Rachel Reid's novel Heated Rivalry — the story of two rival professional hockey players whose on-ice feud hides a years-long secret love affair — was already a favorite among romance readers when its television adaptation arrived. The series sent the books back up bestseller lists and crystallized a shift publishers had been tracking for years: male-male (m/m) romance, once a niche, has gone firmly mainstream.
The numbers behind the boom
Romance is now the fastest-growing part of the book market. US romance print sales reached roughly 51 million units in the year to mid-2025, more than double the level of four years earlier, a Circana BookScan analyst said. Within that surge, queer romance has expanded especially fast: tracking of the romance.io database and Kindle sales found gay romance on Amazon Kindle grew about 70% in 2025, with the broader LGBTQ romance category up more than 80%. US LGBTQ fiction overall sold millions of units a year, with growth well above the wider market.
It sits alongside Casey McQuiston's Red, White & Royal Blue — the 2019 novel about a romance between a US president's son and a British prince, adapted into a 2023 film with a sequel now in production — as one of the genre's crossover hits.
Why straight women are the core audience
The demographic picture is consistent across studies: surveys of English-speaking m/m readers find that a majority of female readers identify as heterosexual, and women make up most of the audience. Scholars and fans offer several explanations. With two male leads, neither partner is a woman, which some readers say lets them engage with desire free of real-world gender dynamics. Others point to escapism, or to the genre's deep roots in female authorship — m/m romance has largely been written by women, for women, shaping its emotional texture.
Yaoi, fujoshi and fifty years of precedent
None of this is new; the template was set in Japan. Boys' Love (BL) — manga and anime centered on male-male romance — traces to the early 1970s, when a group of female artists known as the Year 24 Group began publishing such stories. Its explicit offshoot, yaoi, spread through self-published fan works in the 1990s, and devoted female fans came to call themselves fujoshi. The pipeline from BL to Western m/m runs through fan fiction: Reid's first novel in the series began as Marvel fan fiction before being reworked into original work, IndieWire reported, which read the Heated Rivalry adaptation as a Western cousin of classic BL.
Screens and a cultural conversation
The screen pipeline is now well established, from Heated Rivalry to Red, White & Royal Blue, both generating the kind of fan communities — fan art, reaction videos, online "shipping" — that once lived in niche corners of the internet. The genre's rise has also drawn scrutiny: some queer commentators ask whether fiction written largely by and for straight women adequately represents gay men's lives, or risks turning queerness into entertainment for a non-queer audience. Supporters counter that the genre has long given queer women a space to explore identity, and that many authors and readers sit across the LGBTQ spectrum.
For publishers, the calculus is simpler. With romance booming and queer romance among its most dynamic corners, the commercial logic is clear — and whether Heated Rivalry is best understood as Western yaoi, a new form of queer representation, or both, the market has, in millions of copies, already given an answer.
