‘Heated Rivalry’ and the boom in gay romance stories

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…