Why Are Women Obsessing Over Gay Hockey Smut?
The hottest TV show of the moment is a NSFW gay Canadian series about two male hockey rivals hooking up on the low. Heated Rivalry is like Challengers on ice, but with ten times more churro action and the viewer is Zendaya. It makes Heartstopper seem like Teletubbies. And it is already setting the hockey world ablaze. Written by director Jacob Tierney for the Canadian streaming service Crave, the first two episodes premiered on HBO Max last Friday, introducing American audiences to the epic situationship between Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams), shy Canadian captain of the Montreal Metros, and his brooding Russian counterpart, Ilya Romanov (Connor Storie) of the Boston Raiders. The story begins in 2008, before mainstream acceptance of queer relationships, and speeds through the years. Every so often, a match brings the nemeses to the same city, where they face off in the rink then disappear to a hotel room for kinky illicit sex.
The series is basically gay Canadian porn unleashed upon a ravenous American audience of queer men and women. (Yes, women!) It is not really about hockey. It is about watching hot, sweaty men torment each other in bed. There are reportedly three sex scenes per episode. In promo, lead actors Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie have made it apparent that the insane chemistry between them extends offscreen. ‘The other guy was good, but Connor felt like he was going to pin me down and f- - k me,’” Tierney recalled Williams telling him after their chemistry read. Overwhelmed? Let’s unpack.
So when does the gay sex start? pic.twitter.com/jEtZgPj5DE
— The Coke That Made Charli xcx Brave (@Neil_McNeil) November 30, 2025
Where did the series come from?
The show is adapted from the best-selling Game Changers series by Nova Scotia–based romance novelist Rachelle Goguen, who writes under the pen name Rachel Reid. A longtime hockey fan who briefly played herself as a kid, Goguen told me that the series’ concept had been gestating since she was a teenager in the ’90s: “I was just thinking that there must be a closeted player in the NHL, and how awful that would be for them. It was my dream of that player getting to come out and feel safe and fulfilled.” She didn’t necessarily intend to write into the male-male romance genre — “I didn’t realize there was a growing segment of traditionally published romance for these types of books” — but for research spoke to queer male friends and read first-person accounts from athletes in the Players Tribune. (She has been with her now-husband for over 20 years and declined to confirm or deny fan speculation about her sexuality.) Two weeks after Heated Rivalry’s premiere, the books have already sold out.
Who is its audience?
You might assume that Heated Rivalry’s rabid fandom is powered by the thirst of representation-hungry queer men, but women love the series equally intensely. The Game Changers fan base, and BookTok in general, is predominantly female. Director Jacob Tierney acknowledged as much in a recent interview with Teen Vogue: “I always said, ‘Once you film this, gay men will watch it, but we’ll watch anything with gay men in it’ … The secret fan base of this is women.” The popularity of the show represents the mainstreaming of “fujoshis,” or female fans of male-male romance, to put it simply. (The term roughly translates to “rotten girl” in Japanese; the gay media itself is known as “yaoi.”)
middle aged housewives all over canada about to be converted into fujoshi. the agenda is clear https://t.co/drsewf9h9E pic.twitter.com/7Nn9QKk578
— hot girl de pointe du lac (@pinkstape) November 25, 2025
Is it common for women to prefer male-male romance ?
Yes. A 2022 survey of AO3 fan-fiction readers found that m/m slash fiction — fictional stories shipping pop-culture figures like Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter — was the most popular story category; the majority of its readers and writers identified as cis women. Last year, Faye Keegan, the co-founder of Dipsea, revealed on TikTok that the erotic audiobook platform commonly receives requests from straight women for male-male stories.
There are many reasons for the preference. Goguen says that from talking to readers, “many women like to remove themselves from erotica, from sex, when they’re trying to enjoy something just for entertainment.” Gay-male romances offer women more distance from the cultural baggage of heterosexuality and conventional gender roles. (In 2025, it’s hard to convince women that being with a man constitutes a happy ending.) Plus, good chemistry is good chemistry!
Does it matter that the show is Canadian?
Let’s give our upstairs neighbors some credit. According to Goguen, in Canada, “you’re not really expecting a giant audience to begin with. Jacob Tierney can do pretty much whatever he wants here. That would not be the case if he was making something in Hollywood.”
Are the main actors queer?
That’s unclear, but Tierney doesn’t think that is relevant. He shut down questions about their sexualities in an interview with X-Tra. “You can’t ask questions like that when you’re casting, right? It’s actually against the law. So what you have to gauge is somebody’s enthusiasm and willingness to do the work. And that’s what’s so impressive about both of these guys is they came into this being like, ‘Yeah, we’re here to do this, and we are here to make this story feel authentic and to be as real as possible.’”
How gay is hockey, really?
There are still no openly out players in the National Hockey League, and in 2023 controversy erupted after some players refused to wear Pride-themed warm-up jerseys. But by the looks of it, it is about to get so much queerer. As it should.
How has the professional hockey world responded?
The NHL’s official X account appeared to acknowledge the series in a Thanksgiving graphic that used the Heated Rivalry font. That being said, NHL teams have courted BookTok fans before, but that strategy has backfired on them, so they might tread carefully.
What’s next?
New episodes are dropping every Friday on HBO. Goguen also tells me she’s working on a new hockey romance that’s slated to be announced early next year, though she is hesitant to reveal too much: “I change my mind all the time — I’ve canceled books in the past, so I’m just going to wait for 1,000 percent.”
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