I tried to ignore it.
Heated Rivalry, a steamy new show about closeted gay hockey players, dropped on HBO late last November to great fanfare, especially online and especially among women. Girls were making memes and fancams. They were making their boyfriends watch it with them. Celebrities raved. In due time, magazines like the The New Yorker, which drew questionable parallels between Heated Rivalry and classic works of gay fiction like E.M. Forster’s Maurice, were hard at work manufacturing an intellectual framework by which people could justify watching a tawdry little TV show about furtive gay sex, which I suppose is what some people needed.
Around this time, when my editor asked me to write about Heated Rivalry, I said I’d pass. Sure, Heated Rivalry is basically softcore gay porn, but it’s softcore gay porn written by and for women, not me (an actual gay man). Who was I to report on this? More importantly, I figured it wasn’t worth the time. Like a flash in the pan, or more aptly, a cheap orgasm, Heated Rivalry would disappear from the cultural consciousness the minute the last episode aired, everyone came to their senses, and put their pants back on with a bit of dignity still intact.
Clearly, I was wrong.
