Heated Rivalry Proves Hockey Has Basically Always Been Gay

Rachel Reid is enjoying levels of success most Canadian writers only dream of—all because she was brave enough to ask, “What if Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin were in love? And have been having passionate sex throughout the entirety of their careers?”

While countless outlets have expressed shock at the show’s success—Variety called it “The Year’s Biggest TV Surprise,” while a New York Times headline touted that its popularity has “Surprised Even TV Executives”—few things make more sense to me than the marriage of hockey and gay sex that is driving the success of the show.

One of hockey’s best-kept secrets is that it is one of the gayest sports on earth. Lesbians already knew this, but it’s gay the other way too. I know because I grew up gay and playing hockey in a hockey household, in a hockey town, in a hockey culture—in a nation whose identity rests more heavily on hockey than perhaps anything else.

I was raised in locker rooms and rinks where I became familiar with all the ways hockey culture worships boys and men. When a hockey boy demonstrates skill or promise, other hockey boys will call him a “beauty.” There is admiration, respect, and desire for those young men who excel in the sport, and often, it verges on homoerotic worship: they’ll talk about the size of the player or what he can do with his hands. Skill and virility are read into one another: if a player succeeds, they’ll say he “has wheels” (gets girls) or that “he fucks!”

Then there are the things that happen in the showers or elsewhere in the locker room—the hazing, the groping, the constant barrage of homoerotic innuendo—which are less about sexual desire than they are about power. In this way, it is difficult to parse hockey’s homophobia from its homoeroticism. Functionally, they are one and the same.

When, in my adolescence, I realized I was gay, it was in large part due to the hockey boys in my high school, who, though I was not on their team, sometimes still let their hands wander around my waistband. And yet, I knew the locker room was not safe for a kid like me. I stopped playing. Everyone I knew growing up in Whitby, Ontario, was socialized to be attracted to hockey players in some way or another. The same can be said for nearly every corner of the country.

It comes as no surprise, then, that a TV show that depicts a tender love story between two star-crossed and muscular, young hockey players at the top of their game is going to be a raging commercial success. Heated Rivalry transforms hockey’s homoeroticism into real gay love, while making its homophobia something that can be overcome. Reid’s intervention in hockey culture is less a pivot than an explicit realization of what the sport has always been and, more importantly, what it can be.

Read more from our Heated Rivalry Series:

• Heated Rivalry Holds Up a Mirror to My Deepest Self • Heated Rivalry Is Millennial Optimism Porn • Just How Big Is Heated Rivalry? Really Big • The Queer History Behind the Heated Rivalry Soundtrack • The US Is Trying to Annex the Ultra-Canadian Heated Rivalry