In Game Changers, Kip Grady works in a juice bar and quietly hates his life when he meets famous hockey player Scott Hunter. Scott comes in to the bar several times and chats to Kip, and it takes Kip a while to realise Scott is hitting on him. The two embark on a relationship and though they get along like a house on fire, Kip wants more: he wants to be out, to be seen with Scott, not hidden away in his fancy apartment like a guilty pleasure. Scott understands, but the number of out professional athletes is thin on the ground – particularly in hockey, where it’s common to use homophobic slurs. Will the two manage to find a balance?
In Heated Rivalry, we see more of the same. Shane Hollander is a promising young hockey player with a strong focus on his career. Everything is going swimmingly, except for one thing: his arch rival, Russian player Ilya Rozanov. It doesn’t take Shane long to realise that there might be more than one reason he can’t get Rozanov off his mind – and he gets the distinct impression that Rozanov feels the same way about him…
Both of these books have very little substance, to be honest. There is a meet-cute (book 1) or an enemies to lovers plot (book 2), a lot of very graphic descriptions of sex and a lot of talk about how much they mean to each other. I’m not a prude, but the sex scenes weren’t my cup of tea, really; they began to feel repetitive quite quickly, particularly in Heated Rivalry. Where the books strike a chord, though, is with their frank discussion that, though we might consider ourselves to be progressive, being gay and being something as masculine as a professional hockey player don’t always go together in our minds and that coming out is simply easier for some than it is for others.
I recently read an interview with Nicholás Keenan, a professional (field) hockey player. Keenan is bisexual. He also happens to be engaged to the Dutch prime minister, Rob Jetten. Jetten is the leader of a progressive party and has been out for his entire political career; the sort of people who vote for his party either don’t have an issue with his sexuality, or pride themselves on the fact that they’re okay with it. When his party defeated the right-wing populists last year, the entire left and centre of the nation gave itself a sympathetic back-pat (“see how far we’ve come?”), and the fact that for the first time, we have an openly gay prime minister was put front and centre. But the truth is that the margin between the progressives and the populists is uncomfortably narrow, and that a lot of the criticism that Jetten gets thrown at his head focuses on his sexuality (there’s a video of him reading out the homophobic threats and slurs people send him). His predecessor, Mark Rutte, is a perpetual bachelor who keeps his private life under wraps; one can imagine the gay jokes and illusions made about that. Keenan, meanwhile, kept his relationship hidden for a long time because he felt that being a queer athlete would bring scorn and shame. Apparently, after watching the TV adaptation of these books, he called to make his apologies to his partner for keeping insisting on keeping things a secret for so long.
It’s hard for me to comment on that aspect of the books because I’m not queer, but it’s entirely possible these books mean a lot more to some people than they do for me. It’s not a layer that you’ll find in these books, necessarily, or at least not one that is explored with any depth, but it’s nonetheless a refreshing idea to set a gay romance within one of the most machismo-heavy sports on earth. It’s a theme I’d like to see an author treat with more delicacy, which isn’t a criticism of these books per sé: they are what they are, they don’t aim to be LITERATURE that shakes the foundations of our society to its core. They’re cute and they’re original, and they’re repetitive and a little shallow. They could have been more, but perhaps they don’t need to be.
