Do I wanna fuck him or do I wanna be him?

On gender envy and the role of fandom in exploring queer identity.

Connor Storrie for @vogue.adria

I’ve never been much of a fangirl. My first experience of being anything more than a casual fan was in my early twenties, when I kept obsessively rewatching the original Star Wars trilogy to get through a break-up so messy, I apparently needed to flee to another galaxy to escape. Since then, I’ve grown to appreciate fandom, the community fans build online, the joy, the unabashed show of love for an artist or a piece of art. There’s something freeing and wholesome in loving things out loud instead of vying for the most cynical take on the latest pop culture phenomenon.

I also think fandom is a great teacher. By examining what speaks to us, consumes us, or fills us with joy, we might dig up some truths about ourselves that are lingering in the subconscious. It’s not a coincidence that discovering one’s own queerness through a crush on a fictional character is the closeted queer kid canon event. In the privacy and safety of the world of fandom, mostly taking place in our own minds, we find role models, representation and the freedom to explore what we’re not ready to, or not allowed to, claim for ourselves in the outside world.

This is especially true for the kind of fandom that really pulls us in and makes us feel just a little bit obsessed. The last time that happened to me was when I watched Heated Rivalry. So, when I found myself rewatching two beautiful men fall in love on my screen again and again, noticed myself scouring micro-expressions, habitus and mannerisms with an intensity that felt out of the ordinary, I suspected there was probably something I could learn about myself here.

Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams in Heated Rivalry.

It feels vulnerable and a little silly to admit being so invested in a TV series, and writing this down is making me cringe, but it’s part of a story I want to tell, so this is me getting over myself. There is a level of shame that comes with the feeling of liking something a little too much. Now I’m decidedly not a fan of shaming people, but I guess you could call me a fan of shame, in the sense that I believe that shame is a pretty reliable marker that there’s something interesting going on under the surface.

If we keep returning to a certain piece of media over and over again, we must be finding something special there that we can’t find elsewhere—a feeling, a sense of belonging, a blueprint for a version of ourselves we haven’t met yet. More often than not, it’s gonna be a desire that we have, in some way, been denied, shamed for, or taught is not for us. That’s when casual enjoyment turns obsessive: We finally have access to this thing we’ve been craving, freeing a part of ourselves that’s been starved and is now wolfing down whatever it can get.

Actual footage of future you drinking up all of my posts on here. Stay hydrated, subscribe now. Connor Storrie for @interviewmag

Heated Rivalry has spawned a rather intense fandom in some corners of the internet, and I think that’s because the series feeds a variety of desires that are often classified as shameful, especially when expressed by women and queer people: The desire for, 1. sex—we as a society are really good at shaming women and really anyone other than heterosexual, cisgender men for their desire for sex, 2. intimacy and romance—while being such basic human desires of connection, these somehow got labelled as feminine, girly and therefore, silly, which is just misogyny 101, 3. queer joy and visibility—depictions of queer love, sex and joy that don’t end in tragedy are still way too hard to find, and when they do exist, are far too quickly dismissed as frivolous or gratuitously revealing.

Examining what made me, personally, want to watch this TV series on repeat, I’m sure these aspects all played a role, but I still found myself left with a mixture of longing and shame that I didn’t quite understand. Sexual desire, internalised misogyny, and a craving for queer joy—I’d like to think these are all things I have on lock, and yet they couldn’t explain the strange pull the series had on me.

The bicep, the hair, the hand placement, the realisation that I want to be this.

I felt especially drawn to one of the story’s protagonists, Ilya Rozanov, portrayed by Connor Storrie. There’s some untangling to do here. Seeing as I am, among other things, attracted to men, there’s the obvious layer of Damn, that’s an attractive man, but then there’s also the realisation that it’s not really about that, at least not in the He’s hot, I wanna do bad things to him way. More in the sense that I feel a rush of endorphins coursing through my veins when I imagine myself having arms like his, that I notice myself subconsciously placing my hands the way he does, looking for his features in mine. That my heart swells at the glimpse of recognition, while, at the same time, an ache pulses in my chest, a longing for what isn’t mine and seems unreachable, something I’m not supposed to want.

Gender envy is the term most commonly used for this kind of longing for traits of a gender identity different from your assigned gender. It can refer to physical attributes, but also gender expression, or the way gender defines our relationships with others and the world.

I’ve experienced bouts of this in the past—wanting my jeans to fit the way they did on the boys in my class, buying a rugby shirt after watching Heartstopper, the sting of being put on the girls’ team, the way it felt wrong when I noticed I wasn’t really one of the guys in my friend group, the way my middle name, Luca, always held some magic for me because of its androgynous nature.

Now one obvious explanation would be that, in the patriarchy, cisgender men enjoy a lot of privilege and are generally framed as the main character, while everyone else is considered the other. That would for sure be reason enough to cause some envy.

But this feels different. More primal, visceral, physical. There’s a burning curiosity in me to experience life as someone who is not a woman.

A curiosity of what it’d be like to feel like a man, to love and be loved as a man. To feel hot in a way that is not feminine at all. To feel the thrill of being referred to as him, or at least not as her. To wear the floral print, or the jewellery, but without that making me a woman. To find a balance of femininity and masculinity that feels like me, or maybe invent a magic third thing that’s just mine.

Some lyrics I wrote while deep in the gender daze.

Sometimes we need a nudge for simmering feelings to break through, and for me this nudge apparently came in the form of a fictional bisexual Russian fuckboy of a hockey player, who would’ve thought. In all seriousness, I do believe that Heated Rivalry did a good job depicting masculinity, allowing its male characters the ambiguity of being both strong and vulnerable, cocky and insecure, cold and affectionate, and thereby fully human.

Add to that the way the lead actors, Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, have been presenting themselves to the press, playing with masculinity and femininity in their expression, and it leads to a representation of what a man is that is a lot more inviting and accessible than what we often see in media. This could explain why this TV series, specifically, has had such a big effect on not only me, but also many others who are, to some extent, questioning their gender identity. When asking around in the queer corners of the Heated Rivalry fandom, I heard lots of stories from people for whom this TV series either raised questions or provided validation about their relationship with gender.

Give me whatever gender this is. Hudson Williams by @by.aikaflores

Another element to consider here is that this is a gay (or, more accurately, achillean¹) love story. I’ve learnt that there’s a history of people assigned female at birth (AFAB) exploring trans or gender non-conforming identities through media focusing on men-loving-men relationships, most notably in Boys’ Love and yaoi fandoms². One explanation is that the lack of female protagonists in these stories opens up the possibility for the viewer to identify with one of the male protagonists, instead of automatically self-inserting as the female lead. According to my research (i.e. reading reddit posts on r/yaoi), it’s a common experience for AFAB fans to feel kinda obsessed with a character, only to realise later that their interest was probably related to their own non-binary or transmasculine identity.

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Questioning one of the pillars of identity that I considered a non-negotiable for most of my life feels a little intimidating, and I’m giving myself time to figure things out at my own pace. But what I can say for sure is that, for the first time, I feel like I’m ready to go there.

I look back at 21-year-old me, watching The Empire Strikes Back in my uni bedroom, purposely ignoring the flood of messages on my phone chronicling an increasingly vicious break-up, and losing myself in the process of planning my Han Solo Halloween costume. I remember the comfort and resolve I found in envisioning myself in costume, as him, how it felt like something purely and truly mine, an anchor, grounding me amidst the agonising chaos of young love breaking apart. I guess the signs were there, it just took me a while to let myself see them.

For now, what I’m coming away with from all of this is:

maybe,

I am not a woman
in every way,
or not always,
or not exclusively.

And that feels kinda freeing.

Luca x

Me taking my shot at becoming your new favourite Substacker. Thank you for subscribing to The Wannabe Papers <3

Disclaimer: This is simply me trying to make sense of my personal experience and while I’ve tried to do my research and have been in contact with people who have had similar experiences, I’m in no way claiming to speak for anyone but myself. Please lmk if you feel like I misrepresented anything though, always happy to learn.

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1. achillean is the male analogue of sapphic, and is used as an umbrella term for male-male relationships that’s more explicitly inclusive of bisexual, pansexual or non-binary masc identifying people.

2. Boys’ Love or BL is an umbrella term for Japanese manga focusing on male-male relationships. yaoi is a subgenre of BL that’s often more sexually explicit.

3. For those of you who read the footnote on my last post, the answer is Class Clown by Conan Gray, more specifically the line trying to grow on an earth that writhes <3