Real-life ice hockey player Jesse Korteum has credited the hit romance drama series Heated Rivalry, about two closeted competitors in the sport, for inspiring him to come out as gay.
Korteum, from Minnesota, said in a new social media post that he spent his career on the ice rink as a closeted athlete struggling to “reconcile two identities,” but the TV show had encouraged him to share his story publicly.
The athlete, who has competed as a defenseman/center in several leagues, though not the NHL, explained that he was out to his close friends and family, but did not feel safe enough to tell his teammates about his sexuality.
“Those who know me best know that I don’t share much if anything publicly on social media, but lately, something has sparked in me (ok — yes credit to #HeatedRivalry). I realized it is finally time to share a journey I have kept close to the vest for a long time,” he wrote.
Korteum said that the ice hockey rink was a place where he felt he had to “hide parts of myself for far too long” growing up as the youngest of four boys in competitive sport.
“As a young teenager, I carried a weight that did not seem to fit into that world, and I lived in a constant state of dichotomy,” he continued. “I loved the game, but I lived with a persistent fear. I wondered how I could be gay and still play such a tough and masculine sport.”
Kortuem also said there was little “positive representation in the media” and that coming out in high school in the 2000s would have been a “social disaster”.
Kortuem added that when he was playing as an adult and living in New York and Atlanta, he was “out to many people around me in my life at that point,” but not his teammates.
He continued: “I spent every week in a locker room with guys I respected, yet I still did not feel safe enough to tell them who I truly was.”
In the post, he thanked Cutting Edges, a Vancouver-based LGBT+ hockey association, for reminding him “there is room for all of us on the ice.”
Heated Rivalry, which follows two closeted gay and bisexual professional hockey players as they grapple with how their romance will affect their careers, has taken the internet by storm and rocked the ice hockey community.
One of the show’s leads, Hudson Williams, who portrays hockey player Shane Hollander, revealed that week he had received heartfelt messages from multiple closeted professional athletes after the hockey romance series went viral.
“The people who reach out, somewhat anonymously, who are like, ‘I’m a professional player still, and I’m still in the closet,’” Williams said on Andy Cohen’s SiriusXM show Radio Andy.
The actor said the show was “hitting people right in the nerve” as athletes from across different sports, including football players and basketball players, had reached out to him.
Heated Rivalry’s season one finale aired last month, bringing an end to the six weeks that skyrocketed the show to record-breaking fame. The series, based on Rachel Reid’s book series Game Changers, has already been renewed for a second season on Crave/HBO Max. The programme was released in the UK on Sky this week.
The NHL has never had an openly gay player. But 23-year-old Canadian player, Luke Prokop, became the first player under contract with an NHL team to come out as gay in 2021, though he plays with an affiliate AHL team and has not made it into the NHL.
Prokop recently told the New York Times that some NHL teams viewed LGBT+ players as a “distraction” from the sport.
“With hockey and the LGBTQ community, it’s tricky. You don’t want to do too much to draw attention to it, where some teams might say, ‘Oh, we view that as a distraction. So, we don’t want them on our team.’ There’s been instances where that’s come up,” he said.
In October 2023, the NHL banned Pride Night jerseys and rainbow-colored tape, months after some players opted out of their team’s Pride Night festivities. But the tape ban was reversed when Arizona Coyotes defenseman Travis Dermott defied the rules by covering his stick in rainbow tape during a game.
