Heated Rivalry is a much better show than its premise.

Hockey? Boring.
Gay smut for and by women? Boring.
Attractive, rich, privileged men struggling to come out of a closet that millions of us were thrown out of with no resources? Boring.
The Disney-fication of gay relationships? Boring.

And yet, Heated Rivalry is my favorite show of the year. That is the power of good storytelling and great acting. Excellent art is often boiled down to the bare essence of the source material and discussion of the execution is an afterthought, but any Whitney Houston fan can tell you that it was her execution as a master of her craft that elevated some pretty mediocre songs into iconic pieces of art. That is what Jacob Tierney (director & screenwriter), Connor Storrie (Ilya Rozanov), and Hudson Williams (Shane Hollander) did with a fluffy piece of soft porn.

This is gonna be all over the place because honestly I still have the meat sweats from my Christmas feast yesterday and I’m just kinda stream-of-consciousness throwing this out here before I start hibernating for NYC’s impending snowstorm. So there’s your warning.

I don’t wanna do too much here because I don’t want to spoil the way the show builds emotion for anyone who decides to watch Heated Rivalry later, but there are no six episodes of anything ever produced on television that made me fight back tears as often as I did watching these two characters wrestling with their feelings for each other. I can’t remember the last time a monologue in a foreign language made me tear up, because reading the subtitles takes me out of the vocal inflections of the actor’s performance, but Connor Storrie gives a speech in Russian — over the PHONE, mind you, with no one else in the scene to play against — and it sent me into a puddle. Give that young man every award next year. Another scene made me fully pause the show: when we watch a mother apologizing to her son for not making him feel safe enough to come out to her. I stopped the show and reflected on my own relationship with my mother before she died and it weirdly felt very healing to watch on screen what I wish had happened to me. My mother told me I was going to get AIDS and go to Hell, and in that moment I saw everything I wish I’d been able to have with my mom, and it made me feel happy that my experience isn’t everyone’s.

But I feel like a lot of people would rather watch a show with my experience than the one Heated Rivalry wants to show. Jacob is not interested in a presenting a story about gay trauma. No one is murdered, no one is beaten, no one is thrown away. No one has slurs written on their dorm room wall or reports a rape to the police only to be told, ” you probably enjoyed it” (two things that happened to me when I was the age of these main characters as rookie hockey players). I don’t necessarily need to see that. They’re important stories to tell, but so are stories that give us hope and that tell little queer kids who are being bullied or ostracized or worse that it really can get better, even in hypermasculine, homophobic spaces like hockey.

But even that goal, to give queer kids hope, is putting too much on Heated Rivalry because I don’t even think that was the purpose of adapting the novels for television. I think Jacob Tierney, a gay hockey fan, read books about gay hockey players, and he loved them, and he wanted to make more art out of them. That’s it. And that’s all. And that’s enough. He’s making Bridgerton for people who like to see hot men with fat asses get naked and pound each other. He’s making Romeo & Juliet for all the little boys who secretly wanted to be Juliet and they run off together instead of die. He’s making a Meg Ryan 90s rom-com through the lens of a chaotic homosexual envisioning a world where lockerroom cruising wasn’t killed by Grindr and nobody ever has to douche before getting fucked.

I can’t really relate to any of the characters. I was being called a faggot by 2nd grade and got caught sucking dick in middle school, so I didn’t have years of languishing in the closet wondering how I would ever be able to come out and shatter the image and dreams of the people around me. I don’t know what it’s like put on a lie every day, for years, to everyone in my life (or millions of people who aren’t in my life but feel like they have a claim to me and who I am). I don’t know what masculine men go through when they have to tell people that they’re gay, and to me, it feels like a lot of the knee-jerk criticism from gay men who haven’t watched the show is coming from a place where those critics were in closets made of glass that everyone could see through. It is much easier to say “I’m gay” when your mom knows how much you love Madonna. I imagine it’s quite a bit harder when you’re a professional hockey player. Because our loudest gatekeepers of entertainment are gay men who are a bit left of butch, that tiny little upturned scoff at “manly” gay smut turns into a snowball of so many people wanting to have the most cutting, most derisive takedown of something they feel is beneath them. It doesn’t feel nice. It feels really dismissive of all of the men who do in fact see themselves in these characters.

I’ve had a few convos like this with guys who blend into heteronormative society, who have to come out over and over whenever they meet a new person. It’s something I really take for granted. When I walk into a room, everyone assumes I’m gay. I don’t have to think about it. I don’t have to correct anyone’s perception of me. The guy I was DM’ing with has to make the conscious decision to drop something gay into the conversation every single time he meets a new person.

There’s a mental calculus at play that I can’t relate to at all. I don’t have to worry about a bigot approaching me to strike up a regular conversation — but he does, and he has to decide the likelihood of a negative reaction against the necessity coming out to a stranger with regard to whether this is a person he will be running into or if this is just a fleeting interaction with a random. If it’s someone who will have a role in his life — a friend of a friend, a colleague, a client, etc. — he has to decide how late is too late to drop the information without seeming like he was intentionally holding something back. And then he has to deal with the surprise or disappointment. It’s easy for me to say “oh none of this matters” because nobody is going to stop and stare if I bring a man to the company holiday party. And that experience, that calculus, is why I don’t think coming out stories are unnecessary. Everyone deserves to see themselves represented and it’s never a bad thing to use a 50 minute television show to take a stroll in someone else’s shoes.

Because the show got so big so fast, there are a lot of people taking a stroll in those shoes and, even if you hate everything about the show, even if you’re a gay man from NY or LA or says “real gays don’t have sex like that” or whatever Jordan Firstman jealously vomited, a part of you can at least appreciate that this would not have happened 20 years ago. Straight men were not avidly, publicly, and praisingly watching Queer as Folk when it came out. I’ve been down some Reddit and YouTube rabbit holes reading and watching about straight men watching Heated Rivalry, and I want y’all to see it too. Both of these podcast clips are awkward excerpts, because I didn’t want to include too much spoiler, but I need to share these with the queer fam who were bullied mercilessly by straight men for years.

Watch these three guys (who love the show — the one of the left says his two favorite episodes of TV this year come from Heated Rivalry) talk about this gay relationship like it’s the most normal, casual thing in the world.

(Youtube: What Chaos!)

Watch these two guys (who also love the show — the one of the left was convinced by his wife to review it for their podcast) turn into complete mush, crying on camera as they watch live.

(Youtube: Reel Rejects)

I remember vividly the first time a straight man was nice to me in relation to being gay. He was only 18, but I was 12, so he felt like a man to me. I was at church camp in the North Carolina mountains and my group was going kayaking. I was randomly assigned to a boat with two brothers, one was 13 and the other was 18. When we were alone and far away from the other boaters, the 13-year-old asked me if I was gay. I couldn’t swim, and I thought if I said yes that they would drown me. That’s honestly what I thought. My face said anything before my mouth could and the older brother saw I was terrified. He just said, “hey, if anybody mess with you, you come find me.”

That memory should not be so vivid to me decades later, but it is. For me, and the little parts of me that are still a little unhealed from childhood, the popularity of Heated Rivalry and the way straight men in particular have embraced it is almost as fulfilling as watching the show itself.

Heated Rivalry isn’t groundbreaking television and all of this has been done before. We’ve seen gay sex on TV, coming out dramas, and gay men depicted in sports. But there is no screenwriter/director who has been this adept at knowing exactly which emotional notes to play from scene to scene in a very long time. And there has been no on-screen duo, of any gender or sexuality pairing, that has been this electric on screen, maybe ever.

Maybe the premise isn’t for you, but Heated Rivalry is still excellent television.