Revolutionary? Retrograde.

I know my life now as an older married gay man is pretty far away from current gay culture, but I feel like I’m being gaslighted by the media response to this show. “Sweet, sexy, happy, love story”? The show I watched was none of these things. It had a few sweet moments and I know a lot of people found it very sexy (I didn’t at all, but different strokes, as it were).

But happy? The whole plot is driven by the homophobia of men’s sports, a culture the two main characters have devoted their lives to, where how they are seen by their peers and fans gives their lives meaning and purpose. For that reason they don’t see coming out as a serious option. The stress, their anxiety, are palpable. Their “relationship” consists of a few sexual encounters over a period of years, accompanied by uncertainty of the other’s feelings and intense fear of disclosure. Apparently the risk makes the sex extremely hot, but I wouldn’t say any of it adds up to “happy gay couple.”

“If you want to understand why this show has become our community’s equivalent of a cultural earthquake, the answer is that watching a gay couple be mildly boring and in love is still radical.”

These characters are not a couple, nor are they gay. (And the TV sports visual style doesn’t signal “boring” to me.) These two young men explicitly reject a gay identity. One of them, reluctantly at the end of the show, uses the word to come out to his parents.  The other specifically rejects it.

I’m probably attributing a narrative coherence to the story that it lacks by saying that if you hope for or expect anything from the main characters it’s that they will come out in the end. The strangest and most frustrating aspect of the show is that, in the middle of the series, we take a two-episode (out of six) diversion to follow a peripheral character, another famous hockey player, who falls in love, which leads him to come out very publicly. It’s a moving, if trite, moment, but it’s the only instance of this kind of bravery. The two main characters, in the end, decide together to stay in the closet. For their careers, or for some vague “privacy” reasons, I can’t remember exactly. By that time, I actually was kind of bored with them.

I don’t think it is meant to, but one thing I like about the show is that it pushes against the “things are so much better for gay men now” platitude. Heated Rivalry tacitly accepts the fact that straight men and mainstream culture are still casually homophobic — a homophobia that is especially intense in the world of men’s sports — that coming out is still much too risky for many men to even consider, and that, for most people, that’s just the way the world is and not even really very interesting.

This show, ostensibly about and for gay people, just accepts our homophobic world as a fact, doesn’t use it for narrative tension or plot, doesn’t question it.