January 16 2026, 08:15 
With a hat tip to the wildly popular streamer Heated Rivalry, a gay hockey player is sharing his coming out story with the world.
Jesse Korteum, who’s been on the ice since childhood, posted to social this week, “I realized it is finally time to share a journey I have kept close to the vest for a long time.”
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“Lately, something has sparked in me,” he said. “Ok – yes credit to #HeatedRivalry.”
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Korteum grew up in Minnesota, the youngest of four boys in a state where “sports and competition were not just what we did. They were who we were.”
He spent his teenage years, he said, trying to reconcile his sexuality with those expectations.
“As a young teenager, I carried a weight that did not seem to fit into that world, and I lived in a constant state of dichotomy. I loved the game, but I lived with a persistent fear. I wondered how I could be gay and still play such a tough and masculine sport.”
“Coming out in the 2000s did not feel like an option,” Korteum shared, “especially with so little positive representation in the media at the time and it would have been a social disaster at such a large high school.”
At 17, he walked away from his high school team and “the brotherhood of hockey friendships I had developed from a young age.”
Years later and missing the game, Korteum took up the stick again with high-level teams in New York and Atlanta, but encountered the same tension he’d experienced as a kid in his Minnesota high school.
“I spent every week in a locker room with guys I respected, yet I still did not feel safe enough to tell them who I truly was. Even when the conversation turned to wives, families, or dating, I would quickly change the subject. If it came down to it, I would just tell them I was single, even when I was seeing someone.”
“Like many closeted athletes, revealing who I truly was to my team would change everything in an instant,” Korteum wrote. He feared a negative reaction from fellow players, and worried he’d bring “negative attention to the team with the ‘gay player.'”
“So I never took the chance,” he wrote.
But a “paradigm shift” happened in 2017, when Korteum hit the ice with players who’d reconciled the very feelings that he’d wrestled with since he was “that kid in Minnesota hiding.”
He played with a gay hockey team.
Korteum signed up for the #SinCityClassic, a gay sports event held annually in Las Vegas, where “I met a group of guys from across the US and Canada (Las Vegas Boyz) who were hockey players like me and were also gay. From that moment forward, my life has never been the same.”
Korteum called it “a long, vulnerable road to move past the closeted athlete persona,” but he’s done it with friendships developed with like-minded players in Vancouver, Toronto, and across the U.S.
Last weekend, Vancouver’s gay hockey team, the Cutting Edges, held their annual tournament at Sun Peaks in British Columbia — and Korteum had an epiphany.
“It was so much more than just a few hockey games. Standing on that ice, I realized I have finally found my peace,” he said. “There is room for all of us on the ice.”
Korteum closed his coming out story with words for fellow players like the one he left behind in Minnesota.
“This is my story. It is not everyone’s story, but for what it is worth, I thought I would share because I want to speak to the athletes out there who are still in the closet or struggling to find their way. I want you to know that there is hope and you’re not alone. There is a life and a deep happiness waiting for you on your path. You will get through this, and it is going to be okay.”
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