I really need to watch this. Thing is, that’s yet another streaming TV subscription and it’s starting to get expensive.

But I understand where this writer, and all the fans of Heated Rivalry are coming from. If I hadn’t had the novels I had available to young adult me, even back in the early 1970s, I’d have missed stories of gay love and romance too. And one thing I did learn from that period was to never trust what Hollywood put out there about us. Vito Russo explained why that was better than I ever could in his book, “The Celluloid Closet”.

The written word was my salvation all through my growing up years, but especially during my young gay adult time. I’ve found it interesting that almost all my favorite novels of gay love and romance were written by women. And now, late in my life, I have web comics and manga written and drawn by women. There are a few gay male authors whose books and comics I’ve come to enjoy deeply, but those all seem to have been one-offs. It’s the stories of gay love and romance by female authors that have hit me deeply so consistently. I suspect that’s because the ability to bond deeply with other males is bullied out of boys at a young age in our culture. The movie Close (2022 Belgium), speaks to that in a powerful and heart breaking way.

So that this story originates from a novel by a women is something I pretty much knew even before I knew it. However difficult the growing up is that women in this culture face, it seems they generally come out of it still believing in love. Gay guys in particular, just seem to not. And we just accept that. We need to stop accepting that. Or rather, those of us who feel that belief as a deep dark childish secret need to get loud and proud.

One of the marvels of “Heated Rivalry” is its de-emphasis of tragedy. It hails from the world of the romance novel, where gay plots aren’t novel at all. (Rachel Reid, its author, has written a slew of these books.) As a screen event, however, one that dares to exponentially deepen the worlds Reid dreamed up, the show constitutes a revelation that I forgot I needed, a revelation that maybe I had assumed I was too good or maybe too cool for: a work of utter ardor.

No one’s too cool to say anything on “Heated Rivalry.” There’s no subtext in play. Ilya and Shane (Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams) meet during their rookie years and spend years trying not to fall in love. When they fail, the question becomes how to tell everybody that their relationship has been going on for as long as it has. The last shot of the final episode puts the camera in the back seat of a car as these two drive out of the closet. It was like watching Danny and Sandy achieve liftoff at the end of “Grease.”

…..

Let’s not enumerate every single lusty, tear-jerking, demented box-office bummer. But let’s also never fail to remember that for a long time Brokeback Mountain (2005) sufficed as a dictionary definition of “gay love story.” I mean, Jack Twist gets beaten to death and, in the final shot, Ennis Del Mar stands in a trailer all by his lonesome, his shirt wearing Jack’s. In a closet. His ambiguous declaration of devotion (“Jack, I swear …”) is uttered too late.

And don’t even get me started on Call Me By Your Name.