‘Heated Rivalry’ fuels a boom in gay romance stories, with women leading the fandom

When the holiday season rolled around last year, Margaret Hecox knew exactly what her grandmother would love.

The 23-year-old wrote in a card about "Heated Rivalry," the breakout Canadian TV series following a clandestine love story between two male hockey players. Hecox watched several episodes with her grandmother and also encouraged friends and other family members to tune in.

"I knew she would like the show," Hecox said. "Obviously, she did."

The grandmother-granddaughter duo is part of a sizable fan base of women for books, shows and movies centered on love stories between two men.

This type of romance content — long referred to in some Asian cultures as "yaoi" or "boy love" — has been produced for decades. But consumers and experts told CNBC that the buzz around "Heated Rivalry" pushed this corner of LGBTQ+ media further into the mainstream, particularly among straight American women.

On TikTok, more than 900,000 videos have been posted using the hashtag "fujoshi," a slang term in Japanese for the female fans of these stories. Google searches for terms related to the yaoi fandom surged to never-seen-before levels late last year in the U.S., underscoring the subgenre's growing domestic awareness.

"This is all, pun intended, women coming out of the closet with a genre that they have been invested in," said Shampaigne Graves, who consults on and hosts a podcast about women consumers. "It's not a new phenomena. It's just something that women feel comfortable talking about and sharing with one another."

All the things she said

HBO, the U.S. streaming platform for "Heated Rivalry," said about two-thirds of the series' viewership was women. During the show's press tour, the creative team and lead actors repeatedly fielded questions about why they believed it struck a chord with women in particular.

"'Heated Rivalry' sparked straight woman being like 'OK, we want more of this,'" said Emily Sarre, a social media content creator who made several posts declaring her affinity for the show.

Demand for this type of content has ballooned beyond the six-episode "Heated Rivalry" series.

"Call Me By Your Name," a coming-of-age drama from Sony, had the ninth most fans of any narrative feature film who identify as women on movie review platform Letterboxd. That's 46 slots higher than where it sits on the equivalent list for men.

Nearly seven out of 10 viewers of the Timothée Chalamet-led film in the first three months of 2026 were women, according to Nielsen.

"Red, White & Royal Blue," a 2023 political romcom on Amazon, had 61% female viewers, Nielsen found.

Lionsgate shared Nielsen data with CNBC showing that women accounted for 60% of viewers since the start of last year for "The Perks of Being A Wallflower," a chronicle of same-sex romance involving a football player.

The next 'Twilight'?

Women readers have also focused their attention this year on "Heated Rivalry" and other male-to-male romance books by author Rachel Reid on Fable, a Scribd-owned book discussion platform. After working through Reid's catalogue, they appear to be picking up other titles in the subgenre, like "The Song of Achilles," a reimagining of Greek mythology published in 2011.

"This is not just one more in a long string of little trends," said Kim Allee, Fable's marketing director. "This feels like something much more significant than that."

Exact book sale statistics by gender can be difficult to track. But anecdotally, the lion's share of male-to-male romance readers appear to be straight women, according to Jennifer Bokal, president-elect of the Romance Writers of America trade group.

Bokal said she saw women donning "Heated Rivalry" merchandise "everywhere" at the BookCon convention in April. With the excitement for the show and book, Bokal said it's catapulted into a league with the "Fifty Shades of Grey" and "Twilight" franchises.

On the surface, "Heated Rivalry" and other male-to-male love stories can be unexpected picks for women, given that they are not represented as the protagonist or love interest. But Allee said Fable's women users are struck by the depth of emotion in the subgenre, so much so that "yearning" has become a buzzword to describe what draws them to these books.

"It's showing people the types of love and romance that they deserve to have, regardless of gender," said Gianna Saad, a 30-year-old whose bookshelf is lined with novels in this subgenre by authors including Scarlett Drake and TJ Klune. "There's this deeper level to everything that's happening in these kinds of books."

Showcasing diverse stories

Some of these titles have become mainstream hits in part through word-of-mouth endorsements by female-centric fan bases.

Reid's novels have been among the top-read e-books on Scribd's Everand subscription service this year, according to data from the company released this week. More broadly, Fable's Allee said male-to-male love stories have unseated "romantasy" as the most popular type of romance books.

Amazon said "Red, White & Royal Blue" drove new subscriptions and quickly became one of the highest-watched romcoms on its Prime Video platform. Both the "Red, White & Royal Blue" movie and the "Heated Rivalry" TV series have second installments in the works.

Viewers could see more on-screen gay love stories among athletes as producers look to replicate the "Heated Rivalry" playbook, said Tom Nunan, a producer and former network and studio executive, who now lectures at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television.

But Nunan said the bigger lesson for Hollywood should be that producing original and genuine stories will be rewarded by audiences. The industry has long sought to win the attention of women — who typically account for the majority of audiences for scripted entertainment — through diverse and thought-provoking plots, he said.

"When shows like 'Heated Rivalry' take off, it reminds us: What a rich part of life this is to explore," Nunan said. It's also a reminder to "make sure we populate our shows as accurately and authentically as possible, because everybody wins in that scenario."

While these releases have garnered fanfare and acclaim, LGBTQ+ advocates also warn that the community's overall representation on screen is shrinking.

GLAAD, a non-profit LGBTQ+ advocacy and media monitoring organization, said that the share of LGBTQ+ inclusive scripted films from top movie distributors dropped by roughly 14% from 2023 to 2024. The number of LGBTQ+ characters in TV shows tumbled about 23% in the 2024-2025 season compared with three years prior, the organization reported.

"On one hand, I think it's encouraging," said Katherine Sender, a Cornell professor who researches LGBTQ+ media, of the excitement over "Heated Rivalry." "But on the other hand, I don't think we should be too optimistic."

'All I can think about'

To be sure, not all male-to-male love stories have majority-women audiences. The "Heartstopper" series on Netflix, and the "Love, Simon" romcom from Disney's 20th Century Fox both skewed slightly toward male viewers in the first quarter, according to Nielsen.

There's also evidence that the fan base for this genre extends beyond women who identify as heterosexual. During CNN's New Year's Eve special, co-host Andy Cohen asked the musician Brandi Carlile if lesbians were similarly obsessed with "Heated Rivalry."

"It's all I can think about," Carlile responded.