One morning, I woke up, got on Twitter, and as I was scrolling, I saw people gagging over the first two episodes of Heated Rivalry — the book by Rachel Reid turned into a television series directed by Jacob Tierney.
I was clueless but curious, especially because I had never heard of the book or its TV adaptation. Then those clips of steamy scenes and GIFs further deepened my inquisitiveness. After coming back from work, I watched the two episodes — and the rest is history.
The world of Heated Rivalry is an enthralling one. Good-looking men having hot sex — what’s not to love? But that’s not all there is. In fact, the show is so much more than two rival hockey players having sneaky sex for over a decade.
The show conveys the distinction between desire, fantasy, and longing in a very distinct yet neat way. There is heat and attraction — the physical pull between the characters that immediately grabs the audience. As the story progresses, fantasy comes into play through moments of intimacy that exist only when the world is unaware of them. But reality constantly intrudes, making it risky for them to let that fantasy take over. And this is where longing stays and grows stronger; its gnawing pain shifts from ease to continual endurance.
In the romance genre, media often either overlooks or struggles to get yearning right. Similarly, media consumers often romanticise the portrayal of yearning in movies and TV shows, and people have done the same with the longing depicted in Heated Rivalry.
However, what the discourse seems to miss is how much longing is actually the labour of restraint. The male leads in the show are compelled to survive in a hypermasculine space like sports, which requires suppression, discipline, and a whole lot of masking. This would obviously take a massive toll on the mental and emotional strength of the characters, if not also the physical.
This endurance needs acknowledgement when we talk about yearning, because queer yearning involves far more preparation and containment of desire in comparison to heterosexual longing. There is so much to lose if queer romance meets unwelcoming eyes. The risk can be personally and professionally damaging if it goes public before the characters are ready to admit it to the world.
In the show, the characters cannot be seen together like a straight couple could be in public, so all they have is sex behind closed doors to fulfil those desires in all their forms.
The portrayal of two men who are at the top of their games — who have everything figured out professionally — yet are closeted and struggling with their sexuality hints at something bigger than them. If two straight-passing, white and white-adjacent men, even with strong careers, can go through so much pain due to the fear of the world knowing about their queerness, then imagine the battles of non-white, non–queer-passing folks.
Besides, what Heated Rivalry gets right is that it’s not just another tragic portrayal of queer people in media.
For a long time, we have been depicted either as a sob story or as unfunny slapstick comedy. So it is not only refreshing to see stereotypes being defied; it is healing to see queer representation experience joy in mainstream media.
Hope and joy coded into queer representation are so important because we are more than a one-sided, overdone tragic narrative.
Queer folks often have to live our lives vicariously through media, and we deserve to be shown in ways other than just sad stories.
For example, another beautiful instance of queer media is Heartstopper, also a book series turned into a TV show — which is how I lived my nonexistent teen romance vicariously through Nick and Charlie.
Queer joy should be normalised; the idea of it should not feel radical. We are not there yet. However, with shows like Heated Rivalry, we will get there.
That said, it is worth noting that perhaps Heated Rivalry is still a palatable form of queer joy, since it is a romance between two conventionally attractive, white and white-adjacent, straight-passing gay and bisexual athletic men at the top of their games.
Would the reception be the same if the romance included a femme or trans person of colour? It is worth pondering the implications of queerness if the characters were non-white and visibly queer.
The world is not yet at a place where it accepts all forms of queerness. So this particular portrayal feels more legible to normative society, since it is performed in a certain way that can be legitimised.
Sports movies help explain why this legibility matters. In Jerry Maguire (1996), emotional vulnerability is framed as a breakthrough only after Tom Cruise’s character proves his worth. Likewise, in Miracle (2004), about the US men’s ice hockey team, emotions are permitted only when they serve the team or the nation. Heated Rivalry flips this script. Here, vulnerability is not a reward; it’s a risk. Since the characters exist in hypermasculine spaces, they are not allowed to feel openly — and so their emotional labour becomes the main plot.
With Heated Rivalry cited as a source of courage for real-life athletes coming out after the show’s success, it stands as an example that representation matters. And while the show’s success may partly be due to its palatability, it still opens doors and holds space for queer longing and queer joy in a world where they still feel like a luxury.
