Name; Chiron from Moonlight. In each of them, I have found a resonance, a depth and complexity that reflected my own experience—much like that sexually confused 14-year-old did on a Saturday screening, when he watched the dramatization of a gay mathematician’s life. But on that Thursday evening at my friend’s apartment in New York, watching Heated Rivalry and eating dinner, I felt as though I’d met this man on screen all too often. In the aftermath of the show’s surprising success, I now wonder: Does Heated Rivalry’s popularity reflect an acceptance of queerness—or only queerness delivered in a certain acceptable form?
“That was the craziest part for me to play—everyone always talks about the Russian, but the jockness of it all …, ” Connor Storrie said during an appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers of his role as Ilya Rozanov, one of Heated Rivalry’s two protagonists. Ilya is Russian, closeted for fear of penal punishment—a character normative in his masculinity, unquestioned in his sexuality in the world of the story, which inevitably contributes to his jockness. What Storrie called “the jockness of it all” seems to me to be at least a key part of Heated Rivalry’s success. The show is an enthralling romance, a rare portrayal of non-toxic and tender masculine intimacy, with an unusually joyous resolution—but it also perpetuates a Hollywood norm that reserves depth, wholeness, dynamism, complexity, and nuance for male characters who conform to masculinity in its most traditional physical expression, thereby casting the effeminate, the limp-wristed, and the shrill-voiced to the flatlands of comic relief and supporting roles. So often, these are the characters made available to gay actors, while the rounded roles of substance get passed on to their straight counterparts—who, so often, receive acclaim and awards for their parts; who go on to build lasting careers from there on.
The effeminate gay character is so rarely afforded romantic arcs, emotional intimacies, happy endings: Stanford from Sex and the City; Damian from Mean Girls; Nigel from The Devil Wears Prada; Ethan fromLove, Simon. Gay men like them are stereotypes, but they exist, too. I spend so much of my time wondering whether I am one of them, frightened that I probably am—as I was as a sexually confused 14-year-old, terrified that being gay in this “crazy American way” meant I was destined for the mockery and ridicule so many gay men still confront, hoping that a British mathematician’s on-screen complexity might prove to be an escape from it all. A 2017 survey published in The Guardian found that 68 percent of gay men have been at the receiving end of homophobic abuse that ridiculed them for their femininity; more than 50 percent found themselves altering their behavior while around straight people so as to appear more masculine; and 92 percent thought the effeminate gay man a figure of mockery in mainstream media.
Heated Rivalry is many things—delectable, addictive, visually and emotionally pleasing—but perhaps its gay representation isn’t all that radically novel. I can recall with a strange clarity boarding a flight the morning after I watched one of the show’s most celebrated scenes and thinking, during that 10-hour journey, of little else apart from the intercut visuals of two men captivated by each other at a night club, heartbroken to see the other dancing with somebody else—a woman, nonetheless. After all, they could pass, even to each other.
