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I love that Heated Rivalry girlies are bringing their enthusiasm for the show to the real world, and engaging with the actual sport of hockey. NHL ticket sales are up 40% since the show premiered (despite the fact that the league doesn’t really deserve the audience), and the “Heated Rivalry” tags on social media are inundated with questions about the women’s hockey teams at the Olympics. As someone who once wrote an Autostraddle column designed to get more lesbians into the WNBA by focusing on dating drama and fashion rather than basketball stats, I’m not a sports purist. I believe that part of what makes sports great is that they have many entryways into fandom. 

The problem, however, is that real life is not a romance novel, and the athletes in these leagues are not fictional characters. In their enthusiasm to see their favorite show reflected in the real world, some fans are behaving in ways that feel all kinds of icky.

I’m not talking about the trend of fans showing up to NHL games and yelling “Kiss!” at athletes skating around the boy aquarium. I actually love this. I do not think it is a form of sexual harassment. As long as it’s not aimed at specific players, I think it's good fun. My reasoning comes down to power dynamics. When women and queer people enter a space that is culturally straight and masculine — especially when that league has a history of players not supporting Pride Nights, and has some of the highest numbers of Republican-voting players in pro sports — there is something subversive about cheering for and promoting homosexual behavior. 

The NHL has actively alienated women and queer people over the years, and only reversed course after realizing how lucrative they could be. And if you’re going to court that audience, they’re going to show up as their full selves and yell “kiss” at a group of largely straight, at least partially homophobic players, and I think that’s beautiful.

For the record, Heated Rivalry star and former pro hockey player Harrison Browne clearly agrees with me, as evidenced by his Instagram story, so I’m taking that as validation from an expert that I am correct.

No, the icky fan behavior I’m talking about is a controversial fandom dynamic called “IRL shipping,” in which real people are shipped as if they are fictional characters. IRL shipping has become a problem with a segment of the Heated Rivalry fandom, whether it's invasively speculating if Connor Storrie (who plays Ilya Rozanov) and Francois Arnaud (who plays Scott Hunter) are dating, or threatening Arnaud for what they perceive as him having taken Storrie away from Hudson Williams (who plays Shane Hollander), his on-screen love interest. The harassment has gotten so bad that actors have had to make statements begging fans to stop.

“When you're in a minority community and the representation feels always inadequate, whoever arises either as openly queer or is attributed that identity by fans, those people become disproportionately important to queer fandoms because there are fewer people to start with,” Eve Ng, an associate professor at Ohio University in the School of Media Arts and Studies and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, told me last year for Vogue. “Certain fandoms around these queer imagined relationships have an intensity and obsessiveness that often exceeds straight ‘shippers.’”

Hockey, in particular, has had a number of issues with unwanted sexualization of its players, even outside of Heated Rivalry's lens. A few years ago, NHL teams had to stop posting crossover content aimed at BookTok audiences when players and their wives felt they were being subjected to "sexual objectification," and complained about fans being inappropriate and harassing them. 

"What doesn't sit with me is when your desires come with sexual harassment, inappropriate comments, and the fact that, with the internet, we can normalize behavior that would never be OK if we flipped the genders around to a guy doing this to a female athlete," Felicia Wennberg, wife of San Jose Sharks player Alex Wennberg, said at the time. 

And while I don’t necessarily agree that the objectification of straight men by women is comparable to the reverse — largely due to the gendered power dynamics I mentioned above — I do think that a queer show like Heated Rivalry sheds light on the discussion. Especially because the overwhelming number of people who are active in Heated Rivalry fandom are straight women who are projecting their own desires and cultural norms onto queer spaces in ways that contribute to harm.

Plenty has been written about what drives straight women to MLM romance (a desire for non-threatening versions of masculinity; relationships that remove the patriarchal dynamic inherent in their own, but still centering men as objects of desire; their own internalized homophobia keeping them from seeking out and connecting with sapphic stories, etc.) But that fandom becomes toxic when straight women — who accept and cheer on-screen queerness — seem to struggle with the idea that actors who play those queer characters may also have IRL queer identities. They play-act allyship while instead fetishizing queerness.

These fans “love watching Connor [Storrie] kiss men on screen, but bristle at the idea that he might not want to kiss women like them in real life,” Miranda Vidak wrote on Instagram. “What they want is to insert themselves into a scripted fantasy of their own imagination — without respecting his autonomy or life choices the way fans should.”

Queer (or potentially queer) athletes have long been objects of unwanted projection and fetishization. For example, a fan screenshotting two players sitting on Team USA women’s hockey bench and saying, “Do we think these two are in a 10-year secret situationship?” But those players are team captain Hilary Knight, who is publicly in a longtime relationship with Olympic speed skater Brittany Bowe, and Kelly Pannek, who (as far as I can tell) has never talked publicly about her personal life. 

So no, I don’t think they’re in a 10-year secret situationship. 

It’s not necessary to speculate randomly about sexuality when there are so many openly queer women in women's hockey and other sports. There are wives on Team Canada! There are fiances playing on opposing teams! Two former rival captains for Team USA and Team Canada are now married with children after quietly dating for many years! If athletes want to talk about their personal lives, they will. We do not need to write speculative fanfiction about them.

There is a difference between sending a joke to your group chat about opposing team captains dating and posting it publicly to a social media platform. Parasocial and obsessive levels of fandom have always existed, but they used to be confined to smaller fan communities and message boards. Now, these conversations have broken containment. “Those kinds of conflicts that used to just be happening on Tumblr somewhere are now happening in the mentions of the actors on social media,” Mel Stanfill, an associate professor of English at the University of Central Florida and the author of Fandom Is Ugly, told Slate recently. “Those distinctions between spaces have gotten really blurry.”

Coming out has real stakes. While many (again, mostly straight) fans of the show think Heated Rivalry had a happy ending, I believe they're missing the point. When Ilya and Shane drive off together after coming out to Shane’s parents, they aren’t heading into a happily ever after. They’re going back to the cottage to continue hiding their relationship from the world. Hudson Williams, who plays Shane, said as much in an interview.

“It’s still bittersweet,” Williams told Variety. “A lot of people have said that’s a very happy ending, but I’m like, ‘This isn’t a straight story.’ This is not the happy ending because they’re still in the closet. They’re not coming out to Reebok, they’re not coming out to anyone. They got caught. It looks more like forgiveness than pride.”

Heated Rivalry exists in a fictional universe, but one that is based on the real homophobia of men’s sports. The players are closeted for their own safety and because they have to be. It’s deeply sad.

The world of men’s sports still is not safe for queer people, and queer men, in particular. Olympic skier Gus Kenworthy recently told the New Yorker that after he came out as gay, the head coach messaged the other members of the slope team and said, essentially, "Hey, I’m sure everyone saw Gus’s announcement. We’re super happy for him, but I just wanted to drop a note. If any of you aren’t comfortable sharing a room with him now, let me know so we can make sure that everyone’s accommodated.” That experience is part of the reason Kenworthy left the U.S. team for Great Britain.

After a wave of post-Heated Rivalry coming out stories, many of which were celebrated by fans who touted the show as a turning point for men’s sports, a couple was assaulted in their home following their viral proposal on a soccer pitch.

Even in figure skating, in which many openly queer men compete, homophobia still exists. U.S. men’s skater Ilia Malinin, who is considered the best skater in the world (and who nicknamed himself the “quad god”), made homophobic comments about masculinity and other male figure skaters two years ago that prompted U.S. Figure Skating to send him to sensitivity training. Yet, because he shares a name with a fictional queer character, fans of the Heated Rivalry have been shipping him and wondering who his biggest rival is.

Malinin made the comments when he was 18 years old. I am not saying that people don't have room to grow and change. What I am saying is that projecting a “heated rivalry” onto him is problematic. 

The stakes for queer athletes are particularly high as right-wing fascism gains prominence in many countries around the world, including (and especially) the U.S. Queer people threaten the dominant patriarchal systems meant to control and oppress us, and at the moment, the backlash against people who deviate from the status quo is only getting worse.

Heated Rivalry goes out of its way to depict Russia's repressiveness, and the consequences Ilya could face if he returns to his home country and its anti-LGBTQ+ laws. Meanwhile, Malinin wears laces gifted to him by Russian hockey player Alex Ovechkin. Despite the fact that Ilya is very loosely based on Ovechkin, the real Ovechkin is a huge supporter of Putin and the Russian regime. 

So no, I don’t want to imagine him in a secret situationship with his biggest rival. Skewing athletes' real-life actions and choices usually does more harm than good — if not by giving athletes unwanted attention, then by helping them skirt accountability.

There are many valid ways to enjoy sports, including watching on-field action in order to heighten your enjoyment of off-field storylines. But being a responsible sports fan requires viewing athletes as whole people who exist in the context of their own lives and the sports they play. They do not exist to be used as objects by fans who want to escape into a feel-good fantasy. 

If you’re looking for a real life romance novel, read the stories of athletes who have felt comfortable giving us a glimpse into their personal lives, and be grateful that they’ve chosen to share that part of themselves with the public. Otherwise, you’re perhaps better off picking up another romance novel and getting your fix that way, rather than perpetuating harm onto people.

This newsletter was edited by Louis Bien.