The Weekly Croissant: Puck Around and Find Out

by Guest Hoe Nelson Williams

Dear Croissants:

I am currently on maternity leave and will return to you shortly! In the meantime, please enjoy a series of guest authors, I know you will love ‘em!

Nelson Williams is an upright bassist from South Louisiana who lives in New Orleans. Uncommonly referred to as a “bass slut”, Nelson performs with as many acts as he can logistically (or not logistically) say yes to but his main acts are with New Dangerfield, a new Black string band, and Chris Jones and the Night Drivers. Nelson is a retired caffeine dealer (barista) and lover of bikeable cities.

Salutations, my fellow art hoes! It is such an honor to return to this wonderful warm toasty buttery flaky column yet again. Rachel has left you all in my silly little hands this week and my silly little brain couldn’t pass up the chance to circle back to one of the more hilarious things Rachel has written about me in this beautiful publication: my love of hockey romance books!

I introduced Rachel to the beautiful book series, Pucking Around by Emily Rath, sometime last year amongst our countless referrals of music, film, tv and books. I first ran into this book series quite spontaneously in November 2023 when I was in Brooklyn at the Ripped Bodice with my partner, Jenna, and one of her best friends from PT school at NYU. The Ripped Bodice is an independent romance bookstore with two locations, one in Los Angeles and one in Brooklyn. I won’t say that I am overtly knowledgeable about the romance book world outside of the books I read that Jenna passes along my way but I had so much fun in browsing around that shop. As we perused, we passed a section that was completely devoted to hockey romance books. According to my experts (Jenna and Ally), hockey books are amongst one of the most popular sub-genres within the romance book world which I found unbelievable as a boy from the Deep South where seeing people playing hockey is as rare as seeing good public transit. Obviously we all had to pick a book from the section and I picked up Pucking Around based on name alone and the rest is history.

I have to reiterate that I knew nothing about Pucking Around until I cracked open the first pages on the train back to Manhattan that day and by god I fell hard for this book series. Now I won’t sit here and spoil this book or the other two main books in the series (their names are Pucking Wild and Pucking Sweet cuz of course they are) because they are worth the excitement, speculate, utter shock and red-faced embarrassment from one’s first dive in but I will mention the one thing I didn’t expect to find within this little smutty hockey book: amazing bisexual men representation . . . and relatively emotionally self-aware hockey players.

One of the reasons why I must sing praises onto Emily Rath’s writing and representation of bisexuals in media is that I recently sat down and watched Sex and the City for the first time (I know I’m decades late) and I came into SATC expecting some validation to its cultural importance in the zeitgeist based upon the indeterminate amount of praise I’ve heard it receive since I was quite literally a child. Yet what one of things I found with the series is an unbelievably infuriating deception of the queer community in general . . . and the realization that the show has a personal grudge against bisexuals.

Now you might say “Nelson, the show was made in the late 90’s and 2000’s. Isn’t it a little anachronistic to judge a show from then with the values and expectations of now?” To which I would reply, “Dear gentle reader, you are quite correct but also you’re wrong.” SATC takes every chance it can in the series to throw haymakers at bisexuals and the concept of bisexuality. There’s an entire episode in the first season that’s terrible about it; Samantha, the one character of the main cast who enters a queer relationship, gets torn to pieces by all of her friends when she dates a woman. As the series ends, there’s an episode where a man that assumed is gay happily marries a woman and debate rather humorlessly that it must be a false relationship and marriage as if the man being bisexual is completely and utterly absurd.

Some NYC bisexual must have personally tortured every member of the writing team for the way the show venomously rips the bi community apart.

Yet in stark comparison as I read Emily Rath’s Pucking Around, again a smutty hockey romance book set in Jacksonville, Florida, I found myself both incredibly entertained by everything the book has to offer (and trust me when I say it has a lot to offer) and amazed at how queer friendly and embracing the story was despite it being a sport romance book. Again, I don’t want to spoil much of this book for anyone but I will say it validates my theory that more bros should kiss their bros yet I don’t feel like the story follows the overplayed joke of “straight men playing big masculine coded sports are secretly gay”. Instead I find the book has a genuine well-crafted plot line of a man finding and accepting his attractive to men and living out the desire whilst still being very much in love with women. Hilariously and sentimentally enough, this part of book is probably something a much younger and one foot in closet Nelson would have appreciated reading for his own sake. We love good bisexual representation, ya heard!

If anyone of you grab hold of this series, please slide into my DMs and let me know your thoughts. Rachel is my only convert into the series and I’m fairly certain she’s only read the first book which is something I shall begrudgingly urge her to remedy as she takes this time for herself. I would love nothing more than to one day sit at a hockey game with likeminded friends to yap about a queer friendly hockey book.

Silly Writer’s Note: Carrie Bradshaw throughout SATC breaks up with various men who have the characteristics of playing bass, being bisexual, having ADHD and liking Jazz. She also never dates a single non-white. This makes me believe that Carrie Bradshaw would gun me down in the street and then write in her column “And then I had to wonder: does a guy like Nelson Williams even have the right to exist?”