Hudson Williams has revealed closeted professional athletes have been sliding into his DMs after watching Heated Rivalry, and honestly, that tells you everything about how deeply this show is landing — on and off the ice.
While his fictional world is serving Stanley Cup kisses and queer joy, real players are still stuck in the shadows, from North America all the way down to Aussie rinks.
On an upcoming episode of SiriusXM’s Andy Cohen Live, Williams reveals that closeted pros have reached out after seeing the hit queer hockey series. “It’s definitely the people who reach out, somewhat anonymously, who are like, ‘I’m still a professional player still and I’m still in the closet’,” the 24-year-old said in a clip released ahead of the chat.
When Cohen followed up, Williams explained that it’s not just hockey players getting in touch. He says he’s heard from “closeted hockey, football and basketball players”, some emailing through author Rachel Reid, others messaging him “privately, through like Instagram”.
For Williams, those anonymous messages make the show feel bigger than just a fun, thirst-heavy binge. “Those ones are the ones that really just hit you and go, ‘Oh, so this is a fun show and it’s celebratory, but also sometimes it’s just hitting people right in the nerves’,” he says of the outreach.
He also touches on how people read intimacy between men, and how quickly it gets sexualised. “There’s a lot of taboos around exploring physical intimacy with people you admire and love without people, especially in western culture, [being] like, ‘Oh, they’re fucking, they’re doing this’,” he says, adding that with co-star Connor Storrie, he’s “always going to just physically express my love”.
Williams is not interested in pandering to anyone who’s still pressed about men being soft with each other. “I just was always frustrated by these kinds of notions,” he said, before offering a pretty blunt note to anyone still squeamish about affection in 2025.
“If you’re still biased or jaded or uncomfortable with expressing physical love for people in 2025, you got to fucking, just, you know, get over yourself.”
In a show literally built on a decade-long rivalry-turned-romance between two elite hockey players, that feels like the thesis statement.
But the stuff Williams is talking about — the closeted messages, the way intimacy between men gets policed — isn’t just playing out in North American locker rooms. In Australia, the show has landed in a very specific way with queer athletes and fans who’ve spent years being told sport isn’t “for” them. Australian first openly gay NBL player, Isaac Humphries, even jumped on TikTok and wrote, “Me after watching Heated Rivalry ep five realising this is my literal life being played out on screen. Just in a different sport.”
At the same time, the stats around queer experiences in sport are grim. Research shows that 87 per cent of gay youth in Australia hide their sexuality from teammates, and a 2024 study found LGBTQIA+ young people are 50 per cent less likely to belong to a sports club than their non-LGBTQ peers, largely because of homophobia and transphobia in sporting environments.
On top of that, 80 per cent of Australians have either witnessed or experienced homophobia in sport, which explains why so many people bounce off organised sport altogether.
But Australian rinks are quietly doing what the NHL still hasn’t: making space for queer players to actually exist without shrinking. In Melbourne, the Southern Lights Ice Hockey Club — launched in 2019 as the country’s first LGBTQIA+ hockey club — has built teams that are open to all genders and skill levels, with the point being inclusion more than perfection. Member Andrew Macdougall says it took him “40 years to find a sporting place I can truly call home”, per a club press release, remembering a coach who once called the opposition “poofters” in a huddle and left him feeling like he’d never belong in “the world of masculine men’s sport”.
Walking into Southern Lights changed that completely. “For the first time, I could be an authentic, unapologetic bisexual man on the ice,” Macdougall says.
“We might fall over, we might miss the puck, but we are doing it together.”
That vision has since spread to Sydney’s Harbour Lights, which now has 100+ members and throws an annual “Pride on Ice” tournament before Mardi Gras, and Canberra’s Capital Riot, the ACT’s first LGBTQIA+ hockey team.
“We watch shows like Heated Rivalry because we are starving for that representation in sport,” Matthews says, before adding that Australia’s not waiting around for the NHL to get its act together.
“We don’t have to wait for the NHL or the big leagues. We are building that joy right here. We are creating the locker rooms we wished we had when we were kids.”
The gap between what happens on screen and in pro locker rooms is still massive, but if Heated Rivalry keeps doing its thing and communities here keep carving out space on the ice, those anonymous messages Hudson is getting might not need to be anonymous forever
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