I opened Instagram and scrolled through posts on my feed. Silently giggling at memes to not wake up my roommate, peering at celebrity updates, when I suddenly came across this post.

Posted by @queerty, a drawing of two guys, peeking at each other over their shoulders. The caption? “Prince charm-ing. Your next gay smut obsession? Romance novel ‘The Charm Offensive’ is being turned into a movie with this queer star.” 

I guess my first response should have been joy; excited that another queer story was being adapted into something for the screen. I am lucky, that I live in a time where queer stories are being widely produced. Over the moon that one of the characters in the drawing is a queer person of color. 

But none of that ran through my head. I just sighed. And I sighed a really heavy sigh. One word stuck out in my mind, like gum on the sole of a shoe. Smut. Something about that word, and the sentence it was used in made me feel heavy. “Your next gay smut obsession?” 

I then realized, I’m not the audience of this adaptation. I may have been the audience for this book, but I have been shoved out of a space that was supposed to be mine.

I remember seeing “Heated Rivalry” for the first time on my Twitter, I will not call it X, months ago. It was a scene between the two main leads staring each other down in a locker room. A small sparse conversation, their eyes doing all the talking.

I didn’t think I would see a show that would be outwardly gay and have the same amount of sexual tension as an HBO series anytime soon, but I’m not complaining. I never got around to watching the show. I never had the time, or something else just interested me more to watch or engage with. 

However, what I did know was this; two hockey guys, opposing teams, hot steamy sex and the gays love it. I mean really, gay people loved this show. It would pop up on my feed every now and then, with some queer meme account posting images from the show. 

Slowly though, I saw that who was consuming the show changed. Not just that, but who was running the narrative of the fanbase of the show. Queer fanpages and outlets got shut-out for BookTok, and straight cisgender women.

I’m not trying to start a gender war here, I’m just talking about the apparent 180 the show’s audience had. I’ve been following along with this show since the start, being updated on it once in a while. I noticed that what once was other queer men telling me about the show, became straight girls. 

There’s nothing wrong with this either, if anything, I’m happy that a show so unapologetically gay and sexy as “Heated Rivalry” was being received by a larger fanbase and getting notoriety to be more than a niche queer show. 

It started getting weird though, especially once the show was reaching its end. I’ll call it what it is. The fetishization got really weird. What was conversation about the difficulties of being closested, queer representation in sports and the soft pain of being in a hidden relationship, got sidelined for “look how hot these two guys are having sex.”

These are all comments I have seen made about the show by straight women who watched the show. Nothing about queerness unless it had to do with hot, steamy sex.

Once the show ended with “I’m coming to the cottage” and “the cottage episode,” it got even weirder, and outright disgusting. One TikTok user entered a gay bar and asked patrons to kiss each other. When they did, the user would ask them if “they felt horny” afterwards. They stated they did this because they “needed more” of gay guys kissing because of “Heated Rivalry” ending. 

One Twitter user requoted a tweet from “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” the original tweet being a clip of Hudson Williams teaching Fallon a “Shane Hollander inspired stretch,” which was just them arching their backs. The user requoted saying, “I waited hours for this!!!” 

Another user on Twitter posted about people waiting for a chance to see Williams on Fallon, camping outside of The Tonight Show’s studio in New York City, with the original poster being a five hour flight away from New York City.

The blowback of the show made it very clear that the audience watching it does not want to watch or engage with the queer experience if it isn’t sexual. It makes me feel unsafe, and I’m not even involved with the show at all. It makes me worry about how people are perceiving the male leads of the show as nothing more than animatronic sex dolls. 

We are reduced to an entertainment source. An attraction for their sexual desire. And because of the success of “Heated Rivalry,” these are the stories we, the queer community, are going to receive from now on. If the show doesn’t have hot, steamy sex, why would investors bother investing in it when that was what catapulted “Heated Rivalry” into success.

It’s pervertly sick. It capitalizes on stereotypes and harmful ideologies in the queer community, profiting on our stories while pivoting its audience to someone else. The queer community has this stigma that sex is affection. To love is to have sex, and to have love without sex means the love isn’t real or impactful. 

There’s an idea that sex is the gateway to finding love in the queer community. If you’re not having sex with random people you met on an app, or you’re hooking up with the only other gay person you know, then you aren’t ever going to be in a relationship. 

The message is queer romance means nothing without sex. Sex is what makes love important and real, when that isn’t the case. If that’s the message you are marketing to an already vulnerable community who has been told that repeated message over and over again, you’re harping on harmful dogma.

If you only put out love stories of gay men having sex, that’s fetishization. If the story is only being produced because the gay sex is the appeal, that’s fetishization. If you’re producing the story because the gay sex turned up a larger audience, that’s fetishization.

Selfishly, as a gay man, I don’t want these stories to be the only stories we have. As I, and probably many other gay men are trying to break down the social stigma of sexual fantasies not only within the queer community but within ourselves, having queer sex being the only gratification for audiences to engage with queer media is dehumanizing. 

It dismisses both the joys and struggles of being a queer person, for people to indulge in sexual fantasies. You want our fantasy that many others wish could be their reality.

I want corny Hallmark Christmas movies that are queer. I want off-beat comedy shows like “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” or “Superstore” that are embedded with queer culture. I want queer dramas, comedies and horror movies. But we aren’t going to get those shows and media if queer representation doesn’t evolve past the necessity of hot, steamy sex to keep audiences engaged because that’s how they view us.

I think “Heated Rivalry” does a lot of good, I do think it is a good story. I do recognize that some of the smut is relevant to the story. And it’s not “Heated Rivalry” itself that I have a problem with, it’s the audience and their response to this show. I bet “The Charm Offensive” is charming, but if it’s our “new smut obsession,” then I already know that I am not the audience it is trying to pander to. 

I have no interest in engaging with media that is trying to exclude me in a space that is supposed to be my own. I want to be able to be myself without fearing if someone is going to come up to me and ask if I’m a top or bottom. Or worse, if I’m more “Shane Hollander or Ilya Rozanov.” I don’t want to be reduced down to a stereotype because that’s all you know about queer culture while “tutoring” me on what it means to be queer, as if I wouldn’t know.

If you consider yourself an ally, please consider the media you are consuming and why it is being produced. If you are seeking out sexual fantasy over story, I implore you to ask yourself why. If you recognize the problem, I ask you to help us with the solution. 

Stick to the stories that provide depth to the queer experience. Advocate, alongside us, for representation that doesn’t bastardize queer culture. Educate yourself, watch “Paris Is Burning,” I beg of you. And don’t be a pervert and treat gay men like circus animals for your entertainment. Most of the times it’s sexual harassment.