Jordan O’Dell, PhD student (he/him) is a Black, Mad (PDDer and OCPDer), pan, cis-man interdisciplinary scholar-activist-practitioner working in the municipal sector and studying in Brock University’s Faculty of Applied Health Sciences. When not working, he enjoys engaging in the leisurely little pleasures of life: streaming a good show, sharing a good laugh, and savouring authentic moments of connection with loved ones.

It’s been a few months now since the first wave of the Heated Rivalry craze. If you are joining this discussion at this point, you know what the series is about.

There were many ways the series was and is being celebrated for:

• Propping up of Canadian content. 
• Its nuanced incorporation of (white) queer joy, lust, and love, even in hypermasculine anti-queer men’s hockey cultures.
• Satisfying (mostly cis-het women) audiences craving for more and better steamy sex scenes. 
• Representing athletes on the autism spectrum.
• Celebrating the importance of straight female allyship.

The show has been praised by folks from many walks of life who feel seen—maybe for the first time. There’s also been some crossover into the (white and cis-het men’s) hockey world, with hockey podcasts (typically with cis-straight men hosts) discussing and reviewing the series, and even interviewing the show creator, Jacob Tierney. 

As a Black queer non-hockey player and fan of the show, I am encouraged by the fascination and am eager to weigh in.

Thinking about what the show means and what the show may be able to do in the future, I share some hopes for the show’s impact on hockey, on and off the ice, and hopes for what may be shown in future seasons to make better and bigger impacts on queer liberation movements, on and off the screen. 

Black Queerness as a Lens Full of Possibility

“Not queer like gay. Queer like, escaping definition. Queer like some sort of fluidity and limitlessness at once. Queer like freedom too strange to be conquered. Queer like the fearlessness to imagine what love can look like…and pursue it.” – Brandon Wint (Seattle Nonbinary Collective, 2017)

Learning from Black theorists and activists like Brandon Wint, Audre Lorde, and bell hooks, I see Black queer thinking (and being) as a fugitive activity (Bey, 2019) that escapes, abounds, and expands possibilities for shaping social-material worlds. Applied to hockey worlds, Black queer lenses can help us to think-do otherwise, detaching from current limiting realities to operate in an alternative, speculative space full of love, justice, and humanity. 

What I envision a Black queer love-filled hockey world to be is a one that does not just meet some baseline, lack of harm standard by preparing to conditionally tolerate gayness and queerness, but is queered in its capacity to live in fluidity (i.e., plurality of hockey worlds rather than a conformity to one hockey world), radically accept defiances to be defined (i.e., widening of how the sport looks, is played, and is owned), and embrace courage of creating cultures that White colonialism never wanted us to even imagine. From this perspective, I put one skate in front of another to help us get closer to this queered potentiality. 

Hopes for Heated Rivalry’s Impact on Hockey Cultures, On and Off the Ice

In a recent article, Sam McKegney posed a question to hockey communities: “Do we seize the opportunity for progressive, queer-positive, anti-patriarchal, and anti-racist hockey that the rise of the PWHL affords the game? Do we ensure the holding of space for grassroots, pre- and post-competitive hockey for all?” (McKegney, 2026, p. 14). 

Building on this line of questioning, I ask from a Black queer lens: how do we seize the opportunity of Heated Rivalry’s spotlight on harmful hockey cultures to (re)ignite radically just possibilities for hockey and for queer folks within and outside of hockey cultures? In response, I share a few hopes.

I hope that the series does not:	I hope that the series does:
Stunt people’s imaginations to only envision future white gay friendly hockey cultures.	Crack open more expansive possibilities for queer racialized hockey lives, queering possibilities of how hockey can be sites for joy and desire.
Seduce people into believing that embracing diversity or being more inclusive should be the only goal.	Allow hockey to imagine an incredibly, fantastically anti-oppressive version of the sport beyond just including a few more people into a toxic culture, then continue to work making that dream a reality across the country and beyond.
Put undue pressure on having more out gay and bi pro players. Their sport has let them down. They don’t owe us anything.	Allow hockey to see how much they owe us (racialized+ queers) in creating a way better working (for pro players) and playing environment (for players across all levels).
Perpetuate the myth that intersectional movements are too hard, complicated, confusing or distracting. This is a sentiment I’ve heard from colleagues consistently throughout my almost 15 years of field work in the sport and recreation sector.	Help hockey hold the messiness of addressing heterosexism with racism, genderism, ableism and more – so hockey can see difference as strength, not difference as distraction.
Focus too much media attention on how the series will impact viewership and sales of NHL and PWHL, endlessly discussing how the series may attract more fans or attract new fans.	Shift media attention to how hockey can earn more fandom of racialized queer people, and make up for histories of ignoring, unprotecting and harming equity-owed people already involved in the sport.
Overburden LGBTQ+ folks who love hockey to help queer their sport.	Invite increased responsibility of cis-het boys and men that love hockey to help queer their sport.

Hopes for Future Seasons to Advance Queer Liberation Movements

I don’t think the show’s goal was to help shift conversations about masculinity, sexuality and sport. Perhaps the show was satisfied with celebrating a gay series that centres straight-passing hyper-cis-masc-ness, whiteness (despite an Asian main character the story omits Shane’s racialized experiences) and neurotypical-ness (due to the disappearance of Shane’s autistic-ness in the storyline) as a success of Canada’s neo-liberal multicultural film industry. Perhaps the creators were not trying to push the boundaries of belonging and representation in hockey narratives farther to include or center more diverse masculinities or racialized neuro-queer identities. However, I argue that despite unknown intents, the show’s now cemented popularity does warrant some enhanced responsibility in future seasons to responsively story more expansive hockey, queer, and queer hockey experiences.

Here are some areas the show can explore to help advance deeper, more diverse queer representations in art and contribute to queer resistances off the screen. 

White queer hockey communities seem to be benefiting but I hope that future seasons can create or contribute to trends of centring more stories about non-white folks within white queer hockey circles or in other queer stories.

The first season evaded race arguably too much, leaving me wanting more about non-white queer and queer adjacent stories of: 

• Hollander as a half Japanese, Canadian man seemingly breaking barriers in hockey.
• Rozanov’s friend and sometimes casual sexual partner Svetlana as a Black Russian.
• Miles, the Black gay best friend of Hollander’s “beard”, Rose. 
• Kip’s protective friend Elena, a Brown Indo-Caribbean woman.

Heated Rivalry nods to Hollander breaking racialized barriers in hockey by being one of the first Asian players drafted to the pro league. The racialized storyline starts and stops at this brief mention about how his visible Asian-ness will be inspirational for future generations, posing some heavy implications for how he navigates his career as a face of the race. We do not get much depth in the storylines about how Hollander internalizes and externalizes his racialized gay experiences. We are not given any historical context about past Asian players in the league and their racialized journeys, positive or negative. For example, in the fictional Heated Rivalry universe, is there no Japanese-Scottish Paul Kariya who came before Hollander? The show clearly wants credit for being diverse in their inclusion of racialized characters but does little to honour racialized stories, revealing the show’s liberal politics of inclusion instead of a racialized queer politics (Ratna et al., 2025) dedicated to eradicating all interconnected forms of eraser, harm, and oppression.

In addition to expanding and centring racialized and racialized queer stories, I’d love to see Hollander’s coming out storyline queered. One way this could play out is by showing the coming out event as a net positive experience. We need more stories showing the possibility and (for some) reality of coming out being more positive than negative. This doesn’t mean that coming out is without its bumps, anxieties, social frictions, and professional setbacks, but ultimately shows how loved ones supporting their queer kin can make their relationship better, not worse. This was a seed of success in season one that should be expanded upon to give hope and healing to other racialized queer folks inside and outside of hockey.

Another way the show can queer Hollander’s coming out storyline is by offering a plurality of contested, overlapping, fluid outcomes – a range of world-shattering freedom finding, mundane acceptance, euphoric joy, spiritual renewal, economic instability, and relational trepidation. Queerness can’t always, or may never be able to be, contained or captured neatly. Seeing the spilling out of his gayness transformed into queerness via experiencing the ups, downs, and in-betweens post-coming out would help to honour real racialized queer experiences of always living in liminality, pushing fearlessly into embracing limitlessness yet always being anchored in relation to colonialism’s regressive, repressive, reductive ideas of what living (a good) life means. 

Three other areas of racialized queer lives that I think deserve more attention in future seasons are:

1. Apps for gay and queer hook ups: How down-low racialized MSM are pushed to discretely engage with the apps to find love, lust and themselves.
2. Homo-eroticism in men’s hockey cultures (Westhead, 2025): How (mostly white) cis-het-presenting hockey bros perform a new era masc-ness by complimenting each other’s bodies or joking about same gender attraction, aligning themselves with liberal politics without risking any loss of social status or explicitly resisting heterosexist assumptions. Locker room talk looks different in the 21^st century (MacDonald, 2016) but that doesn’t mean that men’s hockey is embracing progressive, positive masculinities (Godman, 2021) or diverse non-straight sexualitiesyet.
3. Last, it would be great to see more examples of anti-heterosexist activism to avoid erasing resistors (e.g., the institutional leading of PWHL, [CS1] the individual leadership of Renee Hess to Blacken hockey fandoms) and help audiences imagine what may be possible if hockey communities (e.g., women’s hockey leagues, white cis-het guys, multi-racial and -generational fans; Szto, 2020) really endorsed a radical, intersectional anti-heterosexist agenda. Elucidating the historical and contemporary resistances instead of providing some narrow inclusions about a few hockey bros would help to honour and propel positive change for social justice in the sport, on and off screen.

To close, I remain hopeful for the show to crack open more possibilities for media representations of queer stories to better reflect complicated queer lives impacted by intersectional structures of oppression and for media representations of queer stories to help queer sporting lives off the screen. Ideally, the creation of Heated Rivalry will be a stepping stone towards even more robust, diverse, sustained, and mainstreamed queer(ed) storytelling. And the cultural scene were queer(ed) stories abound will help to queer hockey cultures in ways we may not think possible yet. From my humble Black queer lens, I ambitiously envision a future where that can be so. As we work toward building this future we want to live in, let’s all collectively hold onto hope for Heated Rivalry, hockey, and hockey in Heated Rivalry.

Works Cited

Bey, M. (2019). Black fugitivity un/gendered. The Black Scholar, 49(1), 55–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2019.1548059

Godman, N. (2021). “A tug of war”: Perspectives on masculinities in Canadian men’s ice hockey [Master’s thesis, University of Toronto]. TSpace. https://utoronto.scholaris.ca/server/api/core/bitstreams/d0c5b78a-70a1-4313-b2d4-ee488c2338c1/content

MacDonald, C. (2016). [CS1] “Yo! You Can’t Say That!”: Understandings of gender and sexuality and attitudes towards homosexuality among male Major Midget AAA ice hockey players in Canada.https://www.academia.edu/111036662/_Yo_You_Can_t_Say_That_Understandings_of_Gender_and_Sexuality_and_Attitudes_Towards_Homosexuality_Among_Male_Major_Midget_AAA_Ice_Hockey_Players_in_Canada?uc-sb-sw=92268250

McKegney, S. (2026). Cowboys & Canadians: Ruminating on the wounded game I love. Journal of Emerging Sport Studies, 13, 1-34. https://journals.library.brocku.ca/index.php/jess/article/view/5409/3591

Ratna, A., Joseph, J., & Kim, K. (2025). Introductory essay: Race, gender and queering/querying sport and movement cultures. Women’s Studies International Forum, 113, Article 103180. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2025.103180

Szto, C. (2020). Changing on the fly: Hockey through the voices of South Asian Canadians. Rutgers University Press, https://doi.org/10.36019/9781978807976

Westhead, R. (2025). We breed lions: Confronting Canada’s troubled hockey culture. Random House Canada.