'Heated Rivalry' Sparked a Publishing House at a 55-Year-Old Gay Porn Studio

Less than a year after Heated Rivalry premiered last November, a gay adult studio that has been trading, by its own account, since 1971 has decided it wants to be in the book business.

Falcon | NakedSword — San Francisco-based, and a gay porn giant in Attitude's description — has launched FalconInk, an erotic fiction publishing house running three separate imprints: Falcon Books, Raging Stallion Books and NakedSword Books. Variety broke the news as an exclusive on Monday, and reads the launch as a consequence of the show's success. Worth noting up front: neither executive quoted in the announcement mentions Heated Rivalry at all, and the first title out of the gate is a baseball romance.

Two novellas, and an audiobook casting coincidence

The first two titles are out now in trade paperback, ebook and audiobook. Both premises below are as Variety and Attitude describe them.

Hard Ball, from Falcon Books, is an original sports romance by Riley Parks about Mateo Ruiz, a minor-league player chasing a spot in the majors, and Chase Whitaker, the rival shortstop chasing the same one. Enemies to lovers, in Attitude's phrase.

Wild Game: Open Season, from NakedSword Books, is a prequel to the studio's film Wild Game. Riley Parks and Ben Rush wrote it. Its protagonist, Derek Kage, is by all appearances happily married to a woman when a construction worker named Adrian turns his life upside down. The audiobook is narrated by the adult performer Derek Kage, whose name the character shares. Variety also reports that Eddie Burke reads Hard Ball, and that both novellas are being inducted into the Stonewall National Museum, Archives & Library.

What the CEO said about women

Here is Falcon | NakedSword CEO Tim Valenti, in the statement that came with the announcement:

“This exciting venture reflects our commitment to expanding beyond our traditional audience while staying true to the storytelling and sexuality that have defined Falcon for more than five decades. For the first time, we're also creating content for one of the largest audiences in the M/M romance space: women.”

That is a 55-year-old gay pornography company naming women, in its own launch statement, as an audience it is now creating for. Attitude sets one figure alongside that line: HBO estimates roughly half of Heated Rivalry's viewership is female.

Co-chief content officer Ben Rush — who also co-wrote one of the novellas — said FalconInk will “serve as an incubator for future film and television adaptations, both mainstream and adult,” while the company stays “committed to the freedom and acceptance we've represented within the LGBTQIA+ community for 55 years.”

The launch party is on Aug. 29 at Book Soup in West Hollywood.

Meanwhile, the show at the center of this

Heated Rivalry is adapted from Rachel Reid's Game Changers novels and airs on Crave in Canada and HBO Max in the US. Per The Hollywood Reporter, it follows Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) across the better part of a decade of a situationship slowly becoming a relationship, and season 2 starts shooting in August. Bell Media and Crave said in a statement, reported by THR, that they are aiming for a spring 2027 premiere — worth knowing, because the April 2027 date came from a CBS Mornings segment that CBS Mornings itself backtracked hours later.

Creator Jacob Tierney told Variety in March that his approach to the pressure was to go back to the beginning: what he had to do, he said, was “love these books and try to make the smartest thing I can make of it.”

Our read

On the evidence of that one HBO estimate, the audience for this material plainly isn't only gay men — and a company that has been selling it since 1971 has noticed and moved. That's not a betrayal of anything. A studio does not last that long in this industry by ignoring where the audience went.

The question worth holding onto is a quieter one: when the growth market is somebody else, who is the product still for? Wild Game: Open Season, on its own summary, is a story about a man who appears to be happily married working out what he wants. That's a book with a very specific reader in mind, and he has been Falcon's reader for a long time. Two novellas in, the answer looks like both. We'll see what the rest of the list looks like.