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Contextualizing Heated Rivalry
March 20, 2026
Six weeks after Heated Rivalry ushered the cisheterosexual world into a humiliating hysteria, I scoured the internet in search of affirming, challenging, or enlightening discourse about the most-watched TV show on HBOMAX since 2020, according to The New Yorker. After a simple Google search, almost every article I read in supposedly prestigious media like The New Yorker, British Vogue, The Guardian, and even Out Magazine—the nation’s leading publication for LGBTQ+ media—centered heteronormativity in creatively facile fashions. Did no one find it elementary that the dominating conversation almost two months after the premiere was, “Why do straight women resonate so much with Heated Rivalry?”
Heated Rivalry is an adapted TV show based on the books by Rachel Reid—Heated Rivalry and The Long Game—about sex, desire, and sexuality portrayed through the sexual relationship of its main characters, hockey stars Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov. Framing Heated Rivalry as a love story effaces what the show is at its core: A historically humane projection of queer life. Positing Heated Rivalry as a love story that transcends all sexual identities, in defense of its merits, dilutes issues of casual sex, gender, and sexual identity for respectability politics and performance of heteronorms. The show is also surprisingly beautifully shot. At a time when everything in the mainstream is excruciatingly monotonous, jejune, or apathetic, Heated Rivalry is a multi-sensory opulence with lighting, framing, music, and a spectacular screenplay.
The sex scenes don’t feel gratuitous because of stylistic (camera work, editing, and lighting) and ethical (the use of an intimacy coordinator) choices. Jacob Tierney, the show’s writer and director, respects his audience; he refuses to be didactic, which is now routine in every form of contemporary media. He eschews tropes of queer presentism, which queer studies graduate student Colton Valentine defines as “a Whig history of sexuality that positions today’s LGBTQ+ writers as liberators of the closet past,” by situating these characters alongside, rather than against, documented depictions of queer identity and life. It captures in vivid vignettes, sincere characterizations, historical and cultural depictions of queer life in the late aughts, and the pressures of the “exceptional minority” trope in meticulous blink-or-you’ll-miss-it dialogue and acting.
Much of what I feel for Heated Rivalry is entwined in the individual choices of the director, Jacob Tierney, and actors Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, made to adapt this story for TV. It is Tierney’s incorporation of consent as foreplay that intensifies the effervescence of the moment; the camera work invites you into each intimate encounter without intruding. Williams inhabits Shane Hollander with depth, charm, and striking (micro) facial acting. When we meet Shane in the opening scene of the first scene, we immediately learn that he is a rule follower with a competitive sense of humor. By the end of the second episode, we gather that he is deliberate, with a profound sensitivity illustrated through all of his unsent text messages to Ilya. Storrie personifies Ilya with hypnotic line deliveries and a convincing Russian accent for a rural Texan native. During a scene in episode two, Olympians, in the bathroom after the MHL awards (the show substitutes the NHL with MHL to avoid copyright issues), Ilya rejects Shane after making him beg for fellatio. With deep vocal timbre and an intoxicating cadence, he says to Shane, “We will go back to our seats, watch the rest of this boring show, and then go to a boring party after. And then, when you have been waiting all night, you'll go back to my hotel room and I will maybe… maybe do more than just suck your dick.” By the end of the scene, I was spellbound.
The show is filled with queer history and coding, but my favorite is episode one’s shower scene, where Ilya masturbates in front of Shane. Gender studies academic and intimacy coordinator Amber Rose Mcneil historicizes and contextualizes this scene in the Heated Rivalry intimacy scene analysis they publish on their website. They remind us about cruising, “a way that gay and queer men have historically found other gay and queer men to have sexual encounters with,” to illustrate that Ilya’s masturbation isn’t random or merely entertainment. Mcneil breaks down Shane and Ilya’s “casually distanced cruising” by highlighting all of the moments that lead up to the shower masturbation scene. Mcneil selects the hotel cycling scene to illustrate how Tierney’s camera work shows us where Shane’s eyes rest throughout the rousing exchange, specifying that this scene features a “light cruising” where “Ilya is showing and gauging interest and attraction. His words and actions are flirty, providing Shane with information but also gathering information from Shane. In this scene, the flirting and measured behaviour from Ilya are more apparent to a general audience. But, when viewed through a queer lens, it is another scene that intentionally and handsomely illustrates queer coding, queer history, and queer culture.
Heated Rivalry’s conceit includes contrast between the pressures of the homophobic hockey world and the couple’s affection. It is notably the tension in the exterior world and repercussions in their interior life that make for a compelling watch. The show is an earnest, imaginative deviation from representations of queer life as a miserable existence portrayed in many queer presentist media. Queer presentist media represent caricatural queerness through contemporary characterizations and aesthetics, while, as Valentine puts it, "[canonizing] contemporary texts, but eliding and delegitimizing older queer lives and artworks” to make queerness digestible for a heterosexual audience. The writers of the book and of the screenplay reject the impulse to highlight the inherent unhappiness of a life that deviates from the dominant narrative, ultimately refusing to make the injustices and wrongdoings of a heteronormative society its central point.
It did not surprise me that the dominant media ignored all the complexities of this exquisite production. What confounds me is the seriousness with which queer media and social media personalities have devoted to theorizing the show’s cisheterosexual resonance as if queer existence needed universal appeal to rationalize its reason for being. Unsurprisingly, the abundance of theories on this asinine phenomenon has failed to produce any imaginative insight. Is it shocking that relying on the restrictive framework of heteronormativity, which predictably excludes anything that doesn’t fit neatly into its bleak worldview, has produced terrifyingly colorless conclusions?
I will not subjugate you or myself to more humiliation by offering a theory on this futile discourse. Instead of a dignifying review, which the cast and crew deserve—but is absent in legacy and independent media—I have chosen a superlative response in the mainstream (although it falls short) as a framework to establish Heated Rivalry as an earnest culture-defining attempt away from queer presentism.
The New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast offers an interesting perspective on the proverbial closet. They also mention the show’s resonance with the straights™, so beware!
***
In the episode “Scott Galloway vs. Heated Rivalry: Who will save men?” the hosts of Diabolical Lies, a culture and political podcast hosted by Katie Gatti Tassin and Caro Claire Burke, analyze professional grifter Scott Galloway’s vision of masculinity as proposed in his book, Notes on Being a Man, and Heated Rivalry’s supposed “portrayal of masculinity” as solutions for “reimagining the masculinity crisis” from their leftist feminist lens. The focus of my response will start from midway through the episode when they begin discussing Heated Rivalry because I do not have valuable minutes to expend theorizing on the screeching incoherence of Scott Galloway’s book.
In the first part of the podcast episode, the hosts offer visceral feelings and favorite snapshots of the show. They introduce a TikTok video of a cisheterosexual woman outlining personal claims for why the show resonates in a diaristic manner, culminating in trivial observations and fallacious reasoning steeped in Anglo-American feminism. They wholeheartedly agree that the video, “succinctly highlights all of how we are grappling with this idea of idealistic masculinity versus the masculinity that we really deal with in the world today.” Whatever that means.
They claim that “the show walks the line between what is (masculinity that we deal with in the world today) and what could be (idealistic masculinity portrayed in the show).” Legacy media and audiences gushed about the presence of “safe masculinity” instead of “toxic masculinity.” Even the TikToker asserts that “They are literally the embodiment of traditional masculinity. Yet, their masculinity is never weaponized.” But what is safe masculinity and how is it different from toxic masculinity? If masculinity is defined as the qualities or attributes regarded as characteristic of men and boys, which preserves hegemonic ideas of gender and sexual identities within binaries determined by biological sex, how does one achieve “safe masculinity” when masculinity itself is restrictive? I reject the idea that there is such a thing as “safe masculinity” when the doctrine of masculinity ostracizes those who deviate from these norms, such as LGBTQ+ people, while imposing a circumscribed order for those who adhere. They’re essentially saying: Isn’t it so nice that they get to be buff and chiseled while talking like girls? This assertion is both misogynistic and homophobic because there’s the subtext that these queer men are vulnerable privately while passing as straight publicly, as if it’s a good thing. Both “safe masculinity” and “toxic masculinity” are oxymoronic ideas.
The TikToker expresses that it “causes grief” to watch two men on an even physical, economic, and gendered playing field, not because she envied the relationship, but she “craves that freedom within love.” She boldly states that “there's no inherent power dynamic between them, no underlying expectations that one person be smaller, softer, gentler, easier, or more accommodating because of their gender. They're both allowed to be strong and vulnerable at the same time and also masculine without being threatening.” The hosts also reflected on the absence of a “power dynamic” between Shane and Ilya. What I think they all mean to say is that there is no power imbalance between the couple. Power dynamics is the distribution and experience of power in any relational dynamic. In Shane and Ilya’s case, the dynamic is balanced and not for the reasons outlined. Perhaps the ignorance surrounding the concept of power dynamics has produced shallow conclusions.
Power dynamics exist in every relational dynamic, but not every relationship, romantic, familial, professional, and platonic, experiences an imbalance of power. A relationship (and I am not strictly referring to romantic relationships) can start balanced and end or remain imbalanced. Many factors, such as class, age, race, gender, ethnicity, and culture, affect the distribution and experience of power. In Shane and Ilya’s case, the absence of a power imbalance isn’t merely because they are men. The relationship is able to maintain a healthy balance because both parties are unconcerned with overly defining their roles within the relationship, which is the norm for heterosexual couples. Together, they reject the prescriptive, proscriptive, and descriptive confines of heteronormativity, thereby creating a balanced relationship. They exclude the heteronormative dominance of shame and caricatural expectations and expressions commonly adopted in sexual and romantic relationships. Ilya never weaponizes Shane’s virginity by using his experience to dominate Shane. He playfully asserts his sexual knowledge competitively before reciprocating oral sex during their first sexual encounter and never mentions his experience again. Although Shane enjoys relinquishing control during their sexual encounters, it is also true that he initiates sex just as much as Ilya does. When he admits to Rose Landry, a famous actress he briefly dates, that he “prefers being the hole rather than the peg,” he is simply expressing a preference. Instead of prescriptive agendas or restrictive labels like “leader” and “follower,” resulting in dominance and control, they have invited playfulness, consent, healthy teasing, and tenderness. They take turns starting and meeting each other.
It is a myth that the relational dynamics on the show are “functionally unimaginable” for cisheterosexual people. The TikToker hypothesizes that an egalitarian romantic relationship is unattainable because “no matter what, in a heterosexual relationship, misogyny plays a role regardless of how progressive both of you are.” Truthfully, cisheterosexuals seldom explore imaginative solutions outside of their microscopic ideas of what romantic relationships should look like. To have egalitarian romantic partnerships, cisheterosexual women, like their male counterparts, must confront the homophobia that surrounds their romantic life. The women reject men who are either openly bisexual or men who exist outside the parameters of the dominant definitions for how men should act, in this case, “strong and vulnerable at the same time and also masculine without being threatening.” Tedious!
It bears repeating that the dismal worldview and frigid imaginations of heteronormativity remain inferior for comprehending queer relationality that exists outside of the binaries of heterosexuality, i.e., bisexuality or genderqueer identities. Even with the best intentions, a cisheteronormative lens inadvertently excludes and sanitizes Ilya’s bisexual identity. Throughout the podcast episode, the hosts (and many others who have theorized on the show’s resonance with cisheterosexual women, including The New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast hosts) omit or gloss over Ilya’s bisexuality as if it were a trivial characteristic like having blue eyes. Bisexuality exists outside the monosexual framework, threatening monosexual dominance and deconstructing the idea of sex. Through omission, the hosts are unable to perceive and translate the nuances differentiating the queer sexual and romantic relations of the central characters from gay and lesbian couples with heteronormative dynamics. To create equitable partnerships under a patriarchal economy, monosexuals must abandon the heteronormative doctrine and illusions of protection under heteronormativity in pursuit of a queer political praxis that interrogates the conception of power and deconstructs the dominant narrative of gender identity, sexuality, and behavior. Michael Foucault’s History of Sexuality, and the writings of queer theorists such as Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage, and Black feminist theorists such as Patricia Hills Collins’ Black Feminist Thought are critical texts for queer and heterosexual people looking to developing a queer political praxis.
Suppositions on queer relational dynamics through the lens of cisheteronormativity have also curtailed any meaningful discourse about the show. Towards the end of the video, the TikToker professes that the show “resonates because they show what love looks like when gender stops interfering, and it reveals what's possible and what isn't.” The approach is homophobic and illiterate, regardless of intention. Neither the hosts nor the person in this TikTok has questioned their unfounded claims. Because if they’d looked further down, they’d ask, “If Ilya and Shane can have a balanced dynamic where ‘gender stops interfering’ just because they’re gay and men, how then can one explain the misogyny and internalized homonegativity of coupled gay men? Or the rejection of ‘feminized' men in queer communities?” The analysis suffers from an absence of consideration for relevant qualities that shape the main character’s identities and how they experience each other.
Maybe the question isn’t “who will save men,” which is undoubtedly a bootless errand, but theories for how cisheterosexual women might extricate themselves from the clutches of a heteronormative abyss.
***
One of the hosts asserts that “Shane and Ilya's difficulty with communication is quite literally shown via language barrier. Ilya can barely speak English.” They claim the language barrier supposedly prevents the couple from sharing their true feelings, which makes the relationship “largely physical.” According to them, the couple is only able to communicate better once Ilya’s English improves. The absence of communication between Shane and Ilya (to the hosts) is “a very central issue in masculinity.”
Shane Hollander is biracial (Japanese 2nd-generation mother and white Canadian father) and lives in Canada. Ilya Rozanov, Russian, lives in Boston during the hockey season, and spends summers in Moscow with his father and brother, whom he literally and figuratively refers to as “police.” These national and racial identities inform their early and later communicative fashion. Hollander is also established as neurodivergent in the book, which Jacob Tierney superbly portrays without ever telling it throughout the season.
I was sure we had watched different shows because these conclusions were incomprehensible and simply fiction. Supposing that Ilya can barely speak English when most of the show is in English is xenophobic. It is an uninformed analysis of non-native English speakers, which omits the nuances and particularities of how communication is culturally determined. Misunderstanding how someone communicates because of cultural differences is not the same as speaking different languages. Ilya’s communication style must be considered through his Russian identity, familial dynamics, and tragedies. When he first meets Shane, it has only been five years since he found his mother, who died by suicide. He speaks subtextually and it is difficult for anyone with neurodivergence to parse, especially Shane. These variables inform how he camouflages with bravado and humor. At the same time, Ilya’s sense of humor is both cultural and personal. When Marleau, Ilya’s teammate, observes him texting and comments on his blushing face, Ilya responds with what might be my favorite line in the show, “Uh, no, never in life have I blushed. Russians do not do this.” It is simultaneously the most Russian response, as it is indicative of Ilya’s personality. Only Ilya would object by making a common, human, and involuntary reaction a universally “Russian thing.” With Shane, he nestles his affection in humor. In jest, he calls Shane “Mr. Real Estate” because of what he calls a “real estate fetish.” In the scene before Shane visits Ilya’s Boston home for the first time in episode four, Ilya fakes indifference when Svetlana finds him watching a TV special of Shane discussing his love for architecture at his custom-built cottage home in Ottawa. What intrigues me about Ilya is his ability to use humor to elusively communicate his affection for Shane and expose how well he knows the object of his affection. He is neither cunning nor cruel.
Shane compartmentalizes external expectations and pressures as the first Asian Canadian signed to the Metros while balancing a relationship with his mother, who is also his manager. Shane’s neurodivergence is crucial in understanding miscommunications with Ilya throughout the season. Neurodivergence affects how Shane interprets Ilya’s impish nature at various points throughout the show. However, neurodivergence does not imply an absence of feeling. Compartmentalization does not diminish Shane's capacity to feel everything, everywhere, all at once. He does not pathologize or expedite emotional processing or introspection. Instead of interpreting Shane’s realizations as delayed, we can appreciate this stunning unfurling of sexual awakening and identity.
In the relationship’s infancy and especially before their first sexual encounter, Shane and Ilya’s communication is explicit, oblique, and non-verbal. All of their flirtation is sketched with implicit dialogue and communicated with their bodies. My favorite of their early interactions is when Ilya, the more forward of the two, starts flirting by saying, “See you at the draft,” after beating Shane’s team at the International Prospect Cup. Six months later, after the cycling scene—an interaction I have concluded is the most exquisite foreplay—Shane tells Ilya, “See you in October.” It’s hard to miss Ilya’s faint smile after this interaction because Shane is mimicking how Ilya expresses interest, which is an understated example of how one begins and the other joins.
The two are teenagers and barely know each other when the sexual relationship begins. Any expectation of intense emotionality would be premature. It is true that they both struggle to express themselves in the infancy of the relationship, but are we to ignore the external circumstances—familial and systemic as well as cultural and personal nuances that dictate how these young men communicate? In their defense, the slow progression of their communication with one another is realistic and educational for young people starting to navigate romantic life. The lack of emotional communication between the two doesn’t delineate their relationship into “a largely physical one.” Instead, they begin by clearly defining the sexual relationship. And while confusing for both of them at different times and for different reasons, they allow each other the space to navigate personal confusions and external conflicts without saddling the other or their relationships with paralyzing expectations. Essentially, their scanty dialogue is simply because the relationship started out as, in Ilya’s words, "plans to fuck,” but then morphs into something more (because I reject the notion of “love at first sight”).
These days, most contemporary sexual and romantic dynamics are abundant with red flags from the beginning. We enter most sexual and romantic dynamics with overcommunicated personal agendas before we even know what the relationship might offer us. The show’s differing portrayal of gradual intimacy translates as “a very central issue in masculinity” for those with myopic relational standards, where heteronorms define expectations and performance of vulnerability from people we have yet to know. At some point, Katie says, “I wanted them to fucking talk to each other. There was one scene, I think they had started to talk about Ilya's father, and then they started making out, [we wanted them] to have a conversation! Talk about your dad! It was so physical, and they weren't communicating in a way that felt as though they were getting emotionally vulnerable with one another.” While Ilya and Shane’s relationship is very physical, what sustains the relationship is tenderness, mutual respect, and admiration. By contrast, most heteronormative relationships begin in admiration and end with organizing individual disappointments. Shane and Ilya are equally titillated by the others' sportsmanship and personalities. Simply put, they clearly like each other. They needn’t know each other’s past trauma to have good sex. Is it incomprehensible that these two unambiguously initially wanted to fuck?
***
The show strikes a balance by utilizing the supporting women cast as vehicles for pushing the main stories forward while maintaining empathetic and multifaceted characterizations of its women cast. Svetlana is Ilya’s fuck buddy, but she is also his unwavering support system since childhood. We know through Ilya that she isn’t waiting around for him since she is busy with a new career. She’s also aware of Ilya’s first homosexual relationship with their friend Sasha. Similarly, Rose Landry insists on a friendship with Shane after an affectionate conversation about his sexual identity and preference. Caro praises the show’s portrayal of the women characters on the show. She says, “These women do not carry the burden of educating or improving the lives of these characters. [They] are support systems, but they're also autonomous people in their own right.” When one of them verges on a cohesive argument or observation, the other follows with catastrophic conclusions. Katie rebuts that the women have to intervene to “usher [the men] along. We don't really know anything about [the women friends] apart from their relationships as supporting characters to the men.” She infers that although Svetlana is “understanding about Ilya,” she knows his relationship with Shane means more. She almost catches up to sound reasoning with “I guess I could make the argument that, like in some respects, that's literally just how friendship is supposed to work,” but logic was surely faster because she follows up with, “but we don't really see that [support] reciprocated.”
Diabolical Lies is supposedly from a leftist feminist lens. Do the leftist feminists agree that it is reasonable to center the supporting cis’ter characters over the queer relationships throughout the show? Is it not enough that we have agonizingly sat through tropes of the supportive gay bestie to the cisheterosexual woman with sage advice (that she will not take) for her frightful dating life? In the rush to contribute to the discourse and ride the wave of the show’s popularity, the dominating discussions exclude critical theory and historical context while confusing aesthetic inquiries for political judgement thereby curtailing public and private colloquy. With clarifying language, we can acknowledge the show’s true accomplishments, identify the gaps, while also enjoying what it offers.