In the three hours I spent at a Heated Rivalry marathon at a lesbian bar in Bushwick, the room went quiet only once. “Remember what I said about the monologue!” emcee Mary Michael shouted into the microphone as professional hockey player Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) started to confess his affection to his Canadian rival and paramour, Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams). “I have no one now,” Connor says in Russian over the phone; Shane can’t understand but listens regardless. “Well, not no one. I have Svetlana. She loves me and I love her, but not like … not like I love you,” Ilya says. Inside Boyfriend Co-op, hands covered mouths and a few patrons looked up at the ceiling, either wishing away or summoning tears.
Though the evening was advertised as a lesbian-forward event (“Sapphics love a slow burn,” the announcement read), there were a handful of gay men in the crowd, including one in a custom T-shirt decorated with the full English translation of Ilya’s monologue on the back. Viewers stopped him when the episode finished, quietly reading through the text stretched across his shoulders, even though they were likely already familiar with the speech in question. They’d watched the show as it aired throughout December and rewatched it in the nothing week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Three viewings seemed to be the magic number for most attendees, though one woman told me she watched every scene and fancam that popped up on her TikTok feed, “so maybe it’s more, when you count all those.”
