The Horniest Show on TV Actually Has a Weirdly Conservative Message. Don’t Fall for It.

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Heated Rivalry tracks three hypercompetitive National Hockey League players as they pursue secretive same-sex relationships. The show—a Canadian production now streaming in the U.S. on HBO Max—has become the No. 1 fixation on gay social media, generating an endless stream of posts that revel in its soft-core-porn aesthetics: sculpted jocks, locker-room eroticism, and prolonged sexual tension (and, finally, fairly graphic sex) between men whose sexual identities remain, at best, closeted and, at worst, explicitly denied. So far, the series follows two couples: Canada’s Shane Hollander (captain of the Montreal Metros) and Russia’s Ilya Rozanov (captain of the Boston Raiders), as well as New York Admirals captain Scott Hunter and his romantic interest Kip Grady, a smoothie-shop barista in Toronto. Each couple is grappling not only with desire but with what that desire is supposed to mean. And in its fourth episode, the show makes that tension all the more explicit.

In a scene staged shirtless and postcoital, Ilya interrogates Shane, the man he has been sleeping with intermittently for years (the show jumps around wildly in time), about whether he has ever pursued women. The exchange is framed less as a declaration of bisexuality and more as a ritualized disavowal of queerness, an insistence that sex between men need not signify anything beyond the act itself. Soon after, the series doubles down on this logic when Shane begins pursuing a famous movie actress, triggering Ilya’s jealousy and reaffirming the show’s most persistent narrative move: When desire between men becomes too difficult to contain, heterosexuality functions as the only imaginable alternative.

Despite all the horny chatter it has generated, this show is, at its heart, concerned with a familiar and utterly exhausted (and exhausting) question: What, exactly, makes someone gay? Is it the sex act itself, or is it the public declaration of identity—the willingness to name oneself as part of a community? Heated Rivalry wrestles with this conundrum but ultimately resolves it in a deeply conservative way. According to the logic of its plot thus far, sex between men does not make the characters gay (or even bisexual, for that matter). By their own admission, they do not see themselves that way. Gayness begins only when desire leaves the bedroom and enters the social world—when it is confessed, claimed, and explained. The real dramatic tension, then, is not the troubled romance itself, but the slow, anguished march from sex-soaked secrecy to public disclosure. Desire is easy; identity is the burden. Pleasure is private; queerness must be accounted for.

None of this is to deny the fun of Heated Rivalry. I actually love the series, as do so many viewers, for its heat, its pacing, and its emotional pull. But enjoyment does not preclude critique. And what the show reveals is that gay storytelling today is limited not so much by social acceptance as by the narrow stories it keeps repeating.

Over the span of many years—carefully marked by on-screen time stamps flashing 2013, 2014, and beyond—the series shows Ilya and Shane meeting only when their teams play each other, having sex, then returning to solitude and yearning until the next encounter. This cyclical structure becomes the show’s emotional engine: desire followed by separation, intimacy followed by isolation. Women function not as genuine romantic possibilities but as narrative cover, trafficked in to reassure the audience that these men are not, finally, gay.

Incidentally, this time period was the height of gay social media, when countless closeted and questioning men created anonymous profiles—not necessarily to come out, but to cruise and to see what else might be out there. Even men with everything to lose found ways to participate inconspicuously in this world, if only at the level of curiosity or fantasy. It strains credibility, then, that across years of longing, separation, and sexual frustration, neither of these characters ever strays into even the most discreet, anonymous encounter. One might reasonably expect that one of them would at least have gotten his rocks off in a faceless tryst—an act that would have told the story from a recognizably gay perspective rather than from the familiar logic of heterosexual melodrama.

Such a moment would not have trivialized their bond; it would have complicated it. It would have introduced dynamics that countless gay couples—especially those formed under conditions of secrecy—must negotiate: Do we keep this open? Why were you on Grindr? Does anonymous sex count as betrayal, or as survival? Instead, the show glides past these questions entirely. The omission is telling. By erasing the era’s gay social media, the series also erases the possibility of a gay community, however partial, fractured, or impersonal. What remains is an impoverished narrative framework in which isolation is total and the only imaginable alternative to longing and misery is women.

For decades, coming out functioned as the primary story through which queer relationships were made legible. From James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room to the 1982 film Making Love (starring Harry Hamlin), gay life was presented as a problem of disclosure, secrecy, and consequence.* These stories were important in their time, but they narrowed the imaginative field, training audiences to expect that gay narratives would culminate in revelation rather than continuation.

What makes this limitation in Heated Rivalry so striking is that queer writers solved it decades ago. Mart Crowley’s landmark play The Boys in the Band, written by a gay man before Stonewall and unapologetically centered on gay social life, does not hinge on whether its characters are “really” gay. Their gayness is assumed. The drama emerges instead from intimacy itself—from the cruelty, humor, desire, self-loathing, and, yes, rivalry that arise when a group of men share a social world. The conflict is not identity but how people live with one another once identity is no longer in question.

This is why The Boys in the Band (which was revived on Broadway in 2018 and got its second movie adaptation in 2020) remains such a compelling model. I loved it not because it was kind to its characters, but because it was honest about the social dynamics that govern gay life. It gave us the bitchy queen, the couple struggling with monogamy, the men who weaponize humor against their own vulnerability, and the lingering presence of the closet in the form of married or formerly married men. Whatever its flaws, the play understood something crucial: Gay life does not unfold in isolation. It unfolds in rooms full of people.

There were other experiments as well, now largely forgotten. A short-lived 1970s play titled Faggot—not to be confused with Larry Kramer’s Faggots—engaged the quiet despair and dullness of middle-aged gay life, refusing both melodrama and erotic fantasy. It did not last long, and its disappearance is telling. Stories about boredom, compromise, and emotional stasis rarely survive, even though they may come closest to how many lives are lived.

The HIV/AIDS crisis shifted gay storytelling once again, replacing identity anxiety with narratives of survival, loss, and political urgency. Works like Kramer’s The Normal Heart were breathtaking in their rage and necessity. Yet, even here, mainstream representations often faltered. Philadelphia, for example, presented a gay protagonist stripped of culture, friendship, and erotic life—rendered palatable through isolation and suffering rather than community or desire.

Heated Rivalry is adapted from the Game Changers romance series, by Rachel Reid, and its television incarnation has been developed, written, and directed by Jacob Tierney, who is openly gay. That distinction matters—but it does not resolve the larger problem. The show remains tethered to a premise and narrative logic shaped by a genre that, in its most popular and influential iterations, has often been driven by writers working outside gay male social worlds—in this case a woman. Whatever turns the source material or later episodes may take, the show’s first four episodes have already committed to a set of narrative assumptions about gay intimacy, isolation, and heterosexual fallback that deserve scrutiny on their own terms.

This pattern has precedent. Brokeback Mountain, written by Annie Proulx, similarly sought to indict social intolerance. Yet it imposed what the author understood to be the central tragedy of gay life: repression so complete it can only end in death. One lover survives through silence; the other does not survive at all. Like many late-19th-century American novels in which female protagonists were narratively “resolved” through death, the film grants gay men depth only insofar as they are doomed. Versions of this logic persist even now: Another HBO Max project, The Gilded Age, for all its care in depicting a queer relationship, ultimately resolves that story by killing off John Adams, who is abruptly run over by a horse-drawn carriage in the third season.

When stories like Heated Rivalry and Brokeback Mountain treat coming out as the defining drama of gay life, they don’t merely reflect cultural assumptions—they help shape them. Employers remain unnamed. Families are abstracted. Sports leagues, schools, and workplaces disappear into atmosphere. Straight people’s everyday complicity—the jokes, the silences, the conditional tolerance—goes largely unexamined. Structural homophobia becomes atmospheric rather than accountable. I would much rather see stories that turn their gaze outward: toward workplaces that remain discreetly hostile; toward families whose love is conditional; toward cultures that congratulate themselves on tolerance while harboring unquestioned prejudice. Homophobia is not merely an internal struggle—it is built into the DNA of institutions, traditions, and social expectations.

Like other viewers, gay audiences deserve stories that help us navigate our own lives—or at least reflect a nuanced version of reality that we can recognize and learn from. We often say that life imitates art, but the inverse is just as important. Without art, without stories, we are left without maps.

Gay narratives still tend to treat confession as the plot—the moment when life supposedly begins. But for most people, coming out isn’t an ending or a climax. It’s the threshold. What follows is the real material: jobs and bosses, families and conditions, friendships, aging, compromise, care—and the institutions that quietly decide which lives are easy and which are expensive. The question isn’t whether gay people are visible enough. It’s whether our culture is finally ready to tell stories about what visibility costs. If gay stories like Heated Rivalry still feel unfinished, it may be because they keep stopping at the closet door.

Correction, Dec. 18, 2025: The article originally misstated the year of Making Love’s release. It also misstated that Making Love was a TV movie.