Brock McGillis, who is regarded as the first openly gay professional hockey player, has a chilly reception to “Heated Rivalry.”
The 42-year-old retired athlete spoke to the LGBTQ news site PinkNews on Monday and claimed that the steamy series, which follows two rival professional hockey players who begin a secret gay romance, will not help players come out of the closet.
“Nobody’s like, ‘Oh, yeah. This came out and now I’m ready [to come out].’ It’s not happening,” McGillis said. “It’s probably more likely to have an adverse effect on a player coming out.”
“And I hate to be negative because I really enjoy the show,” he continued. “But I also don’t believe that many hockey bros are going to watch it. And I don’t think, if they are watching it, they’re talking about it positively.”
The former ice hockey goaltender also revealed that the first episode of the show, which is based on Rachel Reid’s “Game Changers” novel series, gave him “a panic attack.”
“I was scared. I dated a guy for three years, not a soul in my life knowing,” he shared. “We had an alias for [me in his phone] in case [his friends] ever saw.”
McGillis even stated that while he believe hockey players are “really good people,” if he had children, gay or straight, he would not let them play the sport.
“The language, behaviors, and attitudes that you get in locker rooms are sometimes homophobic — that starts at a very young age and progresses through your whole life,” he explained. “You’re programmed to feel that everyone will hate you and you’ll lose your career.”
McGillis added, “Sometimes I don’t think people recognize what they’re saying or the impact it has. But if you’re hearing that daily, it’s death by 1,000 paper cuts.”
Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, the stars of “Heated Rivalry,” have both spoken about how they hope the show helps viewers who are in the LGBTQ+ community.
“There’s both like the representation of a queer character that a lot of people relate with, whether they feel like him or they feel like they knew him,” Williams, 24, said in a recent interview with Forbes.
“That element is really beautiful and I didn’t know if it would connect, you know? You only hope and it is on the person-to-person level, where they’re looking you in their eyes and that means something.”
Storrie, for his part, told Forbes that he realized the show’s impact during a fan meet-and-greet at a bookstore in Toronto.
“I think in theory, it’s really easy to talk about the importance of representation or what this means to people at large when we talk about communities or demographics that really love this book,” Storrie explained, “but it was such a crazy experience in-person to see someone face-to-face be like, ‘What you’re doing and the person that you are being on-camera means so much to me,’ and like have tears in their eyes.”
New episodes of “Heated Rivalry” air Fridays on HBO Max.
