A night out with Heated Rivalry’s female superfans

Why are women so feral for a gay ice hockey romance?

It is a Saturday night in Clapham, and I am surrounded by girls wearing glittery eye shadow and Canadian ice hockey jerseys. Two 30-year-old women are standing in the nightclub smoking area, taking slow drags of a Calpol-coloured vape like it’s an asthma inhaler. “I haven’t felt hysteria like this since I saw One Direction as a 17-year-old,” one says. “I feel like I’m on my knees and Harry Styles is looking at me.”

I am at Heated Rivalrave, a series of club nights based on the television show Heated Rivalry. The feverish response to the events – some of which sold out within minutes – has spread from the obsession with the show itself, which charts the decade-long romance of two male ice hockey players, Shane (Hudson Williams) and Ilya (Connor Storrie). The series quickly became the most-watched non-animated show ever on HBO Max, its American streamer, and is battling Breaking Bad for the highest-rated television episode on IMDB. It has been ambitiously compared to Maurice and Giovanni’s Room in its portrayal of two men in love. But the majority of its fans, and those here tonight, aren’t men. In the first week of the year, almost two-thirds of viewers were women.

“We were expecting the gays, but it’s very women heavy,” Addie, who’s on the door tonight, tells me. “It’s not like other events. It’s. . .” he nods in the direction of the screaming, “crazy”. Club90s, a nightlife events company, held the first Heated Rivalrave in Los Angeles on 2 January. There are now over 190 such events across the US and London – that’s roughly 50 more shows than Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.

And the fanatic enthusiasm for these nights resembles that of Taylor Swift fans. Women beg for resale tickets on TikTok; I meet two girls who have travelled from Cyprus just for the event and have a flight to catch later tonight.

Heated Rivalry doesn’t really have a musical core: it’s mostly soundtracked by heavy breathing and the thwack of hockey sticks on perspex, or flesh on flesh. A few songs the DJ plays are directly from the series: staff at the Clapham Grand were briefed before the event that the rock ballad “All The Things She Said”, which features in episode four, would be a particularly intense moment. But most of the songs tonight are derived from edits fans have made of the series on TikTok, splicing together clips of the show and its cast to a background of pop songs. These edits have become so synonymous with the series that fans know them by name: “The Google Drive Edit”, “The Big Boy Edit.” Each new song provokes a visceral shriek of recognition from the crowd.

This is how, in the same week that Canadian prime minister Mark Carney gave a speech condemning Russia’s use of missiles against Ukraine – and a few days before Carney meets, and is half-straddled by, Hudson Williams himself – I am standing in a throng of people adorned with maple leaves, whooping as the DJ dedicates the next track to “our Russian boy Ilya Rosanov”. Behind the decks, a large screen is split in two. On one half are clips of Connor Storrie (the Texan actor who plays Rosanov) in various press interviews. The right hand side shows a faceless character from the video game Just Dance, who leaps and squats to the sound of Boney M’s “Rasputin”, clad in a Cossack hat.

Other edits played at Heated Rivalrave are, like the show itself, unabashedly sexual. Bare hips thrust onscreen as Lady Gaga sings, “I want to take a ride on your disco stick”. At this point, the words “hockey stick” flash into view. But the passion of the crowd isn’t purely explained by lust. Gen Z don’t need to watch Heated Rivalry to see two men with six-packs shagging: they can find that in many other places online. “I’ve seen a lot of lesbians here tonight,” says Nadia, who is here with her friend Ella. “I feel like it’s not even the titillation of seeing guys kiss which attracts people. We want to see men be vulnerable.” In New York, lesbian bars have held events dedicated to the series. Ella agrees that the infatuation women have with the show isn’t simply sexual: “There’s something so clearly lacking in the dating scene right now that to see a man show emotion is enough to get the girls going, regardless of sexuality.”

Gay romances have long been popular with women: one author of the genre surveyed over 2,000 readers and found that 87 per cent were straight women. Heated Rivalry was written by a woman, Rachel Reid, and there is a history of women imagining ostensibly straight men to be secretly in love, even when they are almost certainly not. In the late 1960s, female Trekkies wrote romantic fan fiction centring Star Trek’s Captain Kirk and Spock. Louis Tomlinson and Harry Styles of One Direction still receive ardent questions from fans about their supposed love for each other – so much so that Tomlinson addressed the claims last year as a “conspiracy”.

Women love stories about men loving men (MLM, as the genre is known) for the freedom of not seeing themselves on screen. A woman at Heated Rivalrave tells me: “There’s a lot of media where things are unsafe for women, so to be completely removed from the situation is nice. You can get lost in it, you’re not thinking ‘What if this was me?’” A 2016 study by Channel 4 found that prime time TV in the UK showed five sexist “incidents” every hour; the most watched show on Netflix in the first half of 2025, Adolescence, revolved around the murder of a young girl. Gay romance plots have their own obstacles, most obviously the constant threat of homophobia. But without concerns specific to misogyny, or gendered power dynamics, women can watch or read these lovers’ entanglements without getting tangled up in them themselves. In the case of Heated Rivalry, not passing the Bechdel Test is a turn-on.

But while the series is highly sexed, it is also highly fraught. Much of the Heated Rivalry’s eroticism stems from the central couple’s separation: sending texts while in different countries, or pining for each other across a rink. Neither Ilya nor Hudson are open about their sexuality with their friends, teammates or family. With each other, however, their longing is explicit. And almost everyone I ask uses the same word to explain their love of the show: “yearning.”

Sam and Emma, both 28, are gently wafting themselves with fans, which have Shane and Ilya’s naked chests accordioned across them. “Lots of people are embarrassed to want someone,” Emma says. “They’ve made it okay,” Sam agrees, “Both of them were yearning before they ever said they liked each other.” Yearning has become a defining term for teens and twenty-somethings online, with Google searches for the word doubling in the past year. As a generation who have dumbfounded their elders by having less sex than ever – despite unparalleled access to it – their sexual appetites are defined not by satiation, but by hunger.

A lot of the songs at Heated Rivalrave describe unfulfilled want: “party 4 u” by Charli XCX, “Dancing on My Own” by Robyn. A thousand people scream “I feel so untouched right now,” as the characters glowing above them exchange potent eye contact over a cigarette. Some women I talk to note how refreshing it is to see such representation of a gay love story. But the carnal screams which persist throughout the night are not those of a crowd ruminating on the diversification of media. “To see vulnerable masculinity in the mainstream is quite rare,” one girl shouts. It is hard to hear her over the sound of Usher singing “Daddy’s home”. “I think it speaks to what women want: to be listened to, to be respected.” As I lean forward to listen, the screen behind her comes into view. Ilya is reclined on a sofa, Shane’s head obscuring the lower part of his muscled torso. His eyes shut in ecstasy, and the crowd goes wild below.

[Further reading: London succumbs to the hamburger revolution]