'Heated Rivalry' triggered a panic attack for a former gay hockey player. A new book explains why - Toronto Star

Broader culture, and even the NHL however grudgingly, embraced the show. But for some, it awakens some painful memories.

Actors Connor Storrie, left, and Hudson Williams in a scene from Crave’s “Heated Rivalry.”

Training camps are open and the NHL season is right around the corner for hockey fans. “Heated Rivalry” fans have longer to wait. The groundbreaking hockey drama, built around the discreet same-sex romance between on-ice rivals Shane and Ilya, made a big impact with viewers. However, as this excerpt from the new book “Cutting Edge: Hockey as Queer Culture” reveals, its effects on gay hockey players were a bit more complicated.

One group of viewers that struggled with “Heated Rivalry,” even as they admired it, were gay men who had once played hockey at a high level. On Jan. 9, CBC Radio’s “The Current” featured interviews with former professional Brock McGillis and Matt Kenny, a California resident who had played competitive hockey as a teenager while growing up in Ontario. (Kenny was invited on the show because of his Instagram post about watching “Heated Rivalry” on Christmas Eve, which went viral. “I knew watching @heatedrivalry was risky,” it began. “I didn’t expect it to crack me wide open …”) Like Brock McGillis, whose traumatic experiences as a closeted junior player in Ontario involved injuries and illnesses he later concluded were psychosomatic, Kenny found “Heated Rivalry” a triggering experience and said he had a panic attack while watching it. About 25 minutes into episode 1, he told host Matt Galloway, he was overcome by shortness of breath and had to stop watching. For the next five days, he felt a heaviness in his chest and persistent shallow breath.

When he pressed play to start viewing “Heated Rivalry,” Kenny explained, “I thought I’d be watching this TV show on some sexy hockey dudes, but what happened was, my eyes started watching something I thought I had survived and buried. It felt super private, and suddenly this whole experience was kind of being thrown back at me … and it terrified me.” That experience was when, deep in the closet, he had sex with another hockey player. Shane and Ilya’s first hookup reminded him of “this heavy feeling that hung over everything … the fear, the joy, the secrecy of love that was never supposed to exist in daylight, internal homophobia, and shame that players like me wore like a second skin.” But unlike Shane and Ilya, there was no happy ending for Kenny. The fear and shame led him to re-evaluate his life and leave hockey behind. “It just kind of felt like I was giving everything to this sport,” he recalled, “and deep down inside I just knew that this sport that I loved probably wasn’t able to love me back.”

Kenny and McGillis’s raw, emotional response to “Heated Rivalry” was so much different from my own reaction to the series. As a fellow gay man, and as a hockey enthusiast, if never a hockey talent, I experienced no triggers but simply enjoyed the good writing, performances, and production. This was likely because I had managed, long ago, to circumvent the horrors of the mainstream hockey world by being nowhere near good enough to contemplate a career in it, as McGillis came so close to achieving. How sadly ironic and unfair that a recreational beer leaguer — by virtue of a youthful activism that allowed me to carve out a safer hockey milieu in 1990 — ended up having a happier hockey life (or, at least, longer sustained happiness with the game, through solidarity and fellowship with queer teammates) than untold legions of highly skilled gay players who had all the tools and talent to make it to the Show but instead had to suffer in silent isolation because the game they loved couldn’t “love them back.”

Hudson Williams, left, and Connor Storrie, whose characters are lovers off the ice, face off in a scene from “Heated Rivalry.”

With so much instant commentary around “Heated Rivalry,” academia was bound to weigh in with its own two cents’ worth. Enter J.P. Catungal, assistant professor at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice and the Asian Canadian and Asian migration studies program at the University of British Columbia. Himself a queer Asian Canadian immigrant, Catungal is a big fan of Heated Rivalry. In tribute, he created a syllabus that explores how the series engages “enduring critical issues of our time”:

Prime Minister Mark Carney literal embrace of “Heated Rivalry” star Hudson Williams in Ottawa earlier this year illustrates the friendly reaction of the broader culture.

the politics of racism and heteronormativity in sport and in policy; constructions of Asianness, Canadianness, Russianness, and masculinity especially as they relate to queerness; the role of friends and family —especially women — in identity and community formation; the politics of grief, joy, and mental well-being for marginalized communities; and the role of media, images, and representations in self-making.

It seemed as though everyone was talking about “Heated Rivalry.” Stars Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie were cashing in on their instant fame, overexposing their actorly bromance with every photo shoot, podcast, talk show interview, and awards ceremony available to them, titillating fans by enthusing about each other’s hot butts. Showrunner Jacob Tierney was burnishing his credentials as a progressive TV producer plugged into the zeitgeist. And the author of the original books, Rachel Reid — when not doing interviews with the New York Times — was being invited to speak at Cambridge University. With all this talk, the last people to weigh in on “Heated Rivalry,” it seemed, were the NHL and its gatekeepers, including “Hockey Night in Canada.”

By Dec. 22, there was only this comment to The Hollywood Reporter by a nameless NHL rep: “There are so many ways to get hooked on hockey and, in the NHL’s 108-year history, this might be the most unique driver for creating new fans. See you all at the rink.” And that was it: an appeal for new fan dollars, but not a word about the culture of hockey or about the men who play the game at its highest level.

NHL commissioner Gary Bettman finally went on the record in mid-January, telling reporters he had seen all of season 1 of “Heated Rivalry,” having “binged it in one night.” And what was the NHL commissioner’s verdict? “I thought the storyline was very compelling and a lot of fun,” he said, “because I could (see) where they were picking at things that we had in the past, whether it was (the Olympics) in Sochi or the All-Star Game in Tampa. It was very well done.” While adding that the show presented “a wonderful story,” he cautioned that “the content, particularly for young people, might be a little spicy. And so you have to balance that out in terms of how you embrace (the show). There are a lot of things about the game that we think are driving more people to the game, and I do believe ‘Heated Rivalry’ is one of those things.”

The NHL’s tepid response to the biggest-ever pop culture phenomenon about its game only raised the obvious question: Could such groundbreaking television actually help gay NHL players come out of the closet? Speaking for the yes side was retired NHL agitator Sean Avery, a long-time ally for the queer community. The show’s success “should open the door for the first gay NHL player, if there is one,” he told Rolling Stone, noting that he must have had a gay closeted teammate at some point during his career.

Speaking for the no side was Brock McGillis, the first openly gay professional hockey player and a strong advocate for queer players. Despite his personal appreciation of the series, he disagreed that “Heated Rivalry” could help NHL players come out. While it might help some people around gay players to be more understanding and respectful if they were dating someone, McGillis said that years of media work by himself and Luke Prokop, an out player in the minor-league ECHL, since coming out had not led to a single NHL player following their example. So, with regard to “Heated Rivalry,” he said, “Nobody’s like, ‘Oh, yeah. This came out and now I’m ready (to come out).’ It’s not happening.”

He went on: “It’s probably more likely to have an adverse effect on a player coming out. And I hate to be negative because I really enjoy the show. But I also don’t believe that many hockey bros are going to watch it. And I don’t think, if they are watching it, they’re talking about it positively.” His only caveat was that, if someone did come out, hockey players were more likely to rally around their teammate in support than athletes from the other big team sports were.

McGillis may be right. Meanwhile, the “Heated Rivalry” buzz got surreal when Hudson Williams told a radio interviewer that closeted professional athletes — including hockey players — had reached out to him. “Hockey players, football players, basketball players,” Williams confirmed with SiriusXM’s Andy Cohen. He noted that these athletes had contacted him anonymously but said they were still active professionals and still in the closet. “They’re reaching out to like Rachel (Reid), our author, who will then kind of relay these lovely anonymous emails,” he told Cohen. “Sometimes they’re just reaching out privately, through like Instagram, and those ones are the ones that really just kind of hit you and go, ‘Oh, so this is a fun show and it’s celebratory, but also sometimes it’s just hitting people right in the nerves.’ ”

Excerpted from “Cutting Edge: Hockey as Queer Culture” by Daniel Gawthrop, 2026, published by Arsenal Pulp Press. Reprinted with permission from the publisher.