Getting Beyond the Closet Door: BIPOC Queer Teen TVlandia's Unfinished Story

Queer narratives showcased in cover images: "Heartstopper," "Genera+ion", "Heated Rivalry," and "Love, Victor"

I watch a lot of TV—whatever that means these days. I’m on the constant prowl for storyworlds that take queer characters of color somewhere new. So when Heated Rivalry hit HBO Max like a slap shot heard round the internet, I paid attention. A gay hockey romance that became the No. 1 fixation on queer social media, drew straight women and even straight male hockey podcasters into its orbit, and inspired real-life closeted athletes to come out? Sign me up.

But here’s the thing: as riveting and beautifully shot as the show is—and it is both—Heated Rivalry ultimately tells us as much about what mainstream queer storytelling still can’t do as what it can.

Let me explain.

At its core, Heated Rivalry follows two rival professional hockey stars—Canada’s Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Russia’s Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie)—whose on-ice animosity conceals a yearslong secret sexual relationship. Creator Jacob Tierney, an out gay man, brings an intimacy and directness to male desire that feels, at moments, revolutionary.

But the narrative architecture? That’s another story. For all its heat, Heated Rivalry is built on a deeply familiar—and by now exhausted—engine: the coming out narrative. As Jim Downs argued in Slate, the show treats coming out as the resolution, the dramatic destination, when for queer teens it’s actually the beginning—the threshold beyond which the real, messy, complicated material of queer life unfolds.

What happens after the closet door opens? Jobs, families, institutional friction, conditional tolerance, the cost of visibility in a world that’s still structurally hostile—that’s the story we haven’t been told yet. Heated Rivalry doesn’t tell it either.

Confession as climax rather than threshold. Desire is easy; identity is the burden. Pleasure stays private; queerness must be publicly accounted for.

And here’s where intersectionality enters—or, more precisely, where it fails to. Shane Hollander is written as half-Japanese Canadian, played by Williams, who is himself half-Korean, half-white. Tierney deliberately expanded Shane’s Asian identity beyond what Rachel Reid’s source novels offered. I appreciate the move. There’s a scene early on where a Montreal team higher-up awkwardly tells Shane and his parents they’re “thrilled that Shane is Asian, or Asian-Canadian,” because the franchise has “historically broken barriers.” It’s cringey. It’s meant to be. And Shane’s mother Yuna (Christina Chang) reminds her son that “a whole lot of kids are gonna be looking up to you, kids that don’t see themselves here a lot.” Beautiful sentiment.

But here’s the problem: beyond these handful of moments—three conversations total across six episodes, as several Asian American critics have noted—Shane’s racialized experience evaporates. Every time the show creates an opportunity to explore what it means to be Wasian in a hypermasculine, overwhelmingly white sport, Shane shrugs it off. His feelings about being Japanese Canadian remain unexamined. His interiority on race is a blank.

And what about Yuna herself? The character is written squarely within the “model minority” mold—the disciplined, aspirational Asian mother who manages her son’s sponsorships and reminds him of his representational duty. Yuna’s function in the story is to push Shane toward success, toward respectability, toward the assimilationist ideal. She is coded as the engine of upward mobility and perfectionism. This is a recognizable archetype, and the show never troubles it. We never see Yuna struggle with her own displacement, her own cultural negotiations as a Japanese woman married to a white Canadian man in a world that reduces her son’s complex identity to a diversity checkbox.

The model minority framework aligns neatly with the show’s broader aspirational formula: wealth, athletic glory, and eventually, the safety of the closet door swinging open into acceptance. The racialized dimensions of Shane’s queerness—how being Asian and gay might compound marginalization in specific, structurally distinct ways within the NHL’s hyper-white, hyper-hetero locker room culture—go entirely unexplored.

Race becomes ornamental, not structural.

This is the same critique I leveled at Hulu’s Love, Victor years ago, and it still stings because the pattern persists. In Love, Victor, showrunners Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger gave us a Latinx teen coming out story that gestured toward intersectionality: Catholicism, machismo, bilinguality, the beautiful Papel Picado randomly decorating Pilar’s bedroom. However, they never let those identity markers actually inform Victor’s struggle to come into his own.

Identity markers were pasted on, decorative, ornamental. Victor’s physical presentation offered what I called a “safe mestizaje Look”—beautiful brown skin hues that read more like a tan over a Caucasian bone structure for easy audience consumption. And his desire fixed, inevitably, on a white boy. The story naturalized hetero-wealth as the aspirational order.

When the story took us into the domestic spaces of Victor’s classmates of color, they were of the Blackish and BlackAF opulent variety—pedigreed, legacy wealth in all their attitudes and actions. There’s nothing inherently wrong with depicting wealthy folx of color; they exist. But everything in the story added up to a worldview where wealth and straight couplings continued to be the aspirational order of the day. In the end, Love, Victor sold a neoliberal “be true to yourself” message where “yourself” had to fit within a framework that was #soprivileged, #sowhite, #sostraight.

The parallel between Love, Victor’s ornamental Latinidad and Heated Rivalry’s ornamental Asianness is striking.

Both shows create protagonists whose ethnoracial identities are acknowledged but never structurally integrated into how they navigate queerness. Both construct coming out as the climax rather than the threshold. And both were created or adapted by non-queer-of-color creators—Love, Victor by straight writers, Heated Rivalry from novels by a straight woman. The shows most beloved by massive crossover audiences are disproportionately made by people who don’t share the intersectional identities of their protagonists.

When queer creators of color tell queer stories—think Zelda Barnz’s raw, honest, unapologetically queer Genera+ion—the results are more authentic but get cancelled.

The market rewards assimilation. And that should concern all of us.

Across the queer youth TV landscape, we see this tension playing out again and again. Netflix's Sex Education distributes queerness across a full ensemble—gay, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, non-binary—so that no single character bears the impossible burden of representing all queer experience. Eric Effiong (Ncuti Gatwa), a Black Ghanaian-Nigerian openly gay teen, offers a powerful counterpoint to the formula by exploring how different cultures navigate queerness without reducing strict immigrant parents to simple homophobia.

Netflix's Heartstopper centers queer joy, letting teens be young—first crushes, blushing texts, umbrella kisses—and achieved a massive straight audience in the process. Nick’s bisexuality offers a rare, affirming portrayal of bisexual masculinity in a masc-presenting athletic teen. But Heartstopper is almost entirely white and British, and its saccharine tone risks avoiding the material difficulty of queer life, including, notably, any reference to sexual desire in a show about sexuality.

HBO's Euphoria goes the opposite direction—transgressive, hypersexualized, aesthetically dazzling—but is written by a straight cis man, Sam Levinson, and the difference between Hunter Schafer co-writing Jules and Levinson writing Jules is visible on screen. The danger is that queer teens’ only representational options remain sanitized sweetness or aestheticized suffering.

What we need—what I’ve been arguing we need for years—is post-closet storytelling.

Stories that assume queerness and explore what comes next. Stories where the drama isn’t “will they accept me?” but “how do we build a life together in a world that’s still structurally hostile?” We need intersectionality as structure, not decoration. Race, class, immigration status, disability—these can’t be ornamental identity markers sprinkled across a set. They must be woven into the very architecture of how queer characters navigate their worlds.

My Brown-optic framework (see my LatinxTV) applies directly here: when we look at these storyworlds through a lens attuned to the specific, situated, embodied experiences of communities of color, the gaps become glaring.

And we need Latinx queer stories specifically. We are radically underrepresented. The success of Love, Victor proved there’s an audience hungry for Brown queer narratives—now give us ones that don’t assimilate our “troublesome identities” into white, wealthy, straight aspirational frameworks. Give us the Brams and the Victors—the basketball court scene in Love, Victor remains that show’s most powerful moment, a New York City court filled with beautiful Brown and Black men, a gay league, the message that being queer and Brown doesn’t dictate how you look, act, or live. That’s the future: expansive, specific, unapologetic.

Coming out isn’t the climax. It’s the threshold. The real story—the one we haven’t told yet—is what happens after.