As I’ve watched Heated Rivalry quickly become a cultural phenomenon in the months since the series premiered on HBO Max, I’ve been puzzled by the dizzying set of discourses about the show. The “gay hockey show” follows an arch-rivals-to-lovers story of two closeted superstar ice hockey players, Canadian Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Russian Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie). The indie Canadian production is a surprise hit, in no small part due to the steaminess of its sex scenes and the searing tenderness of its romance. A series featuring previously unknown actors about the intimate impacts of structural homophobia is an unlikely sensation in a media market dominated by reboots, superheroes, and A-list casts.

Dozens of think-pieces, and countless TikToks and Instagram reels, celebrate and unpack the series’ representational politics and the impact of its rapid rise to popularity. The digital conversation (exhaustingly) circles around a few central questions: Who is the show for? Does its representation of gay sex and relationships feel authentic? Do Storrie and Williams identify as LGBTQ? If so, is it reasonable that they want to preserve their privacy by declining to discuss their sexualities with the public? And why do so many straight women love the show? Are straight women fetishizing the characters on screen and the actors who play them? If they are, is this necessarily a bad thing?

In some ways, writing about Heated Rivalry already feels overdetermined. So many underlying factors — histories, cultural biases, power structures — make these questions complex to resolve. Conversations about the show are shaped by pre-existing forces that seemingly “determine” the outcome of conversations before they even begin.

In this case, such forces include decades-long intracommunal debates and discussions about visibility and representation in LGBTQ media, casting non-LGBTQ/non-out actors to play queer roles, and straight women “appropriating” gay male culture. These factors also include misogynistic and sensationalizing attitudes about female desire, long-held cultural biases against romance as a genre, both the celebration of and concern about the power of digital fandoms, and the evolving cultural role of celebrity in our contemporary moment.

The Heated Rivalry discourse sits at the fascinating nexus of these interconnected issues. When thinking and writing about the series, I am less interested in providing answers to one of the above questions than exploring the phenomenon of the proliferating discourse itself. I find myself returning to queer theorist Gayle Rubin’s work to help me think about how and why this show has created so much conversation.

Rubin’s tour-de-force 1984 article “Thinking Sex” explores how sexuality itself is a site of oppression. Western societies categorize and rank sexual acts: heterosexual, married, monogamous and procreative sex, she argues, are in the “charmed circle” of acceptability. All other types of sex fall outside of this circle. Institutions — the government, the family, the church, the media — reproduce the charmed circle and then marginalize and criminalize those who deviate from the sexual norm.

This hierarchy is not necessarily stable. Sex acts can flow into and out of the charmed circle over time. As Rubin writes, “The sexual system is not a monolithic, omnipotent structure. There are continuous battles over the definitions, evaluations, arrangements, privileges, and costs of sexual behavior.”

Sifting through all the Heated Rivalry think-pieces makes me wonder if the show has become another node in this long set of “continuous battles.” Perhaps the series generates so much discourse in part because it challenges some of our “definitions, evaluations, arrangements, privileges, and costs of sexual behavior.”

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Take, for example, the sensationalizing conversation about why straight women watch the show. These pieces discuss the psychology of female fans at length, reasoning that Heated Rivalry’s depiction of vulnerability between men disrupts norms of masculinity and heteronormativity and that its sex scenes are intimate, consensual, and devoid of the objectification of women. This may be true. But the fact that women enjoy watching sex on screen is hardly news. Why do we need to psychoanalyze straight women to come to that conclusion? Why wouldn’t they enjoy the show? And why does it matter if they do?

The fact that (ostensibly) straight women enjoy the gay sex scenes in Heated Rivalry might challenge our ideas about what heterosexuality is or means. Perhaps the fact that women are “frothing at the mouth feral” for Heated Rivalry messes with our “arrangement” or understanding of heterosexual behavior. Psychoanalyzing these women is one way to make sense of it, to place it neatly back into our social “arrangement.” But maybe we should allow it to shift our understanding of heterosexuality. Maybe it shows us that (hetero)sexuality is not so simple, rigid, or binary after all.

Rubin explores how moral panics and moments of “erotic hysteria” can “recodify the relations of sexuality.” In such moments, sexual and gender minorities are often the scapegoat for a pervasive cultural fear. While moral panics usually reproduce conservative ideologies about sex, perhaps other moments of “erotic hysteria” can allow us to “recodify the relations of sexuality” in a way that expands the charmed circle. Is the success of Heated Rivalry one such potential moment? Can all this discourse help us see how sexuality is more expansive and complex than existing categories allow for?

It’s worth noting that both straight and queer women have been the audience driving the romance genre, including M/M romance, for many decades. Much research explores historical and contemporary slash fanfiction as a site of cultural production for women of all sexualities. I talked to my friend Erique Zhang, an Assistant Professor of Digital Publics and Promotional Cultures at Simon Fraser University, about fujoshi, the term for a Japanese subculture of female readers and writers of manga and anime that center around queer male romance. The label fujoshi encompasses fans of Boy’s Love (BL) and yaoi, genres of queer male Japanese romance with distinct tropes. BL is a broader term for any romantic relationship between two male characters, often set in high school. Yaoi includes more explicit sex and pornographic elements.

“These women were creating media for themselves that allowed them to think about romance and love and sex in different ways from what was expected of them,” Zhang says. “The term fujoshi actually means ‘rotten woman,’ and my understanding is that it was originally used by men as a pejorative. But then these women reclaimed it for themselves and started using it as an identity, as a kind of source of pride, embracing, like, ‘yeah, we are rotten women. We’re not the women that you expect us to be.’”

If you’ve seen the term fujoshi or “fujo-out” on social media, this is likely why. The term “entered the English vocabulary, largely through Western fans of Japanese BL and yaoi, who also enjoyed reading these stories and consuming these media,” Zhang tells me. “It’s like a trend now…and has been having this resurgence because of Heated Rivalry. I think a lot of people are being more and more open about being fans of the genre now. I would not categorize Heated Rivalry as BL in the classic Japanese East Asian sense, because it is very much a Western Canadian piece of media that does not follow the same kinds of tropes. But I think a lot of fans of Heated Rivalry either have considered themselves to be fujoshi for a long time, or are now hearing other people call themselves fujoshi, and are discovering that term.”

Zhang is careful not to generalize about the genders and sexualities of all these fans or creators. As they put it, “experiences get flattened when the mainstream discourse is all about straight women.” Opening up the conversation to consider why people of all genders and sexualities enjoy gay erotica might help us explore the fluidity of gender and desire across the spectrum.

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“As a trans person, I grew up seeing BL and yaoi media, and these discourses about fujoshi culture were actually really formative to my own identity,” Zhang adds. “Yaoi was one of my earliest exposures to queer male media. As somebody who spent most of my early life, my adolescence and then early adulthood, identifying as a queer man, I had a complicated relationship [with it]. Because it was something that I actually saw myself in, but also was like, this isn’t fully how I see myself. I see it as a very Asian queer space. And then transitioning into a more femme identity, I kind of joke that I’ve been a fujoshi before I was even a woman.”

On social media, trans and queer creators and fans of M/M romance often reference fanfiction and fujoshi as important to their own processes of identity formation. In these stories, the sexual systems and hierarchies do not necessarily mirror those of our social world. The realm of erotic fiction and fantasy opens up spaces of possibility for both straight and LGBTQ readers and viewers to explore their own desires.

“Romance is a hopeful genre,” a friend told me recently. Fanfiction, erotica, and romance allow fans and creators to escape reality and enter into fantasy, to hope for a version of a better world. Perhaps Heated Rivalry generates so much discourse because of the power, danger, and necessity of this kind of hope. The hope that we might be able to leave behind the charmed circle, and every other violent and oppressive system, to “recodify the relations of sexuality” into a more liberatory form.