In the past month or so, Heated Rivalry became a major global sensation. What you probably don’t know is that the show has enjoyed extraordinary success even in Russia—despite the fact that it is not officially available on any Russian streaming platform. On Kinopoisk, the Russian equivalent of Rotten Tomatoes, Heated Rivalry has a rating of 8.6; Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad, listed as the two most popular series on the platform, both have ratings of 8.3. In other words, a self-selected group of Russian viewers think Heated Rivalry is the best show they’ve ever watched. It’s an unexpected turn, especially for a country widely known for its homophobia.
But maybe it’s not so unexpected after all. I know Ilya Rozanov, the smoldering hockey player Connor Storrie plays on the series. In fact, I know quite a few people like him. I might even say that I have been him.
Like the character, I was born toward the end of the Soviet Union, a time when homosexuality was still a criminal offense. My father was a military officer. I grew up in a society where coming out never seemed possible; it was always clear that being gay in Russia would mean being an outcast, being cursed, having no chance whatsoever.
The fictional Ilya was born in 1991, a time when LGBTQ+ teenagers in Russia had not even a single example showing that a different, freer life was possible. Throughout the ’90s, not one public figure—no musician, actor, or writer, not to mention athlete—ever came out. Though Russia in those days did have a few pop stars who were obviously closeted, they were objects of universal ridicule. They wore feathers and women’s lingerie; they could achieve quick fame by shocking audiences, but they clearly had no intention of normalizing attitudes toward LGBTQ+ people by openly expressing their sexuality. Their concerts were attended mostly by older women. Men sneered contemptuously at them, while teenagers used their names as insults.
On Heated Rivalry, Ilya wears a peculiar Russian Orthodox cross, just as I once did. But for him it is an accessory—more a reminder of his mother than a sign of genuine religiosity. That, too, rings true: Even now, Russia remains a deeply atheist society. The roots of Soviet and post-Soviet homophobia lie not in religion, but in the legacy of the Soviet gulag—where being homosexual was considered the worst thing that could befall a man. A gay man in prison was an outcast, a “lowered” one, almost a living corpse. These prejudices persisted after the collapse of the USSR and still prevailed in the rough, hooligan neighborhoods on the outskirts of Moscow, where I grew up in the 1990s.
Back then, the situation in America seemed far from ideal either. I remember learning about the existence of other gay people from the American TV series Santa Barbara, which was broadcast on Russian state television in the ’90s. The show followed a millionaire family in which one beloved son turned out to be a closeted gay man—a family disgrace that was revealed only after his death. For me, as a child, the message was clear: Even in America, it was better to be dead than to be gay.
Things began to change in the early 2000s, when the band t.A.T.u. became a sensation in Russia, then across the world. They were two teenage girls singing about their lesbian love—and though the group was manufactured by producer Ivan Shapovalov, who cynically reverse-engineered the band based on the idea that the “lesbian schoolgirl” fantasy would have wide appeal, the duo eventually became the only Russian pop group in history to achieve any real success internationally. But t.A.T.u.’s global success would have had no impact on the life of 10-year-old Ilya Rozanov, just as it didn’t affect millions of real Russian gay people: They continued to live with the conviction that they had to hide and look like “real men,” and that “coming out of the closet” was the domain of madmen and suicides.
I was 21, still a student at a journalism school in Moscow, when I decided to become a war correspondent. I traveled to conflict zones in the Middle East and in the former USSR for almost 10 years, with one main goal: to make sure that no one would ever guess I was gay. I constructed a brutal, hypermasculine image. Like my friends, I allowed myself homophobic jokes, dated women, and tried to suppress my true feelings. I found myself at war with myself—and that war lasted nearly a decade.
