Cultural pressure achieved a critical mass last week, so I watched the pilot episode of the gay hockey show. I watched it with my wife, who turned to me when it was over and said with a sigh: “We don’t have to talk about this. We can just move on from this.”
“I wish I could,” I replied. “But I have to write this essay for 1,251 people who may or may not want to read it.”
Heated Rivalry is, as I’m sure you know by now, the story of two NHL players who are covertly in love. Both the show and the romance novels it’s based on are popular in the extreme: the books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and the show’s non-athlete stars were selected as torch bearers for this year’s Winter Olympics.
The series is essentially softcore porn hastily stitched together with light suggestions of story. Shane and Ilya are rivals on the ice, but they have undeniable chemistry in bed…as illustrated by a detailed sex scene. Ilya is a preening jerk who taunts sensitive Shane in public, but really Ilya loves him…as illustrated by another detailed sex scene. They’re hypermasculine bros – except not really, not at all…as illustrated by an extremely detailed sex scene.
Which, okay, it’s a Harlequin romance: there are certain things we know to expect from the genre of steamy seductions and enemies-to-lovers plot arcs. Let the bodices – ahem, jerseys – rip, let all those feel-good dopamine and serotonin buttons get pushed. “Just let people enjoy things, Raf!” at least one of the 1,251 of you is thinking. Maybe.
But my aim isn’t to stop anyone from enjoying things. Nor is it to evaluate the literary quality of Heated Rivalry, nor to wonder whether author Rachel Reid has planned what she’ll say when her kids eventually read her books about hockey players moaning uncontrollably in passion for each other1. There will be no inveighing against erotica here. People’s preferences are their own; it makes about as much difference to me as someone liking the Toronto Maple Leafs over the Boston Bruins.
My aim instead is to talk about archetypes of love in fiction, the way books of all genres will adopt certain well-worn romantic tropes to pick at with the obsession of magpies trying to snatch shiny baubles from a sewer drain. Heated Rivalry’s obsession is gay men’s love – specifically, how they must be vulnerable with each other and risk social ease in order to maintain that love. These hockey players act more like pining princesses than twentysomething gay men in the age of Grindr, a fact that’s been astutely observed by actual gay men. These are gay men written for the female gaze. The ideal reader of such a novel? The fujoshi.
The term means “rotten girl” or “fallen woman” in Japanese, and it refers to an all-female subgroup of romance appreciators interested in steamy stories about gay men. The gay men in these stories are almost never like gay men in real life, but that’s not the point. These are high-flown fantasies of secret kisses and forbidden love, often involving a willowy, submissive man being transfixed and/or pursued by a charismatic, dominant one. The willowy man often serves as a proxy for the fujoshi, allowing her to adore men while avoiding the many degradations of female heterosexuality and anxieties about her own body.
At base, this is harmless fantasy: the remit of cosplay conventions and Tumblr weirdos, people enjoying things. But when this infiltrates the cultural mainstream – from HBO to the Booker Prize shortlist – it’s probably worth asking ourselves why. What more fundamental desires about agency, assertiveness, and care are being reflected by tons of women writing about tender, stumbling love between gay men? What is it that’s so difficult about being a woman and desiring men, or desiring at all? Why does it feel easier to, say, write hundreds of pages of fanfiction about K-Pop stars or develop parasocial obsessions with the maybe-gay-IRL romantic lives of the hockey show actors than to honestly reckon with the vagaries of what one wants?
Because there’s something like armor in the fujoshi sensibility, a sense of vulnerability twice-removed. No, she’s not writing about herself: she’s writing about boys. And when she does this, she doesn’t have to be herself at all: she can be one of the boys.
It’s easier this way, you see, because toxic masculinity, patriarchy etc. etc. Because, as biotech CEO Cate Hall writes in an essay about the joys of taking testosterone, “men play life on easy.”
So easy, so free, so chill, to be just another guy in a world ruled by guys. Right?
In 2015, I sped through Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life with the ceaseless appetite of any rotten girl-voyeur. Poor, beautiful, willowy Jude St. Francis! A genius lawyer succumbing to the memories of his unspeakable trauma, only haltingly capable of receiving the selfless affection of handsome actor Willem Ragnarsson – so exquisitely bittersweet! How will frail, trauma-addled Jude ever prevail over his broken body, his compulsive need to self-harm? Will the tender bond between these two men – and the platonic-but-nevertheless tender bonds among their gay friend group – withstand the tests of success, addiction, and pride?
Nearly 1,000 pages of love, longing, and sexiness unfolded on the Lispenard Street of Yanagihara’s Booker-shortlisted novel. Bird-like Jude’s past was revealed to be tragic, and then even more tragic. Willem’s handsomeness and dogged desire to save his lover made me imagine him as a blend between Bradley Cooper and romcom-era Matthew McConaughey. His and Jude’s love was real, and almost curative – but alas, too extraordinary to last!
The novel’s sentiment, combined with its lush descriptions of downtown apartments and expensive food, made it a true treat for upmarket fujoshi readers everywhere. The delightfully bookish singer-songwriter Dua Lipa is squarely within its fandom. She writes: “It challenged everything I thought I knew about love.”
On Dua’s podcast, Hanya Yanagihara said this when the singer asked why she decided to write a novel about male friendship:
“It wasn’t that men didn’t feel vulnerability, shame or sorrow. It was that we live in a culture that doesn’t allow them to express those things…What happens to half of our population when they are not allowed to express the fundamental human qualities that make us vulnerable? Where does that shame and anger and sorrow go?”
Now here’s Harlequin executive editor Stacy Boyd on the mass appeal of the Heated Rivalry series: “They’re very masculine, in the sense of macho, aggressive, strong, fast, competitive…and then you have romance, and you’re bringing out that vulnerability.”
Bear with me, but…is it only men who struggle to be vulnerable? Indeed, where does all that shame and anger and sorrow go when any of us aren’t allowed to express them? Do we let it tunnel inwards and eat us alive? Or do we search for socially admissable expressions of these emotions? Say you’re a gay woman who feels awkward and rotten and fallen and wants to play life on easy mode as a man. Perhaps as a man, your anger will be rendered more acceptable, your desires more intelligible, your sorrow more profound. Perhaps the things that were embarrassing about you before will make you seem interesting now, even a little dignified.
As a man, I published a novel that was a gay love story between two con men. There’s little of the erotic in it, but it does feature a small, willowy narrator pining for a sociopathic Adonis who has and discards him at will. Theirs is a twisted, tragic, withholding kind of love. The narrator is named Ezra Green, but in early drafts his name was much closer to my own.
Is there not shame, sorrow, anger, regret and tenderness involved for anyone in having complicated wants, especially in our age of deep plane facelifts and the gooniverse? It’s naïve to think that men have completely cornered the market on suppressing vulnerability – as naïve as it is to think that women have cornered the market on claiming (and weaponizing) victimhood. Sometimes the world feels too harsh a place to be the way you’d like to be. Sometimes what you’d like to be feels too embarrassing. You would rather keep these things under wraps than risk the sting of rejection, as hockey star Shane Hollander does with evidence of his homosexuality.
Rachel Reid once nursed dreams of playing professional hockey, but she would never make it to the NHL. “I always wanted to be one of the boys,” she told the New York Times. “I thought learning about hockey would make them respect me, which was ridiculous.”
Reading this, I wanted to shake young Reid by the shoulders: Why, Rachel? Why seek acceptance in such a hopelessly barren place? But I’ve read enough love stories to know the answer: sometimes we want things that are forbidden. Sometimes we want them so badly that we’ll go to extreme lengths to get them.
There’s the extraordinary tragic wonder of it all, the inevitable exquisite hurt of desire. But pain us though it may, we needn’t resign ourselves to the so-called “cruelty” of wanting’s optimism. We can want something and then stand back and learn something from it, grow and evolve because of it. Hold it close and let it go. Let the whole experience remind us that we’re very much alive.
Ah well I suppose I just wondered that aloud, haven’t I?
One of my favorite essays by you!
"Bear with me, but…is it only men who struggle to be vulnerable? Indeed, where does all that shame and anger and sorrow go when any of us aren’t allowed to express them? Do we let it tunnel inwards and eat us alive? Or do we search for socially admissable expressions of these emotions?"
Reminds me of all the content I see about books with "strong women." As opposed to...what? All the books about weak women? ALL the books are about strong women! Is gay romance where we (the straight women) must turn for vulnerability?
I really enjoyed this essay; I feel as though it does a really empathetic job of capturing what draws people to this content.
To be honest, A Little Life was and is a favorite book; in some ways, it captures trauma well and there's something heartening about its picture of queer friends growing old together. But it's also a least favorite book of mine, largely because of the wish-fulfillment aspect of it. In some ways, it weirdly idealizes abuse, and it blurs over identity issues. I think part of the experience of being an abused guy is tied to the isolation of the experience (ie, 1 in 6 survivors are men, but there's so much stigma involved and so much pressure for men to be strong that it gets discussed very rarely--which is not to say that the experience is easier for female survivors, just that there are different challenges). It's interesting how Jude's experience of being a guy who's a survivor never comes up. Maybe a good point of comparison would be the TV show Baby Reindeer, which actively engages with the gendered nature of these things in what I felt was a fairly successful manner.
Generally, though, I really liked this essay because I feel it draws out how sad it is that there's so much shame and fear around desire. Society can be terribly cruel to people, often women especially (see terms like "pickme girl"), for wanting things. I have my own complex feelings around the female gaze in gay fiction (ranging from "I know a fair number of gay guys who love these books" to "some of this is pretty creepy/objectifying and bad for wider LGBT representation"), but I appreciate how this essay really looked at it in a kind way, relating to both societal stigma and self-hatred. Thank you for the read! :)