We’ve been waiting for a show about the joys of boning for far too long.
Photo: HBO
I know what every gay guy in your life did last weekend. No, it wasn’t cooking Ina Garten’s stuffing recipe for Thanksgiving, listening to the new Rosalía album on repeat, or posting “like for the alt” on X. (Okay, they probably did those things too). What every gay guy did last weekend, at least those with HBO Max subscriptions, was watch Heated Rivalry, a slutty romance about two hockey players if not in love then at least in very graphic lust.
The Canadian show, made for the streaming service Crave, came out of nowhere with two episodes on Friday and shot to No. 2 on the HBO Max charts on Sunday night. It’s based on a series of romance novels by Rachel Reid that sold out on Amazon after viewers scrambled for a glimpse of what may happen in the four remaining episodes set to air every Friday in December. How did this scrappy little series achieve such success? Based on my social-media streams, it did so by gay dudes being absolutely feral for the sex scenes (though, undoubtedly, equally horny ladies also played a part).
The lovebirds we’re all in love with are hockey phenoms Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), who meet at an international tournament while playing for Canada and Russia, respectively. Staid Shane takes an immediate dislike to cocky (hehe) Ilya when they meet again at the Major League Hockey draft, where Shane is chosen to play for the fictional Montreal team and Ilya is scooped up by Boston. It’s not until they film a commercial together that things finally kick off. In the group shower after the shoot, as water washes down their perfectly pert hockey asses, furtive glances turn into Ilya full-on pulling his hog in front of Shane, who doesn’t say no. He says, “Not here.” This is the first 15 minutes of the series, and there is already full on jerking and it’s not subtle. The frame cuts off right above where Ilya’s hand would be, as if you only needed to scroll down on your OnlyFans screen to see more.
This leads to a hot hookup in Shane’s hotel room that leaves even less to the imagination, but that’s what makes Heated Rivalry way better than porn. The show follows the usual rhythms of a romance novel and the erotic stories that used to populate gay skin mags. It’s all about the tension between two men who can’t escape each other’s orbits. It’s a tap of the foot under a table at a press conference, the quick words exchanged at a face-off on the ice, a subtle rub of the back at an awards ceremony, edging us through each hour as lead-up to the next blockbuster sex scene. Six weeks, six months, two years pass in the blink of an eye. All the viewer sees is hockey, flirting, and sex because this is all that matters to Shane and Ilya.
That’s what makes this show so revolutionary and irresistible to gay audiences. Every gay show before had to exist in the context of society, and, I hate to break it to you, society hasn’t been that great for gay people. Queer As Folk, the original horny gay show which ran on Showtime from 2000 to 2005, had a rimming scene in the pilot, but it was also stuffed with AIDS scares, gay bashings, unpleasant outings, conversion therapy, and every other ill the queer community had to suffer through at the turn of the millennium. Fellow Travelers, the 2023 Paramount+ show featuring Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey as doomed lovers, was just as raunchy, but that period piece was set in the ’50s, when at least one of them had to be in the closet and lives would be ruined if their affair came out.
Heated Rivalry is set in the recent past, but Shane and Ilya are also closeted, Shane because of his overbearing mother and Ilya because of, well, Russia, but also because they play in a macho sport where guys can’t be gay. And even if they could be gay, they’re on opposing teams. This setup does what any great romance should do: push these guys closer together because they feel like there is no one else in the world they could possibly be with. They just have to get over their circumstances and recognize that they’re soul mates because there is literally no one else in the world they could be with who would understand them. It’s this or a long life of senseless yearning and Lana Del Ray playlists.
That’s why the sex scenes are so explosive. Ilya and Shane are kept apart for years with only hockey and blue balls for company. Queer showrunner Jacob Tierney is out of his mind for making the hookups as smutty as they are. They’re so filthy it’s amazing they’re allowed on television, the kind of things we don’t want straight people to know about because they wouldn’t be as much fun if they were acceptable to discuss in public.
Tierney knows we’re here for the tension and the, uhhhh, release. Heated Rivalry isn’t much concerned with politics, delivering a message about equality, or sanitizing gay life to make it comfortable for straights (and based on the number of straight women loving this, they don’t want it sanitized, either). It’s too focused on the sex. As it should be! We are in the age of peak gay sluttiness, where a combination of social acceptance, hookup apps, and drugs to improve sexual health have created a whole population with the same mind-set as Shane and Ilya, looking only toward the next opportunity to bang in a hotel room with vast city views. It’s the perfect show for the moment because, for the first time, it’s meeting the gay community exactly where it is. The gay audience came (hehe) for the sex scenes, but they’re staying for a fantasy of sexual liberation without consequence. Shane and Ilya, just like someone leaving a Sniffies “get together,” know that consequences are coming, but they’re nothing insurmountable, nothing a little time or DoxyPEP can’t get rid of. After all, this is a romance novel, and just like the best massages and hockey shower scenes, they always end happily.
