#skip grady

Shane: "F*cks sake, Rozanov! This is my smoothie! You already drank yours!"

Ilya: "It's not my fault you're so slow, Hollander. Let me help you out."

Scott: "Told you they'd fight over your smoothies, love."

Kip: "Haha! They really ARE that competitive!"

What Heated Rivalry does is something next level though. Every queer main character has a female friend whose role in the development of his romantic relationship is instrumental except for Scott, who gets to borrow his boyfriend Kip's, whether he wants her or not.

The most organic of these relationships is between Ilya and his longtime friend and sometimes lover, Svetlana. Svetlana has known Ilya for most of his life. Their fathers were friends. She knows his lived experience because she's lived it alongside him. She offers understanding, acceptance, and gentle encouragement when Ilya needs it. What is particularly interesting about Svetlana is that her gender almost doesn't matter initially. She could theoretically have provided all this to Ilya if she had been a man; the only difference is that the sexual component of their relationship carries less censure in Russia.

What Rose offers Shane goes well beyond support. Not only does she conclude that he is gay on the basis of no evidence other than that he does not seem to enjoy sex with her, but her conclusion translates into Shane's epiphany about his sexuality. The change in how he sees his relationship with Ilya afterwards is drastic and immediate. Nothing that happens between the two men facilitates this transformation more than Shane's conversation with his girlfriend of a couple of months.

There are a couple of things about this that make do make sense. One is that, because their relationship is socially sanctioned, Shane is able to spend more time with Rose than he ever has with Ilya. There's not a lot of time for talking in depth about your feelings when your relationship involves playing a game of hockey against each other, fucking in a hotel room, and then not seeing each other for six to twelve months. Additionally, while Rose is not a gay man herself, she works in a profession where gay men have historically had much more freedom to be themselves than in hockey. She knows many gay men; apparently the only man who is attracted to men that Shane knows is the one he's fucking! Even if Shane already knows he's gay, which seems far more likely than the alternative, Rose is more comfortable saying it out loud.

But these aspects of Rose's relationship with Shane make Elena's relationship with Kip, and her confrontation of Scott, all the more bizarre. While Shane is isolated from other queer men, Kip is an art history scholar who watches Scott's hockey games with his friends in a gay bar. He's also significantly older than Shane and Ilya, and Scott is older still. There is no comparative lack of opportunity for Kip to talk to his lover; they live together. Yet we see none of the emotionally intimate kinds of conversations between them that Ilya and Shane have in later episodes. Of course, the characters in this B plot have less screentime, but for some reason there is time for a five minute near monologue from Elena to Scott about what Kip deserves. The episode in which that happens end with Scott sadly watching Kip's birthday party from the street outside. The next time we see him and Kip together, they're kissing on the ice on live television. Not exactly the "sunshine" Elena ordered, but the limelight is pretty close.

We're still camped out at the cottage, so let's all revisit every episode of our beloved Canadian-funded queer hockey show with a super special guest: Konner's best friend and sister-in-law, Veronica!

She settles a few host disagreements, gives Skip a lot more airtime than we originally did, and helps us hand out some superlatives.

Get into it!

Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts and Spotify