Why are straight women obsessed with gay men?

From Heated Rivalry and Heartstopper to the A03 trenches, why are straight women obsessed with gay men?

Heated Rivalry received 10.6 million views in the US alone, with women accounting for approximately two-thirds of its viewer demographic. Red, White and Royal Blue remains one of Amazon’s highest-streamed romantic comedies. A03, the be-all and end-all of the world’s most notorious fanfiction, is dominated by MLM tags and has a predominantly female user base. When discussing Heartstopper’s second season with Netflix’s ‘I like to watch,’ drag queen Trixie Mattel declared that “The number of gay men I know who watched this? Zero. The number of straight girls I know who watched this? Five million.” Are we fetishising gay men, or have we entered something much more heterofatalistic: is it embarrassing to be straight?

In October last year, Chante Joseph raised heckles and warcries with ‘Is it embarrassing to have a boyfriend now?’ She undoubtedly drew a line in the sand, but I think we can dig a little deeper. Joseph leveraged receipts of women raging in podcast comment sections: “Why does having a boyfriend feel Republican?”/ “Boyfriends are out of style.” And, ok, I get it, but (perhaps as a queer woman) I have to ask whether it’s boyfriends, or men that are out of style. Are women so burnt out by the behaviours and mating rituals of men that they’ve turned to the gays to fill the void?

In The Trouble With Wanting Men, Jean Garnett labels this as “heteropessimism,” an ideal that stands atop three key pillars: “Domestic pessimism (they still do less of the housework and child care); partner-violence pessimism (femicide is still gruesomely routine); and erotic pessimism (the clitoris and its properties still elude many of them).” Reform UK have the highest ratio of male to female candidates of any other party. Trump is manned by a straight line of straight men in straight white pinstripes. To put things bluntly: it’s no longer cool to be a straight man. In fact, it’s kind of an ick.

We can’t change who we’re attracted to. When all the misandric slander is said and done, women still want to wake up to a musky cloud of Lynx Africa — just not the foreboding thunderclap of gender politics that comes with it. This is where the gays come in.

“The real romantasy is not sex and romance with dragons and fairies, but sex and romance without misogyny and gendered hierarchy. If the only way to get that in today’s media environment is through sex and romance without any women, they’ll take it.”

A recent Guardian article showing women “feral” for Heated Rivalry (Julie Carrie Wong) detailed accounts of women insisting that the queer hockey players had “convinced them to give straight men another chance.”

And it’s not just more fluid power dynamics that they’re seeking. Philosophy professor Ellie Anderson writes that in heterosexual relationships there is something called a “female demand-male withdraw pattern.” Women do all the emotional heavy lifting and become “relationship-maintenance experts.” A romance between two men is backed into a corner with no woman to carry that weight, so we are offered the rare sight of men doing the real hard labour of feelings.

It helps that, in its nature as a gay sports drama, Heated Rivalry features no unclothed women. Female viewers can enjoy the sex romp of two very attractive hockey players (and their male gaze) without feeling objectified themselves. The lack of a romantic heroine frees them from comparison (physical or otherwise), as it is not a story they can project themselves into. Annie Vought, a 34-year-old from Seattle, said she loves that “There is zero room for me personally to be like, ‘Wish that was me.’ I’m just like, ‘Get it, boys!’”

Women can relax, recline and fantasise in peace.

This all makes sense, of course (I wrote it), but fan fiction and the world of A03 is a different beast to tackle.

Jayce/Victor (Arcane), Evan Buckley/Eddie Diaz (9-1-1), Will Byers/Mike Wheeler (Stranger Things): these were the reigning champs of Archive of Our Own last year, with prehistoric legends Sirius Black/Remus Lupin (Harry Potter) and Katsuki Bakugou/Izuku Midoriya (My Hero Academia) lurking a little further down the charts. Game Changers, the first book in Reid’s Heated Rivalry series, started as fan fiction of Marvel heroes Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes (or #Stucky as they have been affectionately fan-named). All these ships are MLM (man loving man); not one of them canon.

While the same rules of why women love mainstream gay media do still apply here, the steamrolling powerhouse of gay fanfiction is a can of three big fat worms: The Bechdel Test, queerbaiting, and the lack of LGBTQ+ inclusion in big franchises.

The Bechdel Test is a yardstick by which to measure female representation in fiction. To pass the test, works must follow three rules:

1. Include at least two women

2. Who have at least one conversation

3. About something other than a man.

While simple on the surface, it exposes gender stereotypes and underdeveloped female characters in film and TV. This becomes a breeding ground for gay fan fiction in cases like My Hero Academia. When female characters feel as flimsy as paper doll chains in comparison to their 3D male counterparts, who spend quadruple the amount of time talking to men than any woman, is it any wonder female fans choose to couple men together? The irony of male-centred media is that it’s so straight, it becomes gay.

The case for queerbaiting is a little more straightforward. Showrunners reel in an LGBTQ+ audience with the tease of same-sex relationships for the views and the buzz, only for that relationship never to be consummated and the characters to go on living their happy heterosexual lives. Fan fiction (such as is the case for Buck and Eddie from 9-1-1) becomes a natural way to flesh out that homoerotic subtext.

The Marauders fandom (of which Sirius Black and Remus Lupin are the founding fathers) is the best (and perhaps most baffling) example of gay ships emerging in reaction to a lack of queer diversity. Given her divisive TERF views and dismissal of asexuality, JK Rowling and anything LGBTQ+ should go together like oil and water, so why do queer works like All The Young Dudes have over 19 million views on A03? As they’ve grown up and out of the series they grew up with, fans have become disillusioned by the limited representation in the magical universe they love (a moment of silence for Cho Chang). Not wishing to lose that world, they extend it by creating new stories that form a more accepting space.

This transformative nature of fan fiction is why women are so drawn towards it — it’s the same reason they’ve rewatched Heated Rivalry seventeen times.

In making a straight man gay, we remove the added caveat of how men treat women, and it is now socially acceptable to ogle him without being chased by the feminist patriarchy. It may not be embarrassing to be straight, but it is embarrassing to be caught drooling over a gender infamous for putting down your own.

Gay men are a straight woman’s loophole to slagging off every man under the sun to her best friend on FaceTime, while simultaneously still swearing her allegiance to men.

Thank you so much for reading! As always, it means the world and more.

The rise in popularity of gay media has been really interesting to me, particularly as I rarely see lesbian media get the same rep (although this is an article for another day). What do you guys think? Are the gays a proxy for women’s unfortunate, ungodly desire for straight men?