Is hockey romance homophobic?

Yes.

Okay, wait. Let's take a step back. And also sort this essay into manageable parts, because it's a complex topic and deserves to be thought about in a complex way.

1. (men's) hockey is homophobic

When discussing hockey as a subject material, the big, glaring elephant in the room is that the culture surrounding men's hockey is extremely conservative. Not only is this visible in the recent US men's Olympics win, when the team partied with Kash Patel and later visited the White House under Donald Trump, it's been visible for years in a variety of ways:

Hockey is the whitest of the big sports in the USA; players of color have discussed the abuse they receive from fans and from other players for years. See: this excerpt on Willie Oree, the first Black man to play in the NHL; the way Ethan Bear, the first indigenous man to play in the NHL, was treated by fans; the Islamophobia and death threats directed against Nazem Kadri. Jason Robertson, one of the few players of Filipino descent, was snubbed from the Olympic team this year despite being one of the highest-scoring players in the league.

Hockey players are known for their violent (literally) misogyny: recently, a case against players known as the "Hockey Canada Five" alleged that five players on Canada's World Juniors team assaulted a woman in a hotel room, and that Hockey Canada (a tax-funded sports organization) paid a settlement to the survivor. The case was tried in court and the five men were acquitted. However, following the case revealed that all five men did engage in sexual acts with an inebriated woman, and in fact seven more team members were present. The judge ruled that the survivor could not prove the events that occurred can be termed as sexual assault. All five have returned to professional hockey following this incident. To date, only one of them has returned to the NHL: Carter Hart now plays for the Vegas Knights.

And this is just one of many alleged incidents. If you want to give up on men's hockey in disgust, look up Artemi Panarin. Or Evander Kane. Or Patrick Kane (no relation to the previous). I could go on. Of course, all of these incidents were settled out of court or the accused party won and, in turn, accused their accuser of defamation. I can't claim to be deep enough in the material to know the exact truth of what happened in each situation; I can say that when a rich man is charged with sexual violence and he, along with every other rich man in his field, is found not guilty, I retain some doubts about the veracity of those verdicts. Money can and does buy innocence all the time.

Much like all other axes of oppression, homophobia in men's hockey is widely known to be a problem. From the NHL banning the use of Pride tape in 2023 to Radko Gudas using a homophobic slur on ice at the 2026 Olympics to players like the Staal brothers refusing to wear Pride jerseys for warmups on theme nights for religious reasons, there has been no shortage of public incidents to alert fans and media to how a large percentage of players feel about the LGBTQIA+ community.

This isn't to say there are no gleams of light. Many of the Edmonton Oilers used Pride Tape despite the ban in 2023. Tyler Seguin, a man who was previously mostly known for partying and a naked photoshoot on a Zamboni, joined Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Darnell Nurse regularly participates in literacy campaigns. There's a documentary coming out soon about Luke Prokop, the only out gay player with an NHL contract (although he plays in the AHL, not the NHL - this is not uncommon necessarily, a lot of players get drafted by an NHL team but never play for the NHL. Which of course doesn't mean homophobia isn't the reason he hasn't cracked an NHL roster). Nick Suzuki, the captain of the Montreal Canadiens, says his team is ready for an out teammate.

And it's also very important to remember that this is about men's hockey. Women's hockey is an entirely different situation. There are conservative players there, too, but the conversation is completely different and the rise of the PWHL is a wonderful thing.

2. hockey fans and fandom

As with all fandoms, the range of fandom is diverse. Lots of people love the CW show Supernatural, but if you spend a lot of time online you might be convinced the majority viewership was cisgender women aged 18-35 from the get-go. And while this became true especially in later seasons, it also had a huge viewership among rural audiences. Who are, of course, largely conservative. For a show like Supernatural, it was politic to queerbait, because a conservative audience not looking for it wouldn't notice and an audience looking for shippable material was ready to take every sign the showrunners gave them.

Similarly, depending on what corner of the internet you frequent, you could be forgiven for thinking hockey fans are largely a) politically moderate or conservative men (reddit), b) politically progressive women between 18-35 who are overinvested in the relationships of men they've never met (tumblr, ao3). Going onto Instagram, Threads, X, or any other major social network reveals mostly that hockey fans are loud.

The thing about fandom, though, is that regardless of your own political position, a lot of fans take in the thing they are fans of and make it part of their own personality. For the conservative man on Reddit talking about how Mitch Marner is too soft for the playoffs, it is integral to his identity that hockey is a hard sport for hard men and that's why he's a fan. For the female fan who saw Mitch Marner and Auston Matthews singing along to Living on a Prayer on the bench at an impressionable age, it is integral to her identity that she, as a woman, has been criticized for being soft and kind, but these professional athlete men she is a fan of can be soft and friendly with each other as well. (I am working so hard to not make a pun about how they can be hard in other contexts because I really don't want to talk about RPF).

In a very real way, that puts anyone who is courting a fanbase (which hockey players very much are - ask Mitch Marner or Auston Matthews one more time about how they feel about the Toronto fanbase or the Marner trade and watch them die inside a little more) in a position of not wanting to reveal too much about themselves. Out yourself as conservative or progressive and you're losing a fan. Out yourself as gay and you're losing a lot of fans, and potentially the support of your teammates.

Of course, some people don't care: the Staal brothers don't mind people knowing they are homophobes. Connor McDavid doesn't mind people knowing he's not (though he is also a Morgan Wallen fan, so he can't be that progressive). But by and large, many hockey players keep a bland and apolitical tone with the media. Which may even be who they really are; another thing money can buy is the privilege of not caring about politics.

But fans like to believe the best of the thing they are fans of--after all, it's part of their identity now. And the NHL makes it easy to cast them as the villain in every story with things like the Pride tape ban, accusations against some GMs and coaches for similar reasons as the players, and the way trades can go (sometimes very suddenly and against the player's wishes). Tt's easy for fans to retain the belief that their favorite players are good people (whatever that means to them) and hate the institution for perpetuating all the -isms.

Really, though, we just don't know what people's beliefs are. And when you've hung your own identity on who you love and who you hate in the arena you are a fan of, it's hard to view them with nuance.

Look again at Evander Kane. I mentioned him above as one of the people against whom there are a number of assault accusations. A lot of female and/or LGBTQIA+ fans write him off completely as an unmitigated monster. He's also one of the few men of color with a successful hockey career. I'm sure he's faced a ton of racism and getting to where he is was not easy; that doesn't mean the accusations are false. One person can be both the perpetrator of something awful and the victim of something else awful at the same time.

Look again at the US men's team from the Olympics. Jack and Quinn Hughes, two of the internet's favorite players, were on that team. Previously this season, they were mostly famous for starting a charity to promote children's literacy, dating Tate McRae (Jack) and either seeing ghosts or being a reincarnated Victorian child (Quinn). When they went to Trump's White House, people weren't just disappointed, they felt as though they had been lied to, because the idea of the Hughes brothers built by younger, progressive fans had been seemingly disproven.

I'm even going to shock some hockey fans here by saying: Sidney Crosby might not be the world's best human. He chooses only to share certain things with the public. Those things have given hockey fans a positive, respectful, even progressive impression - but we don't know for sure unless "we" happen to be close personal friends or relations of Crosby's, in which case I am mystified as to why you're reading this essay. I mean no disrespect to Crosby, everything I do know about him seems great, I just mean that he is a public figure who is careful about what he shares of himself and that is okay.

3. stanning hockey romance and hockey players

Hockey romance as a sub-sub-genre of the romance subgenre sports romance is wildly popular. Why is that? Well, it's very white. That sure helps. I've also posted another essay about the other things that make hockey romance very suitable for romance, and I mostly stand by that (players in different positions get typecast into different romance archetypes easily; NHL schedules and team structures enable some fun tropes like workplace romance, there was only one bed, etc. etc.). But I wrote that essay when I was trying to be non-confrontational and non-critical of things and I am now too old and grumpy to continue with that.

So anyway. Hockey is very convenient to romance authors and readers, very many of whom are white cisgender women. A fairly large amount of these authors and readers are also progressive, or at least want to court progressive audiences. Setting your fictional romance series in a hockey team is an easy way to circumvent the modern dilemma of whether to write/read diversely as a white author/reader.

Hockey teams are a great place to avoid diversity because they are, as discussed, not particularly diverse. Also, because of how the intersect of romance fans and hockey fans view players, the villain of a lot of hockey romances can easily be The Institution of Hockey. The misogyny can be portrayed by an evil teammate who assaults women, while the hero of the story knows better than to treat women that way. The racism can be mentioned by a minor character of color who has no other lines, or perpetrated by a mean coach. The homophobia can either be not addressed at all in M/F romance, or be the whole plot in M/M romance.

This means that when writing a hockey romance, the hockey player character you're writing needs to be above the aspects of hockey culture your assumed audience thinks are morally unacceptable. And that means hockey romance has a certain tendency to perpetuate this idea of the individual hockey player, who is a Good Person, living under the evil dominion of Hockey Culture, which perpetuates Bad Values.

And there are some things to be said for that. The reader is given a moral compass for the works they're reading and it's often a pretty progressive one. More progressive even than most real hockey players'. The fictional, idealized version of hockey is "further along" than the real NHL. The hockey romance protagonists are the good guys in a bad place (much like the military romance protagonists and the small town agricultural worker romance protagonists and do you know I am sensing a theme here that might be worth exploring).

But at the same time, are we not perpetuating some thing? Like having almost only white characters? And...what about homophobia? The thing this essay was purportedly about?

4. hockey romance and homophobia

For those of you who live far away from civilization and have somehow snagged internet access to view this essay and nothing else, hockey romance has exploded in popularity in recent months with the Heated Rivalry TV adaptation. And with it has come a tidal wave of discourse.

"Is Rachel Reid racist and ableist for the way she writes about Shane Hollander, a gay, half-Japanese hockey star, who is confirmed as autistic by the author and the actor, but not by the text?" "Is Rachel Reid homophobic for writing about queer men having sex while being a cis woman married to a cis man?" "Is society at large homophobic for preferring a woman's narrative about queer men to an own voice story?" "Is any negative commentary Hudson Williams receives on his acting actually racism in disguise?" "Is Francois Arnaud dating a co-star, and if so, does that make him a bad person for...reasons, I guess?"

I do not think any of us can give a definitive answer to any of these questions. There are a lot of things worth exploring here and also a lot of things that really, truly aren't. "Should cisgender white women be writing about queer men's experiences, especially queer men of color" is a big one that has long haunted the M/M romance space and there are a lot of very different takes on it, many of which I think are valid in their own ways. I wrote another essay about this, too, actually, and I also stand by most of what I said there. (Tl;dr: it's really complicated and if you don't want to read books not by own voice authors I understand and support you, but I also think we all have our reasons for writing what we do and that finding empathy and shared experiences across different lives is one of the things that draws me to writing in the first place).

I do believe strongly in using sensitivity readers for writing outside your own experience, and I do it for my books, but at the same time, I am aware that in the almost-decade since Reid first put out her books, the conversation has changed a lot. Sensitivity readers weren't a widely-talked-about phenomenon in romance publishing at the time the way they are now. I am also a big fan of Roland Barthes' Death of the Author and I don't think people's feelings about Shane Hollander's characterization need to hinge on everything the author says and does. If you don't like how Reid talks about her characters you are permitted to simply not listen.

(I have genuinely nothing to say about the discourse surrounding the actors. I am not well enough informed, nor do I want to be.)

In the last few days, though, I've been seeing a new one circulate. "Elle Kennedy is lesbophobic". It comes along with this article, detailing the shades of misogyny and lesbophobia in Kennedy's Off Campus series, which has recently been adapted by Amazon Prime. Highlights include: one main character thinking of women as "females", one main character in an M/M novel being repeatedly convinced his bi partner will "go back to women", several instances of women being objectified, especially whilst kissing other women. And of course Kennedy herself saying she had no interest in writing an F/F novel.

Now, I haven't read or watched Kennedy's Off Campus series, nor am I likely to, and I read (and even recommended at the time) Him and Us, but remember nearly nothing of either book beyond that I was unused to reading first person at the time and it really threw me out of the text. I am very willing, based on what I have read in that article, to agree that the characters being portrayed are quite misogynistic and homophobic.

But it draws me up short when I consider this as a critique of Kennedy herself. Because showing me text excerpts where her male, hockey player characters are thinking about women, and queer women, and queer men this way, reminds me of something:

This is what a lot of hockey players are like.

Actually, this is probably a lot nicer than what a lot of hockey players are like. But the criticism being expressed against Elle Kennedy is not that her characters are accurately portraying the state of mind of hockey players and it is unpleasant to be there, it's that she herself is perpetuating misogyny and homophobia in her writing. Which, you know, I don't know. I haven't read the books--are these excerpts in the article I linked beliefs and stances the characters have to overcome? Is this where character growth begins? Or is it just a normal thing for a guy to think in the world of the Off Campus series? If the former, is it well enough handled that readers come away with an understanding of the work's political stance as progressive and anti-misogyny?

Teasing out these complexities is in my opinion a big part of what romance audiences and romance authors can work on to make the discourse surrounding these topics more productive. I think there are some great and some important romance novels to be had about characters who live in the systems of professional sports, who perpetuate all the bad we see there, and learn to better themselves. And I think there are some authors and readers out there interested in that.*

There are also authors and readers interested in visiting fictional worlds where none of these forms of prejudice have any place, and to those people I would say: that's great! There's just a big difference between that and having characters whose perspectives reveal sexism, racism, homophobia, fatphobia, ageism, ableism, and so on, but the narrative doesn't register that as a flaw--because then, what you're creating and consuming is a story that supports those things.

*(Full disclosure, that is what I tried to do with Jax Grant in my own hockey romance, Two for Holding. I started writing his character with the premise that a gay, cisgender white man might enter the NHL sensitized to homophobia, but he might not always recognize his own internalized misogyny and needs to be called on it. It's not a major plot point and not all readers liked how I handled it; looking back I might do it differently.)