3 months ago
5
The “who’s out” of sport sometimes seems like a who’s who: NFL players such as Carl Nassib and Michael Sam, divers Greg Louganis and Tom Daley. Welsh rugby union player Gareth Thomas. And in Australia, soccer player Josh Cavallo, Olympic diver Matthew Mitcham, swimmers Ian Thorpe and Daniel Kowalski, footballers Ian Roberts, Andy Brennan and Mitch Brown and more.
It might sound as if it’s filling a room, but it’s not filling a stadium and, in truth, out gay (or bisexual) male sportsmen are very rare. Rarer still while on the field of play. Many came out after their professional careers – and any risk to their viability in competitive or sponsorship terms – had passed.
The new television series Heated Rivalry – based on the book of the same name by author Rachel Reid, the second in her Game Changers young adult fiction series – is hoping to smash some of those perceptions to pieces, set in the seemingly hetero-inflexible world of Canadian ice hockey.
In it, rival professional hockey players Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) become famous for their on-ice animosity, while they are concealing an eight-year passionate romance away from prying eyes. But not, as chance would have it, prying television cameras.
Connor Storrie as Ilya Rozanov in Heated Rivalry.
“There’s no doubt that professional male sport is a deeply traditionally masculine place where it is not easy [and] hockey is particularly difficult for whatever reason,” says the show’s creator, Jacob Tierney. “There is not one out professional player, not even a retired one.
“But this is a Harlequin romance, this is a fantasy, right? And that part of what makes it appealing as a fantasy is that one of the things that is explored, in quite a serious way, in this world of male/male romance – written by women and consumed by women, largely – is male vulnerability.
“There’s something very appealing about that idea of the courage, of the empathy, of the danger of doing that, of existing in that world,” Tierney says. “There’s something very sexy about it to women, and it’s something that’s fun to explore. We’re providing a fantasy in that way where, if it sparks a conversation, that’d be great, [but] that’s not the agenda.”
Loading
Tierney and Reid first discussed the possibility of adapting her books into a TV series in 2023. In the first, Game Changer, New York Admirals captain Scott Hunter fell in love with juice bar barista Kip Grady. In the second, Heated Rivalry, it is Montreal Voyageurs captain Shane Hollander – the sport’s Mr Nice Guy – and his bad-boy, on-rink rival, Russian-born Boston Bears captain Ilya Rozanov.
Homoerotic literature in the style of Game Changers is a cousin of slash romance, a genre of erotic fan fiction that takes its name from the / mark between the names of its paired – typically male – subjects. What makes the wider genre intriguing is not just that it is largely written by women, it is also largely consumed by them.
“From the deep dive that I’ve done, it’s a lot about male vulnerability, which is so absent from traditional romance,” Tierney says. “Men are often these one-dimensional, powerful, stoic, again, classically male men.
Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) and Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) in a scene from Heated Rivalry.Credit: Sphere Abacus
“What interests women in this space are men being vulnerable. And there is nothing more vulnerable, to be crude, than a man [being the passive participant in gay sex] and that is of interest to women. That’s the kind of taboo, that’s the danger, that’s the appeal of it.
“What I have heard from a bunch of female authors is that they love the idea of exploring power dynamics, of exploring desire, and that there’s so much misogyny [elsewhere] that if you take gender out of it, and you make it two men, there’s freedom in trying to do whatever they want sexually. It doesn’t have to fall into the trappings of a deeply misogynist culture and a culture that endlessly dismisses or downgrades female desire.”
Loading
The decision to launch with Reid’s second book, which plays to a more traditional kind of tribal rivalry, may lie in the fact that feuding hockey teams are reminiscent of two great houses in conflict, in the style of the Montagues and the Capulets. Which, give or a take a hockey puck, makes Heated Rivalry a kind of “Romeo and Romeo”.
“There’s an element of that,” Tierney says. “This is a classic enemies-to-lovers trope in the romance world. Does it trace back to Romeo and Juliet? I think it does, except in this sense it’s not the families that are feuding, it’s them. So they don’t even need a structure behind them to feud.
“They are pitted against one another in a much more gladiatorial sense of, let one of them live and one of them die, and they secretly are in love with their opposite. The reason these tropes thrive and survive is that they are rooted in something primal and rooted in something probably pre-Shakespearian, it’s more like a Greek drama.”
Hudson Williams as Shane Hollander in Heated Rivalry.
In a sense, the series owes some of its genetic lineage from the subculture of gay indy cinema, where movies such as Latter Days (2003), 4th Man Out (2016) and Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo (2016) aspired to tell very different, but also very authentic stories about gay lives.
“And in a land of 10,000 TV shows, boy, we can have ours, too,” Tierney says. “Think they can exist in all forms. They can be the highest of glossy to the lowest of low. What we are trying to do with this show is make premium TV. A show that can stand up next to an HBO show. Did we have their money? F--- no, but we have their intention, and we have their ambition.”
Connor Storrie as Ilya Rozanov in Heated Rivalry.
The series makes something of a statement about generational story tropes in the gay community. American writer Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, set in 1963, published in 1997 and turned into a movie in 2005, was ultimately a story of heartbreak in the shadow of unacknowledged sexualities.
Loading
Russell T. Davies’ Queer as Folk (1999–2000, later adapted in the US in 2000–2005) was a more uplifting story, about liberation, freedom and euphoric love. A Little Life, the 2015 novel by American writer Hanya Yanagihara, was a substantially darker book, exploring substance abuse, sexual assault and depression.
Tierney agrees there is a long, dark shadow in gay storytelling, which the gay community needs to step out of.
“I get it, we do grow up with pain, we do grow up feeling alienated, we do grow up. It’s not easy still to grow up gay, even in the most liberal of places, it’s not obvious, it’s not easy,” he says.
“But the more we tell ourselves that the end game is death, the more it will be. Because we can only imagine what we see, ultimately. So, part of putting this out in the world, that’s so exciting for me, is that it’s queer joy, it’s pure joy, it is a romance.
“That’s why I will proudly tell people it’s a Harlequin novel because then they know what they’re going to get. I want you to know that there will be trials and tribulations because otherwise there would not be a TV show but, will they end up happily together? Yes, they f---ing will.”
Heated Rivalry streams on HBO Max from November 28.
Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.
