Love Stories is a series about love in all its forms. For this year’s installment, Vogue partnered with the publisher 831 Stories on a collection of essays and excerpts celebrating the art of romantic fiction. So break out the chilled red wine and silky pajamas, and read on.
The viral success of Heated Rivalry has meant that the rest of the world is finally learning what readers of Tessa Bailey, KD Casey, and Susan Elizabeth Phillips have known for years: that sports and romance make thrilling bedfellows. Just why that is, however, is harder to pinpoint.
In the context of men’s hockey, the answer would seem to be, ironically, the culture of exclusion. (See: the asinine muddle that was the NHL’s rainbow tape controversy in 2023.) Despite the league’s attempts to exclude queer culture from NHL fandom, queer fans have created spaces for themselves—whether by watching the games at gay sports bars like Hi Tops or writing and reading gay fan fiction and romance novels set in the NHL. Something like Heated Rivalry—one of the books in author Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series—is a great example of writers and readers using fiction to act out queer joy in a space that rejects it. In both the books and the television series it inspired, Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, and Scott Hunter must overcome internalized homophobia and secrecy in order to embrace catharsis and joy.
It’s a fairly different story in professional women’s sports. The WNBA is full of visible queer representation. Engaged couple Alyssa Thomas and DeWanna Bonner shared the court during every Mercury game last season and Paige Bueckers and Azzi Fudd didn’t so much come out as hard-launch on social media (very Gen Z). While Arike Ogunbowale and Brittney Sykes walk the tunnel in incredible masculine-of-center outfits and styling, DiJonai Carrington represents high femme.
For newer fans like myself, it’s easy to forget that this visibility was something that queer players and fans had to fight for. In 2002, fans staged a kiss-in at a New York Liberty game to assert their presence. Sue Bird has spoken at length about how when she was drafted that same year, she was told that the only way she could be successful was by selling the “straight girl next door” look.
Professional women’s sports leagues aren’t perfect spaces even now, but players and fans have won enough battles and made enough strides that the sapphic WNBA romance novel I published last month, Rooting Interest, is more of a reflection than outright fantasy.
When I started following the WNBA at the beginning of the 2024 season, it wasn’t the phenom Caitlin Clark that sucked me into the action, but Clark’s Indiana Fever teammate NaLyssa Smith. Smith and DiJonai Carrington were exes, and early that season the Fever played a few games against Carrington’s team, the Connecticut Sun. The two players’ interactions, both on the court and on social media, were so heated that fans soon speculated that they had caught each other’s attention again—and, indeed, a few weeks later, they were back together.
As a romance reader, I knew that was just the kind of exquisite lesbian drama I wanted to see on the shelves of my local bookstore. And though I loved the sapphic sports novels that I did find, there weren’t very many of them, compared to the hundreds of M/M sports romances. Daydreaming during the commercial breaks of the WNBA games I was watching eventually planted the seed of the idea that would grow into Rooting Interest.
In fiction, and romance novels in particular, writers can decide how much of the world they want to hold a mirror to, and how much they’d like to reinvent. The ecosystem of male professional sports makes such a compelling setting for queer romances because they can transform homophobic or hetero-dominant spaces into ones that accept and celebrate queer identity and queer joy. With female professional sports, on the other hand, romance books can embrace and reflect the queerness already readily apparent.
In addition to all of this, pro athletes and the protagonists of most romance novels have a characteristic in common: the bold desire to make their dreams a reality. Though every game yields a winner and a loser, every competitor must enter the game with the confidence that they could be the one to come out on top. Their training and striving are ways to alchemize desire into action.
Romance protagonists set off on a similar journey; they have to make themselves vulnerable and take a leap of faith in order to love and be loved back. In other words, in both sports and romance novels, you have to risk a loss for the big win.
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