Dear Reader,

I live my life through a new lens. One that can only exist after watching the television series Heated Rivalry. There is a way of being alive before Ilya says he’s coming to the cottage, and a way of walking through the world after.

There have been many moments in my life when I felt my queerness sink in deeper. Where my experience of being gay solidifies to a new level that I didn’t know it could go to. The first time I fell in love with another woman, watching the L Word, getting a matching tattoo with a girlfriend, reading The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, listening to Chappell Roan and Joan Armatrading, seeing Portrait of a Lady on Fire. It is sometimes my real life experience that deepens the well, but it is often media that reflects something back to me I hadn't found the words for yet.

Heated Rivalry joined this lineage not because it was perfect, but because it was attentive. It lingered where other stories rush. It let desire be repetitive, circular, obsessive. It treated care as a practice rather than a payoff. And in doing so, it reminded me that queerness—at least for me—has never been about transgression alone. It’s about staying. Returning. Choosing again, even when it would be easier not to.

I did not expect a show about closeted gay hockey players to rearrange the inner architecture of my heart. To lead me to making a Pinterest board of new haircuts inspired by Ilya. To make an appointment to get my haircut at the end of January. I’ve been growing it out so time will tell if the feeling sticks or if wanting to look like a gay boy from Russia is merely a phase.

Queer media has a way of bringing queer people together through memes, reels, and concepts that feel shared amongst other queer people. Between Ilya and Shane we see something we so commonly know, falling in love when it is inconvenient and terrifying. And yet, they let themselves, which brought me and my girlfriend to uncontrollable sobs on our couch.

The desire to stay hidden, to stay small, even without the pressures of professional sportsmanship, ring true for many queer people. Whether it is our gender, our sexuality, our pronouns — in the workplace, with our families, coming out is sometimes endless and exhausting.

Also - do we read the books now? I feel like I need to read the books and deeply commit to the genre. As you know I so rarely read fiction and feel this could be an entry point for me.

After Scott and Kip’s society altering public kiss, Ilya’s declaration that he’s coming to the cottage left our household screaming and jumping on the couch. It was like a part of me that was in the closet as a child had been freed. That through watching this story unfold, my own past was given permission to come out. As non binary, as boy, as gay, as me.

What that moment gave me wasn’t release so much as resolve. A deeper commitment to staying—with myself, with my history, with the parts of me that learned early how to wait. Queerness, for me, keeps returning to this: not the spectacle of coming out, but the long practice of not leaving. Not abandoning who I was when it would be easier to move on. Not rushing past what still wants to be seen.

I don’t think the show freed anything in me so much as it named what had already been waiting. The child who learned to watch carefully. The adult who learned to survive by editing themselves. Heated Rivalry didn’t invent a new identity—it reminded me that attention, when offered generously, can undo years of silence. That being seen, even indirectly, still counts.

I’ll be patiently waiting for season two and in the meantime rewatching season one! God bless gay love.

→ Finally started listening to The Telepathy Tapes

→ I laughed a lot watching Actors on Actors with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence

→ Watched TOGETHER the body horror film and liked it very much (love the fact they’re married IRL)

→ This week I don’t have any hot takes on current events or things to share with you, I’m just tuned in to Democracy Now! everyday for an hour. Finding my way through and letting it all move through my body. The horrors almost feel too great right now to sift through to share any one thing. Liberation now, for all living beings in all places. May god be with the people of Venezuela.

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