AMELIA WATTERS: Hi everyone. My name is Amelia Watters from the Opinions Desk, but you can call me Amy.

JEGERS: Hi, my name is Matthew Jegers, also from the Opinions Desk.

WATTERS: Welcome back to another episode of In the Know, a podcast  dedicated to the University of Minnesota. Today we have the great pleasure of speaking to all of you about one of the true, true joys of life, hockey yaoi with “Heated Rivalry” and the big boom that’s been happening with queer media in pop culture right now.

JEGERS: Right, absolutely. And all of the, the good and the bad that that may entail. So if you have been on the internet recently, it’s been fairly hard to avoid anything related to “Heated Rivalry,” whether it’s cultural discourse or even, discussions about it with the Mayor of New York. It’s been everywhere in our pop culture space.

WATTERS: I was watching SNL with my family over winter break and it was the Finn Wolfhard episode and they made a “Heated Rivalry” joke and I was watching it with my dad and he laughs and I go, “You know what that is?” And he goes, “Of course doesn’t everyone?” Horrifying thing to hear from your father, by the way. 

My, my roommate’s mom was invited to “Heated Rivalry” watch parties. It is something that is truly transcended, I feel like the niche corners of like queer pop culture that on like my Twitter and things like that, into something that’s really, really a huge cultural phenomenon, which is obviously really interesting.

Because for a very long time, queer media and LGBTQ+ content has been sort of relegated into like a really confined space. And so now we’re seeing this like truly gay piece of pop culture content take over in a way that I feel like I’ve never really seen before.

JEGERS: Absolutely. And an interesting thing is when queer media goes viral, it tends to either go viral in one of two places. It goes viral in the mainstream sense, or it goes viral within the queer community. “Heated Rivalry” did both. 

It, it is remarkable in the fact that it, it appeals to both gay culture and mainstream culture and was able to really make its niche. And it, it has been really interesting and really, I guess inspiring to see.

WATTERS: Absolutely. But, what brings us here today and what we sort of wanna talk about is obviously it is absolutely fantastic that we are seeing LGBTQ+ representation really highlighted in mainstream pop culture. 

But something that we find really interesting, especially from my perspective as a queer woman, is the fact that this show is coming out and getting so much buzz when the books that the show is based off is written by women. 

And what we see a lot of the time is like a lot of these books “Simon Versus the Homosapien Agenda,” which was turned into the movie “Love, Simon,” which came out when I was in sixth grade. A very newly out to her parents Amelia Watters saw that in, in theaters and it meant a lot to her.

But, a lot of this content is written by women and generally really appeals to women. I remember seeing Gopher Chicks post a lot about “Heated Rivalry,” and it is I think again, really, really fascinating that this content that probably feels like it should be made for gay men and let it be known “Heated Rivalry” is written and directed by a gay man, is based of content written by women and really, really does appeal to women. 

JEGERS: Right, absolutely. And it’s that sort of fact that a fair amount, I’d almost say a majority of it doesn’t just, it isn’t just romance books, it’s also fan fiction. Sometimes it’s comics and just a whole lot of gay media or media depicting a relationship between gay men in general is produced by, and oftentimes for women. 

And it’s, it’s a really interesting thing to me because oftentimes what I’ve noticed is you can tell what the target audience is. If it is media written by gay men for other gay men, you can tell the differences. But more if it’s a more general thing of like, gay media written by women. It’ll be interesting to sort of unpack that.  And I, that’s what I hope we can do today.

WATTERS: Absolutely. So one thing I wanna bring up, a couple months, like while the show was airing, Jordan Firstman, who’s a queer actor who’s gaining popularity because he was on the show, “I love LA,” another HBO Max show, got into a bunch of hot water because he made some controversial comments about “Heated Rivalry” and his feelings that it wasn’t accurately depicting what it was like to be a gay man. 

And it sparked a lot of controversy. A because “Heated Rivalry” is a really popular show, and it’s also a really important show in terms of like, again, media representation for queer people. But at the same time, obviously no show is going to be able to fully depict the totality of the queer experience because there’s so much of that. 

But I do think his words were really resonant for a community that like where queerness often is watered down through like this lens of like straight people. And obviously we don’t know Rachel Reed’s sexuality. We can speculate. We don’t know if she’s queer or not.

Becky Albertalli, who wrote a “Simon Versus the Homosapiens Agenda,” later came out as bisexual after writing the books and felt pressure to come out. And so we can’t speculate to that extent. But there is something to be said about media that is made by the people that it is depicting, right?

And as much as a woman may be queer, they will never understand what it is like to be a gay man and vice versa. And so I think his words were really important in sort of guiding our conversation toward maybe getting to a place where we can have media for gay men and about gay men that is also written by queer men, right.

JEGERS: Right. And I find it really interesting that he targeted “Heated Rivalry” specifically in these comments, because that is one thing that I, I, I do believe transcended the queer barriers and the barriers between mainstream culture and the queer community. And also resonated with a lot more gay men than I personally had expected. 

And so it, it’s interesting because I would probably take the comments as also a broader frustration with the broader media landscape as a whole. Because I mean, you see, you frequently see what I would describe as the Hallmark gay stories, like of, oh this is just a, like literally a Hallmark movie or a more, I guess, cliche based romance story, but just with gay characters. And that really does feel ingenuine. 

And that has led to a growing frustration within queer spaces. However, “Heated Rivalry” actually when I was like starting to engage with content, when I was starting to like, see clips, like read the discourse, I was actually astonished at how well some of those aspects were integrated.

And so it, I, I think that goes to the point of media about gay men written by women isn’t inherently bad. It’s the fact that the media landscape involving stories about gay men is overwhelmingly dominated by women. That can be the problem and that can lead to some issues.

WATTERS: Exactly. And well, I think the perspective that obviously I bring to this conversation as a woman, a woman who has in her day read her fair share of gay fan fiction, I’m not even gonna lie to you, right. Is what we find in like these shows where a lot of like queer fan fiction is written specifically gay fan fiction.

I’m thinking “Supernatural,” “Sherlock.” What’s really interesting about these shows is a lot of them don’t really have women to talk about at all, right? A lot of them have female characters that are disposable. Or in “Supernatural’s” case, low-key, non-existent. I couldn’t get into that show because I’m so serious I am not confident a woman talks for like the first 10 episodes. 

It is just about men, right? Men are the people that get this sort of level of like interiority that isn’t afforded to women. So it makes sense that when women are engaging with fan media and fan content, they are engaging with male characters dating because the women characters are boring. They don’t wanna read about them having sex. They don’t care. 

And so it’s a really nuanced conversation because there’s a reason why women are drawn to write about this beyond fetishization, which is I think the idea that people immediately get in their heads. When really it’s really complicated, especially as women are navigating their own media landscapes of representation, which itself is quite dire.

JEGERS: Absolutely. And, another thing that really stuck out to me is in a lot of literature it is safer from an author’s perspective to write a male character than it is to write a female character. I’ve seen time and time again, authors, if a, if a female character is stronger, “Oh, she’s just another like hollow girl-boss archetype.” That’s the audience reaction. Or if she’s, she’s “Mary Sue” is another one especially.

WATTERS: Mm-hmm. 

JEGERS: Star Wars community, I am looking at you. So in some aspects it is, I guess, safer to, just because of these audience notions, it’s safer to write male main characters and explore the various characterizations and dynamics without having to potentially risk any audience backlash, which is horrifying.

WATTERS: Writing female characters comes with a level of baggage, especially LGBTQ+ female characters that isn’t there when writing men, even when writing gay men, and that’s where like this element of like intersectionality comes into play here. 

It is interesting, especially like when we talk about even when you do get these like female characters that are a little bit stronger, right? There’s still a level of like shipping them with other men. 

JEGERS: Mm-hmm. 

WATTERS: That can be a little bit uncomfortable and because a lot of times, again, you get these female characters that are just disposable or when they’re not disposable, they are existing for a male character to be a male character’s love interest. Right?

JEGERS: Right.

WATTERS: And when you have gay media, there’s something so freeing as a woman to watch two characters be in love, where both of their stories matter. Where both of them can be seen as subjects in their romance, and one of them isn’t viewed through the lens of being an object. 

Which is, I’m gonna be honest, what I see in a lot of heterosexual couples on television and even a lot of lesbian couples, right? A lot of lesbian couples in, in media are still themselves written by and for men. 

JEGERS: Right. 

WATTERS: To an extent too, which makes this a lot more complicated. And why a lot of queer women, like my roommate, bless her, are really into gay media and haven’t found as much lesbian media because it simply doesn’t exist. Right? 

JEGERS: Right. 

WATTERS: And so in order to get to this point where it feels like we’re getting equal representation, we have to talk about that too. This lack of lesbian and women loving women content, this lack of heterosexual couplings and romances in television where both people are granted a strong level of interiority where neither of them feel like objects in the story. And at the end of the day, just more female characters in general is, I think would help solve this problem a lot.

JEGERS: Absolutely. And. Like, it, it, it’s truly astounding. If you look on AO3, for those of you unaware, “Archive of Our Own” is a major free fanfiction website. It’s the fanfiction website.

If you look on there and compare the numbers of fan fiction’s tagged male/male versus female/female, when it, when it comes to ships, the disparity is shocking.

WATTERS: It’s astounding.

JEGERS: But the, at the same time, all of this attention on gay male ships doesn’t always come with just benefits. There’s also a lot of drawbacks as well. A major issue that I’ve noticed with gay media written by women is the types of gay men represented tend to be a bit skewed. Specifically, there tends to be a tendency towards more either effeminate men or like very, very traditionally attractive men.

And in a community such as the gay community, which already has such horrendous problems around body stereotypes and all of the like assumptions about personality that are wrapped up within those. It’s not, it just makes it so much worse when you don’t see, like, I, I highly doubt I would be able to read a piece of gay media written by a woman that has a bear in it to use the, the stereotype. It really can worsen some of those body image problems within the community.

WATTERS: Yeah. And I think, again, that comes back to this idea of we are asking a group of people to write about a community that they are not a part of, right? And at the end of the day, no matter how much care and how much authenticity and research and energy you put into representing that community accurately, you’re never gonna be a part of it.

You’re always going to be looking from the outside. The solution here again, is to uplift gay stories by queer men. And I do think we are getting to a better point here. Both with having access to queer content written by queer men. 

Obviously “Heated Rivalry” the show, although based on books by women, is directed and written by a man. But we’re also getting to a better point with female representation in pop culture. Me and my roommate are huge fans of “The Pitt.” We love “The Pitt.” We’re streaming every single week. 

And what I think is super cool about that show is obviously the gay ships are there. Obviously everyone is into Huckle/Robby. My bias is Abbot and Robby. That’s tea for me. And that’s definitely prevalent, but if you go on Tumblr, if you go on AO3, if you go on Twitter, you have just as many people talking about, like Melissa and Langdon, right?

Or Samira and Abbot, my other favorite, right? Or, in terms of like queer ships Dr. Santos and my roommate loves Dr. Santos and Javadi. This is getting really in the weeds here. But, you get the point, right? Like it’s move beyond just centering the men and shipping the men. 

And I think part of it again, is you have so many female characters who are so beautifully written and are so embodied by their actresses and are allowed to have a heightened level of depth to them beyond just being disposable. 

Which allows, like women the chance to see themselves represented on television well. Queer women, the opportunity for that. And it just, it lessens the need to be so entrenched in the yaoi. Obviously that’s always gonna be there. 

JEGERS: Right. 

WATTERS: Yoai we will always persevere, but I do think we’re getting to a much better point in all of it.

JEGERS: And also I, I think another reason why we might actually be getting better is because, as mentioned before, you can tell the difference between media written for gay men and gay media written for women. 

There, there is a fairly notable difference, and I think those audiences are segmenting a bit. I remember seeing on an, on an online community that featured more like, I guess hyper-masculine traits within relationships between gay men. The audience was upwards of 70% gay men. 

And then plus that doesn’t include like bisexual men and all other queer men. And so I, I do think the audience is segmenting a bit, which could be a good thing for helping repair just the overall media landscape because, yeah, and I, again, I don’t wanna necessarily put down media written by women. 

Because again, like in “Heated Rivalry’s” case, there’s quality media to be had about gay ships written by women, just as like, gay men can also write straight ships and also be completely valid. So I don’t mean to invalidate anyone but it’s just the manner of representation that is the issue.

WATTERS: I don’t think I have anything more to add, but before we wrap up, I do need everyone to know that. The smoothie that Kip makes in episode three of “Heated Rivalry” has haunted my dreams since I watched it. I think about it every single day. I’m gonna be honest, I didn’t even love the show like that. Not really my journey, but I think about that, that smoothie at least four times a day. It was so watery.

JEGERS: Absolutely.

WATTERS: All right.

JEGERS: So, that’s all that we have for all of you today. This episode was recorded by Matthew Jegers.

WATTERS: And Amy Watters.

JEGERS: And produced by Ceci Heinen. Thank you all so much for listening to our lovely podcast, and thank you all for putting up with Opinions Desk taking over the podcast this week. If you have any other questions, comments, concerns please don’t be afraid to send us an email at [email protected]. 

My name is Matthew Jegers.

WATTERS: And I’m Amy Watters.

JEGERS: And be safe, be well and stay warm. It is colder out there right now then it is on the lovely “Heated Rivalry” hockey rinks. 

We’ll talk to you next time on In the Know.