douched & dangerous

i don't think i've read or talked about one exactly like that, though i have posted a little about how this bit in stickhandling by moonlitgarden really bodied me:

initially i was really knocked out by the framing of the locker room showers as this punishing place where performance of cisheteromasculinity gets surveilled and enforced, so ilya making this open expression of desire in that setting is this shocking and compelling thing. and that's the aspect i've posted about in the past. but when i revisited it i was more surprised by the fact that the author doesn't actually put it a strict binary as i'd remembered it. they give us a spectrum from this chaotic torturous youth leagues environment (characterized by threatening scrutiny, so shane looks away to avoid being noticed) to the sterile, orderly, fully disciplined-into-cisheteromasculinity environment of professional locker rooms (characterized by routine devoid of any charge of any valence), and shane and ilya's desire lives in "an in-between" where you can look and have it returned. there are still risks but the risk is not that you might look and be punished but that you might look and like it.

obviously the locker room shower scene in the book (and consequently the show) is a locker room shower scene in part because it's a convention of the hockey romance genre, it's a natural fantasy setting within that genre. so it's also interesting to me when fics comment specifically on that fantasy aspect as diegetic. that is to say, it's a fantasy convention for us as readers, but it's also a fantasy for the characters. for example, this bit from from cut to the feeling by Charlotte_Stant. for context, this is a 13-going-on-30 type premise where 18-year-old, full-closet shane wakes up in his post-retirement married life and is trying to figure out how the hell he got there:

so here, the shower scene (which for textual shane is a fantasy scenario, but we know it to be adjacent to what happened in-universe) is explicitly impossible within the framework and precedent of his experiences in the locker room (an expression and realization of desire "in the showers [doesn't] make any sense"). part of that impossibility, the heightened imagery of steam everywhere, gives it this hazy visuality that puts it in this dream dimension. the focus on the steam is actually super interesting given the lack of dialogue (both here and in the sexual parts of the actual shower scene), since it gives it a striking similarity to a steam room cruising scene, both aesthetically and in terms of the unhesitant pacing, which is really only broken in the book/show by shane's "not here", this little interjection that pops the bubble of the fantasy by reinscribing the shower as a space where queer eroticism and sexuality can't exist (or at least be acknowledged), nor can it be enacted. not "no" (we can't be sexual together) but "not here" (we can't be sexual together in this environment, even if no one is here but us, whether or not anyone else is likely to come in).

in general i find it super compelling when people talk or write about a tension between hockey (as signified by its spaces, practices, and rituals) and queerness not just in a "you can't be gay......you play hockey" way, or even a "you're gay and also you play hockey" way, but with interest in the actual eroticism of the sport and its settings and sensations. hockey can be mostly set dressing in the books and the writing of the show and that's fine too, but it feels like a missed opportunity! and even in the fanfics, there can be a tendency to dismiss hockey as something that's tangential (particularly with ilya and the "ilya doesn't really give a shit about hockey" reading) or as exclusively oppressive/forbidding (with both of them but especially with shane and the "hockey isn't fun anymore and he's just going through the motions he's memorized" school of thought). i don't personally find either of these reads super convincing wrt the characters, but again, they also miss a lot of chances for exploration.

it's really interesting to take "hockey is foreplay for shane and ilya" (which we get in the show text) and push it to "hockey is sex for shane and ilya" (which we also get somewhat in the show text) and then land on "hockey is sex to begin with and the taboo of experiencing that honestly is both a source of tension and part of the charge". take, for example, this really fun little aside, again from cut to the feeling by Charlotte_Stant:

you get this fascinating tension in just a few lines. getting slammed into the boards? regular and not subject to scrutiny. watching old tapes of yourself getting slammed into the boards? regular and not subject to scrutiny. the thing left implicit, the thing that makes this factually accurate, totally anodyne description of what shane's doing into a tense, furtive little lie-by-omission is that it's hot to him. getting slammed and watching and thinking about it later is sexy. so the issue isn't the action (people are slamming and getting slammed, people are watching their tapes of it back) but the internal experience you have during and about it. what you're thinking while watching. how you feel about it. if you're only looking to think about the technique and gameplay, or if it additionally gets you hard or makes you horny. i think it's especially interesting when fic writers explicitly eroticize that taboo, that getting slammed while being reminded that it's disgusting to experience hockey as an erotic space is actually like the hottest thing that can happen to you, like in this bit from the world-famous-to-me trans girl shane fic dustbowl by thathastu:

not to be like "the source text!" bc whatever, this so fandom and i'm playing in the space. but there's a line in the books about how it wouldn't be totally unforgivable to be gay in hockey, but it would cross the line into "perverted" if people knew that the NHL's headliner "rivals" were "very familiar with each other's dicks", that it would be this freakish prurient spectacle if everyone knew shane and ilya were fucking each other when they're competitors. when shane comes out to his parents and his mom asks if he ever let ilya win it gets played off quickly ("do you ever let dad win at cards?") but that's the read, y'know? are you compromising the integrity of the sport for dick? is this just a perverted little sex game for you? are you thinking and caring about the right things when you do it, and if not, can you really be performing as you're supposed to?

and obviously the temptation is to be like "hockey and queerness are separate", or to argue that they can compartmentalize them and that it's reductive and homophobic to suggest otherwise, but i think that, idk, cedes some really interesting ground? is sort of an uninteresting read that doesn't do much to dig into the structure of the taboo? like basically the most simplistic queer theory reading you can get from the kind of sedgwick school is that modern homosocial relations between men, as in spaces like sports or fraternities, are fundamentally structured by a binary homosexual/heterosexual definition that requires the denial/rejection of homosexuality through which to build and practice acceptable bonds. so in sedgwick, you often get this triangulation through heterosexual competition (e.g. you relate intimately to a man through competing for a woman) but here you get, like. you relate intimately to a man through competing for The Cup. and it's fine if it's charged and intimate and you're totally devoted to it and it is the focus of your life. but if you even for a second say the quiet part out loud and acknowledge that it is erotic, that's a perversion of the intimate rituals and a violation of the rules of the space.

so the relief of it all is like, playing hockey is sexy to shane and ilya. beating one another and being beaten is sexy to them. beating other people when they're playing on the same team is sexy. it's taboo to find playing hockey sexy so you have to pretend it's not so no one will notice you're hard as hell about it, but the thrill of it is that when they're together, they both know. even if no one else does.

through that lens, yes, being two generational talents on rival teams is this source of scrutiny and surveillance that seems to make their relationship impossible. but it's also something that lets them connect with each other (sexually, mentally, emotionally) in a way that doesn't necessarily seem accessible for them outside of that context. shane and ilya being together allows them to sort of fully experience this erotic dimension of hockey that would be furtive and limited (or even closed off) to them otherwise. hockey has always been sex, but it's by being able to acknowledge it to each other that they're able to really give themselves over to this transcendent experience of it, and reciprocally to the experience of loving each other.

it's like that greta gerwig frances ha monologue but it's like:

and even more so, it's that little prose poem (written by someone who has since deactivated so i can only link a rb not the original) it's like

love these points, particularly citing plausible deniability as entwined with queer codes in this ambiguous overlap between homosocial restriction and cruising flourishing within restriction. the link @knifeeater draws between the two actually cracks open a point i've been really interested in, which is how shane and ilya communicate, which is a key driver of tension on the show. as @charybdiscreations puts it:

this is a really useful read of how shane and ilya's internal experiences, personal histories, and neurotypes shape the ways they communicate/interpret. however, i think @knifeeater raises a great point that we're also seeing a tension coming out of different social codes being used by both characters. the continuity of scripts and signals used in homosocial environments with their erotic appropriation in cruising crates this shielded space of queer agency, but it can also circumscribe limits on consciousness, awareness, and ability to act within and beyond the space.

@fresh-bag-of-ham has this great post that really cracks open what is actually being negotiated in the tuna melt scene. To quote:

There's a mindset in certain male homosocial environments where you can be young, horny, get up to whatever with your equally young and horny pals, fool around, tell yourself you're just "blowing off steam" or whatever, and the fact that you will grow up and settle down with a woman will still remain unquestioned. This mindset considers any homosexual experiences in these environments as irrelevant, meaningless, in an entirely separate category than pursuing a woman to date, marry, etc.

both posters very correctly point out something that i failed to address, which is that sex acts are possible in homosocial spaces even outside of hazing etc, as long as they're afforded a non-acknowledgment that renders them non-erotic non-events. it's not even that queerness needs to be instantiated through speech acts and the acknowledgment of said speech acts, in order to render queer sex acts inadmissable as such. but it's further that refusal of acknowledgement renders those sex acts illegible (as sex, as acts) to the point that they don't necessarily trouble an identification with cisheteromasculinity¹. @fresh-bag-of-ham really hammers on this question of capability by asking not only: does shane have awareness of his queerness? but also, is he even able to acknowledge/contemplate his sexual experiences and relationship with ilya and thereby develop that awareness?:

[For Ilya] the question isn't really about whether or not Shane likes girls -- it's about [...] whether Shane is interested in/capable of seeing what they have as a relationship, as anything other than "a bad idea."

[...] When Ilya offers, "I like girls, but I also like you," [...] Shane [is] not able to say [t]hat he likes Ilya back. He can lie that he likes women, 'of course' he likes women, but silence re: liking men/Ilya.

@fresh-bag-of-ham discusses this capabiltiy largely in relation to shane's internal processes of introspection vs. denial, that is, is shane emotionally ready to acknowledge his and ilya's desire for each other and to incorporate that into his self-understanding?:

He has not reckoned with his attraction to men/Ilya in relation to his self-perception at all [...]

[...] when Ilya slips up and uses Shane's first name and Shane responds in kind, Shane is confronted with the idea that what they're doing isn't some kind of "blowing off steam" mutually meaningless whatever thing [...] it throws water on all Shane's self-delusions.

to this very thoughtful reading, i'd like to additionally submit that the obstacle being negotiated here is not simply self-delusion (insofar as self-delusion can be simple) emerging from shane's specific psyche and histories, but is also a facilitated delusion shaped by the limits on what sex acts can mean within the homosocial script of plausible deniability. furthermore, i'd say that the miscommunication is exacerbated by the fact that ilya has been communicating within this plausible deniability/cruising continuum where queer sexuality can be made to pass under the auspices of "just fooling around", whereas i would say shane is NOT working in that register at all².

all to say plausible deniability is an important tactic that can be agentively deployed in a homosocial space (e.g. as ilya does in the shower scene), but it also structures the way that the people in the space (most notably shane in this example) can or will interpret the experience and assign meaning or lack thereof to it. and those structures of understanding get carried to other spaces outside the homosocial environment and shape how you can and do show up there.

something i really like about the tuna melt post, especially when read in full, is that the author points out that core discrepancies in how shane and ilya conceive of (or are even able to conceive of) their sexual experiences together only come to the fore and clash only at the point that ilya tries to move whatever he and shane have going on from this schema of isolated hookups (which shane can atomize as a series of circumstantial one-offs if he really ignores the timeframe) to the acknowledgement that they are/have already been engaged in a continuous relationship based on shared attraction.

fanposts sometimes use the rhetoric of ilya "changing the rules" on shane in the boston hookup by introducing new behaviors (e.g. the sleeping over, cooking for shane, etc.). but there's also a shift in the rules of how shane's is asked to interpret his reality writ large. to meet ilya where he's at would require shane to not only fundamentally alter how he's thinking of his feelings towards ilya (as mediated by a fundamental core of desire rather then momentary lapses on judgment), but also to reframe the previous however many years of his reality. i wish i could find the excerpt, but there's a great interview quote where hudson talks about shane hitting ilya with the ottawa plan where he says something like "shane doesn't really plan ahead, he just shows up wherever he's supposed to be and focuses on the task in front of him". and that tunnel vision is a very useful trait to cultivate when you're an overmanaged, tokenized, hyperscrutinized phenom in an environment like pro hockey, but it definitely enables and entrenches this denial, where shane never has to puzzle out the significance of a nearly decade-long entanglement if he simply tells himself every time that it's a meaningless one-off nothing, and the last one this time for sure.

all this to say, the tactics that enable queer survival and desire in specific high-risk, highly surveilled homosocial environments can be this great seizure of agency and assertion of desire in a context that is structured to curtail, surveil, and forbid the same. however, that doesn't necessarily get you out of the saw trap of internalizing the environment and its culture and rules, and the effects of internalization aren't inherently confined to bad feeling. one of my favorite undergrad profs used to say that one of the concepts that people struggled with the most in their work was the idea that feelings don't just come from within you, that contexts and relations of power not only make you feel in the sense that you have reactions to them, but in that they can shape what you are able to feel, and the terms in which you are able to name and interpret experience.

so the constitution of reality that the homosocial culture of hockey rests on/demands (not only that queer sexuality is forbidden, but that it is fundamentally impossible within that space regardless of the presence or absence of sex acts) isn't just a conscious game of pretend that's isolated to the time the characters spend in those spaces; it actively seeps into the rest of life and reshapes it. and it's not just about your own life. as we see with shane and ilya, the internalization of these realities can fundamentally shape your relationships to other queer people with whom you might find some kind of respite; it can even place limits on the ways in which and extent to which you're able to connect and relate.

so you get this fundamental conflict, right? you can have this desire that's forbidden in that space, and not really be able to see or touch it even as you're acting on it. so that's another piece of why "i can't keep pretending i don't like you" is this huge catharsis; it's suddenly possible to access and name this piece of the self and of reality that you didn't know all your energy was going into walling off. it's this open hand out for love and care that you might not even have had the capacity to build before.

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1. I think this sometimes sounds like an absurd thing to say if you've never had this experience yourself but I have met enough older straight-identifying men who will happily disclose that they've had habitual, consistent sexual encounters with men (especially in the past) to be like oh this is just an experience people have and it doesn't present a fundamental incompatibility with their sense of self.

2. Honestly think there's an argument to be made that Shane working exclusively in this register is due in part to learning the social scripts that are For Hockey Spaces to use With Other Players and having trouble incorporating other potential registers of meaning. i'd say this is probably exacerbated by the history of mixed signals from ilya that other people have noted. however, i find the contextual nature of these very fixed scripts conceptually useful for making sense of the fact that shane is able to clock flirtation and expressions of interest from men in other contexts (e.g. in both the book and the show he appears to clock that the bartender at the restaurant where he first meets rose is being lightly flirtatious.

for me, this introduces a really interesting dimension of differently experienced and negotiated risk for shane versus ilya in homosocial spaces like the locker room. as other people have noted, ilya is allowed much more room to present and act outside the masculine norms of north american hockey culture. the persona (the "just an act") he's been assigned and has cultivated expands the bounds of his plausible deniability: if he dresses flamboyantly it's not suspect because he's russian, if he flirts with or touches other men (the rink kiss, the 'you look very pretty') it's because he's a shithead who's fucking with other players to emasculate them. ilya can risk an expression of desire and have the wiggle room to play it off. not that being subject to xenophobia or turned into a character for league pr to profit off of are privileged positions, but they do enable types of leeway. (i'll try to go back when it's not so late and cite some examples of posts people have made about how ilya gets stereotyped in hockey but i know @steveyockey has posted a bit about this).