So: Heated Rivalry.
I haven't seen the show and probably won't until it is released on home video; maybe not even then. I did read the book, though. I found it sitting there, readily available, as an e-book through my public library, and it wasn't bad. But it wasn't good enough to make me want to read the others in the series or to subscribe to stream it.
I have watched a lot of promotional videos about it on YouTube, and I was impressed by the young leads. They're poised, smart, and funny, dealing well with their sudden fame. I especially enjoyed some network anchor type (Rachel Roberts, I think?) interviewing Hudson Williams before the Golden Globes. She said something about how much we've seen of him and Connor Storrie in the media, and Williams said cheerfully that of course everybody has seen all of them -- referring to the nudity in the series. The interviewer was taken aback, I suppose because he'd said the quiet part out loud, and completely without shame or prurience. It's normal in pretty much all media to giggle like adolescents about sexual content, and I doubt these supposed adults will never outgrow it.
Still, I was pleasantly surprised by how comfortable a lot of older media people were with the fact of a gay love story becoming immensely popular. It's as it should be. There's no reason why heterosexuals shouldn't be able to identify with gay characters. Heated Rivalry was written by a straight woman for straight women, and the series was written and directed by a gay man, but when the elderly Al Roker is gushing about how romantic it is, I think we've come a long way. This is good news because by all accounts the series puts its many sex scenes in the viewer's face, so to speak. There's no way to deny that these male characters are having sex repeatedly over a long period, it's important to them, they aren't just homosocial.
While Heated Rivalry is probably unprecedented in degree, for film or for television, it's not new in kind. A few people have mentioned Brokeback Mountain, also written by a straight woman for a straight audience though produced by heterosexual filmmakers. It wasn't nearly as sexually explicit as Heated Rivalry, but it was much better than, say, Philadelphia. But it did end with Gay Doom, and Heated Rivalry doesn't. That's some kind of progress.
But let me dredge up the past a bit more. Patricia Nell Warren's The Front Runner was published in 1973. I remember seeing copies displayed in a mall bookstore, and somehow I knew it was about gay men. Indeed, it was about gay athletes: not just the title long-distance runner and his coach, but other gay athletes were prominent characters. The sex scenes were explicit enough to upset some squeamish male reviewers, but even better, the gay characters weren't struggling to Identify As Gay. The young runners were politically conscious, even militant - a stance notably absent from Heated Rivalry. The book had a tragic ending but with resolve that life and love would go on, and Warren later produced a sequel or two. There was ongoing buzz about a possible film version - supposedly Paul Newman had bought the film rights and wanted to play the coach, but it never happened. Warren herself was lesbian, and continued to deal with gay themes in her later novels.
Then there were Mary Renault's historical novels, especially the ones about Alexander the Great. The Persian Boy, about Alexander's second love Bagoas but also featuring his long relationship with Hephaistion, was a best-seller. Again, rumors circulated about a movie, but it never happened. Ancient Greece has inspired gay fiction, from the ambitious to the dire. (I'm thinking especially of Felice Picano's An Asian Minor: The True Story of Ganymede in the latter category.) Anne Rice wrote some interesting historical fiction this vein, such as A Cry to Heaven about Italian castrati; and of course her vampire novels are famous examples of the straight woman identifying with her gay(ish) male heroes. Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles, a young-adult story of Achilles and Patroclus, made some gay men angry for some reason; I thought it was fine.
But as I've said here before, there's a lot of LGBTQ fiction around these days, and quite a few movies too. I'm not sure why Heated Rivalry has taken off, though I'm glad it has. There will be a second series going into production soon, with the same leads carrying their characters' story forward. I expect there will be knockoffs, imitations, that won't do as well because they aren't as good. Sturgeon's Law always applies. I don't care, because I don't have to watch them or read them.
The thing is, I'm not all that interested in formulaic romance stories, and Heated Rivalry is formulaic. The hockey angle, which excites a lot of people, is just window-dressing. The core of the story is the characters' struggle to overcome the obstacles in the way of their love -- obstacles which are internal as much as they are external. Rachel Reid handles this plot well, but it's old hat and she has nothing to add to it. A lot of the trouble, I admit, is that I'm old and I've seen it all before; besides, everybody knows how a romance is going to turn out. Her guys' angst is understandable in its pro-sports setting, but even that is required by the romance plot. Heterosexual romances also have to set up barriers for the lovers to overcome, but the reader knows that they will be overcome. Romance novels nowadays are marketed by subgenre, and Heated Rivalry is always described as "enemies/rivals to lovers." I don't find that very interesting, just because it's a formula. A lot of people like it, though; fine.
One thing I've been focusing on in the publicity is the fans. One genre of promotional YouTube video is "celebrities react to thirst tweets," those being social media posts where the writers talk about what they'd like to do in bed with the celebrities. It's often impossible to tell whether the posters are serious or are just trying to be obnoxious. Williams and Storrie handled this assignment with good humor, and it's just part of the publicity machine, but I still thought it was creepy. It's of a piece with the popular tendency of us ordinary shlubs to take for granted that we are the special one that the star would want if we could only meet him or her; or more generally, to assume that if I'm attracted to someone, it's because he wants me and is sending out sex rays to pull me in. This isn't a guy thing or a straight thing, it seems widespread among both sexes and all sexual persuasions. But as I've been wondering for many years now, if you pretend that your desire for another person is a positive thing ("love"), why do so many adults believe that the way to win the other over is to be as obnoxious as possible? Williams and Storrie have joked often about their butts and their workout secrets to pump up their glutes, which as Williams said, everybody has seen by now. Many of the fans reciprocate by showing their asses on social media.
There's also excited speculation about the stars' personal sex lives, about which they have been reticent. I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, we should be past the era when one's sexual orientation is a dread secret: it's a public fact about any person. But on the other, no person is obliged to share the details of one's love life, or sex life, with the world. That's especially true among gay men, many of whom obsess about who's a top and who's a bottom, again with the seeming assumption that they will ever get near enough to act these roles out with the celebrities. I still remember that after Boy George had come out publicly in the mid-1980s, a presumably straight interviewer for the rock press assumed that the public fact entitled him to press BG for intimate details. Boy George properly drew the line there, but many people still can't tell the difference. The fantasies about Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie will go on being spun, but the fantasists need to get a grip on themselves; it's as much as they're going to get. You know what I'm talking about.
I wish Williams and Storrie well. I hope they have long interesting acting careers, with opportunities to be more than eye candy. I'll also be interested to see what effect Heated Rivalry has on TV and cinema's treatment of gay subjects. There seem to be some other intriguing projects in recent release, for that matter.
