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In my late 30s, I don't consider myself a "queer elder," but I have consumed a massive quantity of male same-sex romance and erotica. I don't think there's a lot of any of it in a language I can read/comprehend that I haven't yet come across. M/M romance has very directly shaped my sense of self as a queer transmasculine adult (the fujoshi to ftm pipeline, as they say). In my teens, growing up in the US, it was hard to come by without clever use of eBay, sketchy download sites, and inter-library loans. When Brokeback Mountain appeared in theaters, I remember goggling at the film poster, shocked and secretly delighted that it looked like it might be gay. There was always something profoundly humane about queer sex and love in art as I knew it in my formative years, because it was so non-mainstream, most of the time, and even when it slid into fame like Brokeback did, everyone who participated in the creative process stood to lose money, fans, and become pigeonholed if not condemned for what they had created. Humans making and sharing art is not just an inherently human act, but also one of deep vulnerability, and homoeroticism on screen in particular (because of the immediacy and universality of the format) has been a supreme illustration of that vulnerability, which art audiences join if they fall in love with that piece of art.

There are many more options for male-male sex and love onscreen in 2025, but also a sense of escalating danger for us queers and everyone else as surveillance capitalism joins hands, inevitably, with surveillance states flying various political flags but united in their willingness to sacrifice universal human dignity if not humanity itself for the hallucination of endless profit. So-called AI is the latest and most galling example yet of where we are in late-stage capitalism: people who have hoarded mind-blowing resources for themselves worshipping the efficiency and productivity of a predictably flawed, faulty machine without asking what the efficiency and productivity is for, or whom and what it destroys. In my view, "AI" boosters have entirely lost sight of human beings and the world that allows us to live, by exhausting the land and air and water that, last I checked, we all do still need to survive, billionaires included, as much as some of them might want to become immortal brains in vats.

This is why I have watched Heated Rivalry with great enjoyment and excitement though I rarely consume television. It's lovingly made (the jersey designs alone show the amount of thought and care, but also winking cheekiness, poured into the production); it showcases truly virtuosic acting performances; it's longform, not delivered in tiny blips engineered to hook our dopamine systems; it's released in installations, uniting us over it in time.

But most importantly of all in 2025, it's a slap in the fucking face to several bundled assumptions that we should all struggle against while we still can. The first is that all kinds of people can't revel together in the joy of a work of art and would prefer only a algorithmically engineered IV drip to match their exact previous preferences. The second, that machines can "do art more efficiently" and therefore, better. The third, that men who want to love and fuck other men are unnatural, unlovable, a sign of decay, or can't draw audiences.