Heated Rivalry's Closet and Mine

I'd forgotten what my former life was like. HBO's hit show reminded me.

Like a lot of people, I initially expected to hate Heated Rivalry, the sensation-of-the-moment about two closeted hockey players. And then I loved it. It broke my heart. And, to my surprise, it awoke memories of an entire life I used to live, but had since quite forgotten.

The premise of the six-episode series, based on a series of popular books by Rachel Reid, is simple: two star hockey players are outwardly bitter rivals, but secretly lovers. (This essay has spoilers for the characters’ development arcs but not plot points.) And the first two episodes largely conform to expectations. The guys are young, sexy, and athletic. The sex is hot, and furtive; both young men know that their careers would be ruined if their secret became public. It’s fun.

But the show really deepens as it goes on. One of the men, the All-Canadian-Boy Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams), is clearly in love with the other, the tough-guy Russian Ilya Gregoryevich (Connor Storrie), whose feelings are less clear. It’s hard to tell which closet is more painful: the overall closet that the two men share, or Hollander’s repression of his feelings for Ilya. You can just see him wishing that he could say “I love you,” but of course he can’t. It’s just sex, right? Just fun?

Fans will immediately recognize this as part of a genre: stories about gay men written by (mostly) straight women. Heartstopper, which spawned the hit Netflix series, is a good example. The Interview with a Vampire series is another. So is a lot of slash fiction. Much digital ink has been spilled about this phenomenon, and it’s not my focus here, but there are characteristics common to a lot of this work, including an intense emotional yearning, with one of the male characters acting as a kind of prism (or fantasy) of feminine-masculinity. The genre has more in common with romance than pornography: there are no throbbing members, and many throbbing hearts.

For myself, as I’ll describe in a moment, I found the closeted gays of Heated Rivalry quite convincing, and the series was show-run by a gay man. But not everyone agrees. Some gay critics have complained that the series is set in the late 2010s, when gay marriage was already legal in the United States, but the repression the characters experience seems like a relic from decades earlier. (They also wanted even more explicit sex.)

This, I think, misunderstands the socially constructed, culturally dependent nature of the closet. Sure, to be gay in 2018 was no big deal — even, in liberal circles, socially desirable. (Now it’s just boring.) But not in professional hockey. Not in Russia (which is dealt with in the show, as Ilya has even more at stake than Shane does). And not in subcultures, athletic or religious or otherwise, in which masculinity is defined in conventional, narrow ways, and in which coming out means blowing up life as you know it. That is still true today.

And it’s my story as well. After some fits and starts, I came out “for good” in 2001, when I was thirty years old — late, both in gay years (for young twinks, age thirty is “gay death”) and in my own life. Why did I wait? Sure, 2001 was a lot more homophobic than 2015 or 2025, but there were plenty of gay and queer subcultures around; wasn’t the 1950s. So why?

There’s as much Heated Rivalry fan art as you’d expect. This one is by @snowarox .

There are many interlocking reasons. Some of it was uncertainty about my own sexuality — on a conscious level, I really did believe I was bisexual, and it took the failure of an otherwise beautiful relationship with a woman to finally convince me that I wasn’t. (Let me emphasize that bisexuality is real for many people; it just wasn’t in my case.) And if I could have a family, social acceptance, and all the dreams that came along with it — well, wouldn’t that be better?

Of course, intrinsic in that framing is some intense internalized homophobia. Which I had plenty of. I grew up in Florida in the 80s; ‘faggot’ was the insult of choice. And in the 90s, AIDS was still a devastating plague, and I had absorbed a lot of false, harmful narratives about gay people being superficial, or depraved, or whatever. From this vantage point, I’m grateful for having had to unlearn these beliefs, because doing so taught me how even deep-seated beliefs that everyone seems to share can also be wrong, even bigoted. But for a while, I believed all of them.

Part of it, also, was religion. I was raised in a conventional conservative-Jewish home, which came with its own moderate but clear homophobia, and then took on a semi-orthodox religious practice in my twenties. This, too, had a mix of motivations. I loved the the rich spirituality that can really only be found in traditional religious communities: the devotion, the prayer life, the seriousness of study, the mysticism, the rich sociality of Shabbat dinners and holidays. As I wrote about recently, “religion with a lower-case r,” that is, liberal religion, struggles to deliver the juiciness that comes in these traditional containers. I loved that.

Perhaps less consciously, this thick spiritual sociality provided an acceptable conduit for eros – not sexually, but relationally. Especially before marriage, traditional Jewish life is filled with intense homosocial relationships (I wrote about that twenty years ago). The friendships are deep, even intimate (again, not sexually). There’s a shared intimacy to prayer and spiritual practice. And there’s the eros of spirituality itself; one needn’t be a follower of Sabbetai Zevi to feel the affinity, if not identity, between sex and spirit. I still love this sublimated-eros (or unsublimated-spirituality, if you prefer). As readers know, it’s a big part of my life. But in those early years, it was like a lifeblood.

Maybe traditional religion was itself a kind of closet. I was aware of my desires for men — the pornucopia of the internet arrived in my mid-twenties — but by living in the way I did, I existed in a different world from gay people. Or so I thought.

What I’d forgotten, until Heated Rivalry reminded me, was how painful, stressful, and life-draining all of this was. It’s funny that I’d forgotten it, since I wrote endlessly about it after I came out. My best-selling book, God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality, is in large part about the deceit and repression that comes with the ‘closet.’ Sharing my story was a big part of my activism for a decade, grounded in core religious values of truthfulness, love, and empathy. The painful dance of longing and sublimation even runs through my recent short story collection. Yet there was something about seeing these old feelings expressed and evoked on screen that brought them alive in a way they hadn’t been for many years.

As the years stretch on in Heated Rivalry, Shane in particular can no longer bear the deception, loneliness, and self-loathing. Everyone is looking up to him — he’s the hero with the Reebok endorsements while Ilya is the lovable villain — but Shane knows he’s a liar. Even when he does begin to come out, he apologizes more for lying than for being gay.

I went through that for years. There’s a reason that the last person I came out to was my mother; in addition to the gay shame, there was the shame of having lied to her all that time, especially during my relationship with a woman. Sure, I did think that I could be bisexual, but I never told her that; it was only when the began nagging me about starting to date again (after all, she was a Jewish mother) that I finally told her.

I also knew, as Shane and Ilya do, that coming out does have consequences. (For no-spoiler reasons, I’m leaving out an important subplot of the series, so you’ll need to watch to get the whole story.) It took me years to internalize that it would not mean the end of my relationship to the sacred — quite the contrary, as I wrote about back then, fact coming out was the beginning of my spiritual life, not the end of it. But it was the end of my life in that traditional religious bubble. I had to be willing to let it go.

None of this is part of my life anymore, and hasn’t been for many years. In this second Trump era, I am newly reminded of homophobia, and of how many people in this country think my family is an abomination that should be legally invalidated. But, most of the time, I’m a gay dad in a liberal suburb, and I’m a white, cisgender, privileged gay dad at that. I processed my internalized homophobia for years in therapy, I started not one but two queer Jewish nonprofits, I wrote the gay book, and I’ve had many, many Body Electric and Radical Faerie and other way-out-there queer spirituality experiences. I don’t feel repressed, I don’t feel like I liar, I don’t feel like God hates me in any way. These days, my healing looks like forgetting I’d ever been sick.

Of course, that lost decade of sexual adulthood (not to mention adolescence) leaves permanent traces. People don’t understand how painful it is for queer and trans folks to lead fake lives, desperately afraid of disclosure at any moment, depriving oneself of the possibility of true and honest love. I’d even forgotten (or repressed?) how hard it was for me, since it’s been so long since I last felt this way. But these political decisions — the ‘War on Woke’, the attempt to eradicate transgender identity, the removal of rainbow crosswalks and ships named after gay heroes — these things have immediate personal and spiritual consequences. I know wokeness can be annoying sometimes, but the war on queer people is a war against our humanity.

Like a lot of older gays, I sometimes envy the total no-big-dealness that many queer Zoomers experience, and I can appreciate the puzzlement with which some gays look at these celebrity hockey players and scoff at their angst. But that would be a mistake. A long time ago, being gay, and hiding it all the time in constant fear of being discovered, was definitely a big deal for me.

As it is for Shane and Ilya. I won’t give away the ending of Heated Rivalry, but let’s just say that one of the episodes (you know which one if you’ve watched it) made me cry on my sofa like an idiot. Watching Shane was like watching myself from twenty-five years ago (a much more buff, rich, talented, and athletic version of myself anyway). I could feel his yearning, his terror of confessing his true feelings and losing his relationship with Ilya, his inability to keep lying to everyone, his sense of being a fraud.

It was painful to watch, in a good way. And I had forgotten all of this. I’m grateful to Heated Rivalry for helping me remember.

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That was a pleasure to write. To my paid subscribers: I wanted to capitalize on this wave of hype — Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen talked about the series on New Years Eve — so I’m putting this post up today instead of Monday. This counts as next week!

Some other Substack reading:

Here’s a great take on the success of Heated Rivalry by the redoubtable Michelangelo Signorile .

Erik Davis did a wonderful memoiristic take on his Christian phase - still highly weird, of course. Kind of pairs well with my mini-memoir on my Jewish phase here.

Of the many worst-of-2025 lists I read this week, my favorite is Robert Wright’s ‘Nonzero Awards’ (“Most Countries Bombed During the Holiday Season” “Most Adroit Playing of the Neurodivergence Card” etc.)

And Paul Krugman did a great, schadenfreudiche analysis of the decline of the Heritage Foundation as presaging the decay of MAGA. Now that’s optimism.

Thanks for reading and for tagging the stars and creators of Heated Rivalry when you share this post. ;-)