I spent the summer in Auckland and arrived back in Wellington to a heat tempered by South Coast ocean breezes and the laziness of a populace not all yet back from holiday. I watched Crave’s Heated Rivalry—all six episodes of the first season—very quickly before I left for home. My phone always takes me west of Lake Taupō, and along the winding Waikato curves of State Highway 32, I blasted some house and thought about all the carefully obscured dick-sucking I’d just seen.
Heated Rivalry is about two closeted ice hockey players who are in love, but don’t realise it because they’re too busy fucking, when they’re not smashing each other apart on the ice. It isn’t a perfect work of television. The plot is tropey, and I don’t buy Hudson Williams’ explanation that the thinness of some of his line delivery is because his character’s autistic (he makes up for it with the depth of feeling he conveys without speaking). This doesn’t matter. There is so much good in this show—good pacing, good lighting, good music—and really, really well-choreographed sex.
Technically, the fucking in this show is not that explicit, but attracts that label because it’s queer, as Hudson Williams has discussed. There’s no full male nudity, making it on par with Bridgerton and less graphic than Normal People, both full of straight sex. But it’s generous: Heated Rivalry’s sex scenes, which make up a third of some episodes, play out intimacy almost in real-time, in a way that podcaster Evan Ross Katz has compared to Russell T. Davies’ Y2K series Queer as Folk. These scenes are a rebuttal to whatever insanity made Harry Styles tell Rolling Stone in 2022 that gay films should do more than show “two guys going at it”. There’s no struggle between sex and tenderness, here (as if there ever has to be): screenwriter Jacob Tierney makes Shane and Ilya’s trysts essential to the unwinding of their emotional repression. This storyline’s so full of yearning it made world-famous gooner Katya cry.
So the sex is good because it makes the story work, but it’s also good just because it’s gay sex. Every on-screen hint at homosexual desire in Heated Rivalry—Ilya rimming Shane before he fucks him, the post-tuna-melt frotting where they collapse into romantic love—is a fuck you to fascistic imperialisms that would turn bodily autonomy, pleasures of the self, of living, into patriarchal obéissance. We know that this conservatism looms; we cannot avoid it. A United States federal judge has recently ruled that teachers can out queer and trans kids to their parents—just the latest headline in a continual American trajectory of homophobic and transphobic violence. In Ilya’s own Russia, a country that threatens its citizens with imprisonment for sharing what it designates as LGBT extremist propaganda, the show has, of course, become an underground hit.
And what joy, what pleasure—taking in all the sex (and Connor Storrie’s glorious ass), watching certain scenes over and over, and making meaning of them. Heated Rivalry has diffused across my queer life, like the warmth of our January sunshine. In this collective dream, I’ve been the transfag messaging my ex-girlfriend-now-close-friend about this show as she’s told me I fucking love watching gay boys grab and kiss each other.1 Another friend and ex-lover let me know she was lowkey not lowkey Shane, and I replied yes, the way he folds his clothes after he takes them off is quite you.2 For those of us who are not insanely ripped cis men, this show is a kind of positive anti-representation: we see ourselves in the queerness of Shane and Ilya’s dynamic, but are far enough from their subjectivity that watching them is pure indulgence, untainted by reminders of real life, which characters more like us would arouse.
Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie have been asked repeatedly in press interviews why they think Heated Rivalry has such a big female audience; I’ve heard them say (similar to what I mention above) that the absence of women in this love story means they can view it from a place of safety. Women’s pleasure is one of the targets of the conservative prudishness creeping across the West (tradwife content’s a great example). The rise of the fujoshi in the English-speaking world is a mark of resistance against this, I believe. I rewatched Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers over the holidays (with my mother, of all people) and was reminded how wonderful the female gaze on gay boys can be. Heated Rivalry’s really the same as the sexy tennis movie; it’s just that you get to be Zendaya, behind the screen, watching your two hot boyfriends make out.
So, yes, all the on-screen sodomy in this show is healing. There’s a lot I haven’t mentioned here—the cautious reception to Heated Rivalry by some professional hockey players, unsure what its popularity will mean for them (of the four major North American men’s sports leagues, only the NHL has no out players); the parasocial frenzy the show’s induced which star François Arnaud has called mass psychosis (fair); and the fact that all the Hollanov edits we’ve sent each other on our work breaks have made us more addicted to our phones than ever. But there’s cause for hope. All this summer gaiety meant that last Saturday morning, I pushed through dustiness to brave the men’s changing room for a swim at my local pool at 8 am, and head to a campaign meeting against the puberty blocker ban afterwards. The weather’s turned shit, and I’ve crashed and got sick since, but still—maybe the mental relief the show provided had some tangible effect on my capacity to organise.Writing for Vanity Fair, Russian-born journalist Mikhail Zygar, who is gay, and, like Ilya, cannot return home, has praised the Russian hockey player’s characterisation as including no exotic balalaikas, no mysterious Russian soul, no Putin, no Dostoevsky—just an ordinary person, alive and vulnerable. He also writes that while other Russians he speaks to don’t believe the happy endings in Heated Rivalry will ever be available to them, he has, in recent years, traveled an enormous distance toward realizing that freedom is possible. Maybe I have overstated what on-screen erotica can do for us all. Consumption is not action, it’s true; I can only hope it’s made space for us to breathe. Either way, like Zygar, I will look back on it fondly. I will remember with happiness the time when, in early January, I sat on Parliament Lawn at noon, eating the last of the season’s strawberries, and interrogated each of my workmates about whether they’d watched the gay hockey show.
1 Message quoted with permission.
2 Messages quoted with permission.
Featured photo by Klim Musalimov on Unsplash.
