It’s getting heated.

If you like Heated Rivalry, you’ll love The Front Runner. More on that in a moment, but first, a reaction to the show. 

I’m not going to talk about my experience of the show, mostly because I am already dehydrated and choose not to trigger a weepfest in a coffee shop. I haven’t been so tear-triggered since Brokeback Mountain–I still can’t hear the opening four notes of the movie’s theme without instantly crying. It’s Pavlovian. Like most queer narratives that preceded it, though, Brokeback conformed to the unfortunate pattern of not making it through the plot without a queer character getting bashed, emotionally traumatized, publicly humiliated, or killed. So those four notes carry with them not just the joy of seeing boys like me on the silver screen or the particular delight of Heath and Jake, um, shall we say, improvising #iykyk. They also carry the heartbreak that comes with the story, the layers of heartbreak. I hear those notes and see Jake’s shirt hanging on the back of Heath’s door. I relive Jake’s murder. My grudge against Anne Hathaway intensifies.

But the tears that well when I start even thinking about Heated Rivalry are more akin to the ones that flowed with Heartstopper. As that series progressed, we all watched with baited breath (well, at least those of us who didn’t read the graphic novels first) and waited for tragedy to strike…but then, nothing. Well, not nothing–we met Charlie in the wake of vicious bullying, and all of the Heartstopper crew were experiencing the very real daily traumas of being a teenager–but as the story progressed, nobody was being punished for being queer. I cried a lot over the course of that show, mostly at the beauty of it all–how the characters cared for each other and listened to each other, how two boys figuring it all out could fall in love, how Olivia Colman responded when Nick came out to her. Every queer kid deserves the chance to come out to Olivia Colman, we all declared. So yeah, those tears flowed from a newly tapped spring, one that we could only source after years of expanding and increasingly authentic visibility and representation. And that leads us to…

…another Canadian series that is teaching Americans how to be human beings. Why do we, just about once a decade, get a Canadian slap in the face in the shape of a gripping television show that introduces queer characters that feel realer than anything we’ve seen in American productions? DeGrassi TNG gave us Marco Del Rossi in 2002. David Rose arrived in Schitt’s Creek in 2015. And Shane, Ilya, Scott, and Kip filled our screens in 2025. Is anyone paying attention to this once-a-decade Canadian invasion? Should we be worried? Or excited, like, if we watch enough Canadian TV, could we get fast-tracked for a Canadian passport? In the last few weeks, and somehow on noone’s 2025 Bingo card, Heated Rivalry has exploded, sparking all sorts of commentary, critique, and cacophonies of praise. Like I said, I’m not going to talk about the show–enough has been said of the remarkable beauty of the narrative, the script, the cinematography, the acting, and, goodness, the asses. 

But here’s what I will say: amidst all the praise for the show and the various barriers it has broken, I’m worried that folx will see this as an anomaly, a magical outlier that arrived ex nihilo. Like all other markers of authentic queer visibility and representation, it’s just one step–one gorgeous, beautiful, heart-poundingly and jaw-droppingly sexy, and somehow simultaneously romantically fulfilling and psychologically penetrating step–on a much longer path. My first intersection with that path came in college when I encountered another story about queer athletes that made me weep. Patricia Nell Warren’s 1974 novel The Front Runner is a love story set within the world of, you guessed it, elite competitive sports. I included an essay about The Front Runner in six to carry the casket because of its impact on me–it was the first time I encountered a love story that I could see myself in. 

The Front Runner didn’t keep me reading because of its reverence for sports. But it did keep me turning the pages because I had never heard a story about gay men that wasn’t thoroughly tragic. My mother’s first response after I told her I was gay was, “Well, I’m concerned, because I’ve never known a happy homosexual.” The Happy Homosexual, I thought, that’d be a great name for a musical. Harlan and Billy were more real and more potent to me than any characters I’d encountered before, and Warren didn’t reduce them to one-dimensional heroes, villains, or victims. And she didn’t skimp when it came to sex. Harlan and Billy presented my first encounter with gay sex. I’d never seen it—I sure hadn’t had it by that point—and I’d never even heard it described. Their budding lust and care for each other was familiar, and reading Warren’s depiction of the first time they fucked was the most comprehensive sexual education I’d ever had.

A lot of attention to Heated Rivalry begins in the same place. As Harlan and Billy’s love story was for me, Shane and Ilya’s will be someone’s first, the first time some queer kid can see their story, their desires, their feelings, and their fears on screen. And let me tell you, the sex scenes in Heated Rivalry are–it’s not dramatic to say–groundbreaking. So, just as Harlan and Billy taught me the “gay boogie,” Shane and Ilya will surely inspire a lot of, um, shall we say, imitation. But The Front Runner impacted me far beyond the realm of love stories; it highlighted the harsh realities of queer life that could be avoided if we as humans learned how to see each other as humans. 

Another reason The Front Runner grabbed me and maintains a grip on me extended from my personal “what ifs.” If talented celebrity-athletes came out in the ’60s and ’70s, along with folx in other industries and fields, would that have mitigated the burgeoning anti-gay tactics of the far right that picked on queer people (and are still picking on queer people), the hate and political pressure embodied in Anita Bryant? Would that have made a difference in the late ’70s and ’80s as AIDS emerged and spread, as members of Reagan’s administration dismissed it, even openly laughed about it, and attitudes, like Imogene’s in Designing Women, dominated, perpetuating the notion that AIDS was “killing all the right people”? Would there have been more stories like The Front Runner that depicted the lives and loves and complications of queer people without reducing them to victims or accessories? Would queer people have had more and better models to follow, guides to navigate the changes in our bodies and our desires? These are the possibilities that I ponder with so much regret.

I hope the enthusiasm for Heated Rivalry sustains and moves in this direction. Viewers should be asking questions about why powerful social institutions (including, but certainly not limited to, the entertainment industry) fail to reflect, much less serve, the full range of human diversity. We should be happy that HR has steamed up the screens with something that actually looks like gay sex and feels queerly familiar, but we shouldn’t be grateful for it. Instead, we should be asking why it took this long to even imagine a crack in the heteronormative glass ceiling of the entertainment industry. We should be furious that we’re not inundated with stories that we can relate to without doing empathetic acrobatics. And we should, with delight and rage welling within us, definitely tune in next season to see which way the ice is melting. 

If you want to hear me read the full essay about The Front Runner, I posted a video on YouTube.