Heated Rivalry is the craze right now. I attended a rave in early February 2026 that was tied in theme to the show from Canada. Heated Rivalry, which features Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams as the main characters, broke norms of television in many places by being, for lack of a better term, openly gay. Many on social media have praised it for its queer representation in a traditionally homophobic space while others have gone after it for the decision to pick non-homosexual actors, though that opens a whole other can of worms about assuming peoples preferences. Today, though, we will be talking about Heated Rivalry, its effects on the athletic community, and how this kind of representation is vital to the LGBTQ+ cause.
One of the biggest talking points conservatives and many anti-LGBTQ+ individuals have stated is how this is normalizing and “shoving” the LGBTQ+ agenda onto their views. While it seems like that to many conservatives, it’s the lack of reading deeper between the lines that brings us to this type of representation being so important. I will say it here and I will say it again later, but something anti-LGBTQ+ individuals need to understand is that normalizing representation is the first step to normalizing the very community. This kind of representation was a breakthrough in the 1969 film “The Gay Deceivers”, which features two men attempting to hide from a military draft by pretending to be gay, though the end twist of this movie is quite comedic. This film was the first of its kind in Hollywood and one of the lead actors even assisted in rewriting the script to make the movie less homophobic and more stereotypical. This shift in Hollywood treatment of openly gay actors and films that embraced LGBTQ+ characters was actually making a lot of progress at the time.
Fast forward to the era of sweaty gay hockey players; progress has stagnated. Media representation has halted and, at times, even slowed down. Anti-queer folks have claimed that inclusion of queer people in media is a form of indoctrination into the community, leading to conservatives bullying and even outright calling for laws to be made against things like drag story-time and calling students by their preferred names or pronouns. Yet, the anti-queer crowd still insists that representation in media is too much. So when Heated Rivalry came out just a few years after “Red, White, and Royal Blue” in winter of 2025, the same crowd who says that there is enough queer representation is now saying this is too much and that it does not belong on the screens of people around the world. These individuals are constantly saying on social media that there is too much normalization of these kinds of representations.
Now, Heated Rivalry is just one such example, but it is a very good one to bring up in this case. During the civil rights era, black individuals in media was not common and, when Hollywood began adopting black individuals in films, backlash started almost immediately. The very same lines, excuses, and protests came up, which forced black media creators to always work twice as hard to get half as far. The very same rhetoric used against black media is now being used against the LGBTQ+ community and not enough people are standing up.
If anti-queer individuals get their way, representation world-wide will receive detrimental damage, setting back years of progress. Even Pope Leo XIV has called on people to treat the LGBTQ+ community with respect as brothers and sisters, not as enemies or demons. You know you’re in the wrong when the Pope is siding with the LGBTQ+ community. Heated Rivalry is our way of normalizing this representation because the very people we see in Heated Rivalry are normal. As a gay man myself, I do what all of you do. I pay taxes, I go to work, classes, homework, have hobbies, and even like baseball, a historically very divisive sport. I am, by all means, normal. So there should be nothing wrong with normalizing queer representation in media if we have the same kind of representation for heterosexual individuals.
Queer folks have been around for centuries with queer activity having been seen and studied extensively in nature with some animals even being able to switch genders or be both at the same time. Seeing two men truly love each other on screen should not be a basis for your hatred. It is the kind of representation closeted individuals need. If the world treated LGBTQ+ individuals the same as heterosexual individuals, this would not be a conversation. Unfortunately, we have to have this conversation because the fact is that we are not treated the same as everyone else. In reality, though, that is all we want. That is all Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander want: equal treatment. That’s all any gay man, trans woman, and queer person wants – to go out into the streets and simply walk around without the fear of someone treating them differently and aggressively simply because they don’t like the opposite gender or want to have a pronoun that doesn’t match their gender assigned at birth.
Heated Rivalry is the best representation of queer individuals that I have seen in a long time. Especially because it takes place in a setting that is traditionally not welcoming of LGBTQ+ individuals. One day, I would like to be able to walk into a baseball game where the Dodgers win their tenth world series in a row and see a team member hug his husband in front of the crowd without the need to come out or be afraid of not being accepted. One day, I would like to hear my daughter come home and tell us she has a girlfriend without her needing to tell us she is gay or bi. This representation in media is vital to the LGBTQ+ community’s message of unity and normalization because, at the end of the day, this is normal. Normalization is the first step of normalization and, if you can’t take that or feel sensitive about it, maybe it might be time to rethink who the snowflakes really are. Go Boston Raiders and, of course, congrats to the New York Admirals on their win.