Intro

It’s not often these days that a piece of art becomes a cultural phenomenon. I certainly wouldn’t have guessed that one of the artworks that could break through the constant noise of the AI, social media-poisoned, short-form video-addled, populist slop era would be a heavily eroticized gay romance between an asshole blond guy and a potentially autistic brown-haired guy caught up in a years-long situationship full of intense, confusing feelings. I may or may not have related quite heavily to aspects of the show.

Heated Rivalry is the gay hockey romance between Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov. It started as a novel by Rachel Reid in her gay-hockey-romance series, Game Changers. Jacob Tierney’s television adaptation was released through Canadian streaming service Crave and was immediately picked up for release in the US by HBO. There’s a lot of sex… Though, is there? Honestly, when I saw all the talk about it, I assumed there would be plenty more erotic scenes than there are. I think the people who called it softcore perhaps don’t get out enough. It’s definitely explicit, and there are a good number of erotic scenes, but it’s not like… a lot.

One of the clips that went viral on Twitter involves Shane in bed and Ilya watching from a chair. He orders Shane to pleasure himself. There is a dom-sub dynamic here, which I suppose is somewhat kinky. That’s one of the kinkiest scenes, and we’ll get to the other later. It’s not that intense, though. Shane tosses his underwear at Ilya’s face. Everyone went, “He should have sniffed them!”

I agree. He should have sniffed them. But… he was never going to. Why? Because scent isn’t really part of their thing. Like, I hate to burst everyone’s bubble, but there was nothing in the show about eroticized scent. Poppers weren’t used. Pits weren’t sniffed or played with. No foot stuff or clothes sniffing. Ilya was never going to sniff the underwear, because the show isn’t that intense. It’s pretty tame.

I mean, you could say the erotic scenes are intense in that they’re putting a lot of energy into them. They operate at a fast speed, a speed that is honestly sort of absurd. When they go down on each other, and they each last like 10 seconds, that is kind of hilarious. I know it was meant to be hot, and it was, but it was also funny. That’s not a knock against it, but still. The intimacy in the show might be physically intense, and the dynamic is emotionally intense, but the eroticization isn’t erotically intense. I’m putting that out there in case you haven’t seen the show and have been wondering about how people talk about it in that way.

We’ll get back to that sniffing scene later.

What should one say in an essay about Heated Rivalry? There are several things that could be interesting to talk about: You could draw the connections to the RPF people theorize about it being or the Stucky fanfic allegation. You could analyze the erotic scenes or do a deep dive into the treatment of queer people in Russia. I’m sure there’s an interesting essay out there about how the show handles Shane’s neurodivergence coding. You could talk about the entertainment industry’s reaction to the show. You could talk about the weird and horrid parasocial reactions to dating rumors and the like. You could talk about homophobia from the 2000s to the 2010s. 

Many gay guys have talked about their emotional reactions to the Scott and Kip moments. I cried during the World Cup scene. I get it. You could also theorize about the disconnect between gay men and women in general in terms of Scott and Kip. In honesty, I think it’s partially due to the fact that it’s implied they’re both versatile, but we’ll talk positions in depth in a bit.

I want to talk about three things, though: Gay guys, fujoshis, and censorship.

One - “Real Gays”

One of the first major discourses when Heated Rivalry hit the scene was over the “realness” of it. We could talk about the back-and-forth comments about whether or not it represents the “true” gay experiences, but I find that conversation fundamentally uninteresting. Sex looks different for different people. No one’s experience is universal. This is not a profound insight, and yet it seems to elude people quite frequently.

Instead, I want to discuss something that pops up every single time a piece of queer filmmaking makes it big: Do actors need to be queer to play queer roles? Is it wrong for a woman to make a bunch of art about gay guys? Is it immoral to make art that is not about you?

No, that’s stupid.

I’m so very sorry. I know people want this to be a nuanced conversation, but it really isn’t. It comes down to entirely not understanding what art is and not respecting the personhood of an artist. It’s a bunch of people who heard the phrase “write what you know” and decided that meant you can only make art that follows in your footsteps. This is ultimately anti-creativity and anti-empathy. It’s solipsistic and, sorry, juvenile.

Now, can a piece of art made by someone not of the group it's about be insensitive? Sure. Can it be bigoted? Yeah. Can it miss things? Yes. All of this is also true if the piece of art is made by someone who belongs to the group. The art should be judged on the whatness of it, on its actual artifact, not based on who has “permission” to make such artifacts. 

“Only gay people should play gay roles” is not woke. It’s just anti-art nonsense that argues a straight man could never have the empathy or imagination to portray a gay man without delving into homophobic stereotypes or “playing it straight.” Again, sorry to say, but the latter complaint is nonsense. It’s homophobic in and of itself. The real complaint would be about a lack of chemistry, and, if that poor chemistry is caused by the actor’s homophobia or inability to connect in that way with a male co-star, that’s not an issue with the actor’s sexuality. It’s an issue with the actor’s and the director’s skill.

What’s most frustrating to me is that the people who seem vocally invested in this idea that gay roles should only be played by gay men, that the job of acting should in part be determined by your sexuality—something that homophobes would gladly take advantage of and which is clearly unjust employment discrimination—are my fellow gay guys who should know better or at least have the slightest understanding of how art works.

But here is where a bit of nuance pops up. This isn’t merely about the brain-dead take that you should only make art about yourself. It’s also about dehumanizing artists.

Then again, there’s a segment of gay guys who will throw parasocial fits at the idea of their favorite erotic actors being gay for pay. If you’re unfamiliar, that refers to a straight man who acts in gay porn, no matter the position. Some people have called this queerbaiting; it is not. It is acting. Erotic acting is just acting. These people are playing characters.

The real problem is the parasocial fantasies people have about actors, no matter what genre they appear in. This is really true of all entertainers. Boy band members rarely chat about dating because part of the reason for the success of boy bands is that fans imagine getting into a relationship with one of the members. Disclosing an actual relationship ruins that. An erotic actor revealing himself to be straight ruins the fantasy of getting to have sex with him. An actor who plays a gay role in a non-erotic film coming out as straight ruins the fantasy.

But when you put it like that, it sounds like whiny nonsense, so you have to moralize it. You have to pretend like there is a moral imperative that only gay guys are allowed to be gay on-screen.

It’s all just nonsense, playing dolls. It’s taking these artists and dehumanizing them. It’s objectifying them. 

Let’s talk more about objectification.

Two - Fujoshis

If you’ve been paying attention to the reception to Heated Rivalry, you’ll probably note that it has a rather large female fanbase. This is to be expected due to the obvious: Genre romance is primarily enjoyed by women. HR is a genre romance adapted from a gay romance novel. Women tend to be the majority of readers, especially of romance, and so the pre-existing fanbase was largely composed of women.

This has led to a lot of strange conversations from a few different angles. 

First, we should maybe talk about fujoshi. Fujoshi is a somewhat reclaimed derogatory term in Japanese meant to refer to female fans of BL, that is, boys' love: yaoi, shonen ai. Fujoshis tend not to be fans of bara, but that’s not true of all of them. The fujoshi isn’t restricted to the mediums of anime and manga, though. When you see a fujoshi depicted in a BL manga, you’ll see this encompasses all of fandom, from JPop idols to live-action characters to shipping real-life people they see out on the street. This is somewhat relatable to me in that every time I see two guys walking side-by-side, I glance down at their hands, hoping they’re clasped together.

Depictions of fujoshi and fudanshi, their male counterparts who also love BL, are often comedic. They’re making fun of them, sometimes in a gentle, teasing way, and sometimes in a way that makes clear the artist enjoys dabbling in homophobia and/or sexism. The most positive depictions I’ve seen have been where a fujo is or becomes the friend of one of the leads and lends them emotional support. Sometimes, they’ll be an ex who the lead comes out to and then becomes friends with. They’re the Rose Landrys of Japanese media, though there probably isn’t enough evidence to call Rose a fujoshi.

The existence of fujos and fudans can confuse people. Fudanshi are easier for most people to wrap their heads around, but really only when they imagine them as being attracted to men themselves. Similarly, the popular imagining of a fujoshi is a straight woman. Neither of these things have to be true, and that introduces even more confusion to a lay person. Why enjoy erotic and romantic m/m stories if you have no interest in men?

First, I think we have to clarify: a lot of people—most people, I would wager—aren’t really fujoshied up. They would express similar interest and support for a straight couple or a sapphic couple. What drives their support is chemistry, whether romantic or erotic. While I prefer everything to be gay, I get that. If something is cute, it’s cute. I wouldn’t necessarily label something involving women as “hot” as that’s not how my brain is wired to respond to those scenes, but I can still appreciate erotic scenes that aren’t between a bunch of dudes.

After that, there’s a good chance your mind will make an analog comparison: fujoshis are to Achilleans what straight men are to sapphics. In other words, they fetishize the idea of homosexuality, similar to how straight guys see lesbians as an interesting sex object. Object is the operative word here. There’s been plenty of discourse surrounding the online Heated Rivalry fandom and the discomfort some gay men feel at being objectified.

We tend to think of objectification as a bad thing. To be turned into an object by another is to become something other than human. You are the thing on which a human acts. As a concept, it goes beyond sexual objectification, which is what most of us likely think about. Imagine a taxi driver who is treated poorly by customers. The dehumanization going on here is, subconsciously, a form of objectification. The driver is seen as an extension of the car. Think about the way people talk about artists. Part of the reason people have become obsessed with generative AI is that some of them have already dehumanized the artist in their minds. They’ve objectified them into some automaton meant to churn out content exactly to their liking.

It’s through this sort of dehumanization that much of patriarchy works. Women are sexually objectified all the time without consent. They’re also sometimes conceptualized as matronly automatons, some sort of cleaning, care-taking robots of the domestic sphere. This has led some feminists to claim that objectification is the mechanism through which patriarchy manifests. Their answer to “what is a woman”—theoretically, if not realistically, because many of these types turn out to be TERFs—is “one who is objectified.” Man screws woman. Subject, verb, object. In this view of gender—I again assert that this is a theoretical application because most of these types don’t actually strictly hold this view—if a woman objectifies a man, she becomes a man, and he becomes a woman. In an Achillean couple, if one partner objectifies the other, he is the man, and his partner is the woman. Sounds a bit weird, homophobic, and sexist when you put it like that. Put a pin in that. Some of the people who hold this view become strangely lesbo-phobic, specifically when a Sapphic couple engages in any sort of power-play. It’s wild.

Why go off on that little tangent?

Well, it’s trifold, like a bulky wallet. Perhaps four-fold when we take that pin down in a little bit.

First, it’s to acknowledge the legitimate frustration some of my fellow gays are expressing. Homophobia is, at the end of the day, an offshoot of sexism. Objectification is dehumanization. Most of the time, that’s upsetting and potentially dangerous to be on the end of. The objectification of trans women into sex objects by certain straight men, for instance, can lead to intercourse that devolves into violence when the trans woman asserts her humanity. Just as there are plenty of straight men who enjoy lesbian porn but turn around and express homophobic beliefs or support homophobic policies, so too do some fujoshis. I imagine there are some fudanshis out there of the same nature.

Second, it’s to contrast this with the idea that there can be good objectification. Or consensually erotic objectification. The most literalized version of this is a transformation kink where one fantasizes about being magically turned into an object for someone else’s gratification, whether it’s being turned into a piece of clothing, a toy, furniture, or so on. You’ll see the latter sometimes expressed in BDSM settings. Someone acting as a footstool for their dom is someone who is engaging in their own objectification and enjoying it. It’s not automatically evil to objectify someone, and it’s not automatically harmful to be the object.

Objectification goes on in just about every fandom space. Characters in a narrative are treated as dolls. Now, strictly speaking, this doesn’t hold an inherent moral value one way or another. If you want to stretch the metaphor as far as it goes, any artist who deals with character creation and interaction is playing with dolls, just with varying degrees of empathy for their toys. Dollification does present a problem when it comes to real-life people. You know, this is how celebrities are often dehumanized in parasocial settings. It’s also what makes me uncomfortable with most RPF, that is, real person fanfic. I’m not saying you’re wrong to engage with it; it just makes me a bit uncomfortable. The point, though, is that objectification is pervasive and not necessarily homophobic or harmful.

Finally, it helps us figure out why some women love gay male stories.

Armchair psychoanalysis doesn’t apply to everyone, so on and so forth, don’t listen to me, blah blah blah. Why do some women, straight or gay, go gaga? It’s because Lady Gaga is iconic, and we should all aspire to be her. But let’s stay on topic.

If we agree with the feminist theory that objectification is the expression of patriarchy, then we know that women are made to endure objectification throughout their lives. Unwanted, terrifying, dehumanizing objectification. What’s one way in which we handle negative emotions or trauma? We sexualize them. Eroticization is a defense mechanism. I sometimes enjoy having a man call me homophobic terms in the bedroom. This is an eroticization of past experiences with homophobia. In sexualizing it, I temporarily remove its power, its pain, and its chaotic nature. It becomes within my control. It becomes an expression of my desirability.

Some people enjoy objectification in the bedroom for this very reason.

But let’s keep going. The language we use to describe sex is often violent. Thrust. Stab. Dominate. Screw. Hammer. Pound. Slap. Smack. These are violent words. Penetrative sex is a vulnerable act of invasion. There can be a beautiful amount of trust there. Submission. Convergence. It can also be pure horror.

Fantasies of gay men get the woman out of the picture. If you can enjoy a man getting it on with another man, you get to indulge in erotica without imagining any sort of violence against women. And, though I don’t think this is conscious for the vast majority of people, you get to see the “violence” of penetrative sexuality deployed against a man. There is safety in male/male romance and erotica. Catharsis, even.

When people write about women who enjoy gay erotica, they often joke about it being some simple perversion as though there’s anything wrong with general perverseness. There’s not. But it doesn’t sit right with me to write these women off as a joke. There’s something here, something deeply satisfying that is hard to accept or find elsewhere, something that shouldn’t be written off as a joke, in part because this is valid art, and we gay guys aren’t mere fetish objects. If I like a straight couple, that isn’t some perversion. To judge women for doing the same seems to have a layer of sexism baked in.

What else do you get with gay male romance? Male vulnerability. This is especially true with stories like Heated Rivalry. 

I expect part of why it’s been so successful is that it takes place in a hyper-masculine world: that of highly demanding sports. You’re witnessing uber-masculine men being vulnerable with each other, satisfying both the fantasy of physically “perfect,” “manly” men and of the man with a yearning, emotional heart. Now, in almost any romance story, especially the good ones, you’ll see vulnerability from the main character and the love interest. You’ll at least get some emotional vulnerability. And though there’s vulnerability inherent to things like the reception of oral sex, it doesn’t provide the same physical vulnerability as bottoming does, as being the receptive partner.

So why is gay male romance more popular with these types of people than straight femdom romance with pegging? After all, pegging has a male receptive partner who is the one subjected to the theoretical violence. It satisfies a will-to-power fantasy.

In part, this is because it still has a female main character who may, in some way, be subjected to male violence, even if it’s just the theoretical violence or oral intimacy. You may be wondering why I’m suggesting the woman would be the main character in this dynamic instead of the straight male bottom. This is where we need to take that pin out and talk about sexism and homophobia.

In the 2000s and early 2010s, when everyone spoke more in euphemisms—which we’ve exchanged now for a combination of explicitness and algospeak self-censorship, love that for us—people would ask gay guy couples, “So, which of you is the woman?” The epic clapback we devised in the 2010s was, “Uh, we’re both men. That’s kind of the point.” But the real question was about the sword and the sheath, the serial killer and the victim, the subject and the object. Who’s topping? Who bottoms?

The euphemistic phrasing lets people avoid being crass while sating their curiosity, but it also reveals the underlying idea: Who is a woman? One who is penetrated. Pegging is seen as an intense taboo because it flips the “correct” positioning of man and woman in the bedroom. A man is invaded. A woman does the invading. Because it goes against “nature,” AKA social constructions about gendered behavior, it’s taboo and assumedly hot. I say assumedly hot because straight people nonsense does nothing for me, libidinously speaking. This taboo also makes it intolerable for many people.

What is the great claim of patriarchal sexism? Man is greater than woman. So then, what is the worst thing a man can be? A woman. Classical homophobia is based around this idea, mixed with the idea that to be penetrated is to be “the woman.” To be objectified is to be “the woman.” The hunted. The vulnerable. The submissive. The cared for. The beloved. These are taboos. Women are not immune to the sexist conditioning of the world. For some straight women, even if they find the idea of dominating a man to be hot, the idea of a man being the receptive partner drains them of their masculinity. They do not want a feminine man, and so even if they want to enjoy fiction where a man expresses the ultimate vulnerability of being penetrated, they cannot abide by it in straight romance. 

This is sexism.

To get the fix for this, if you can’t tolerate a male partner bottoming for a woman, you turn to male/male romance. In this genre, you can have both an ultra-masculine love interest who provides emotional vulnerability and a male main character who provides physical vulnerability. Since both characters are men, the combination of the two satisfies the real fantasy without imagining the love interest as a woman.

When it was revealed that Rachel Reid was writing another Holanov book in her Game Changers series, I saw several viral fan comments that expressed excitement… while issuing warnings. She isn’t allowed to let them open their relationship. No cheating plots. And no “switching,” which you would assume means no Dom Shane, but is actually meant to serve as “versatility.” These comments were specifically talking about having Shane top and Ilya bottom.

Why? Why would that be such a sin?

If you don’t know any gay guys who are too open about their sex lives, there are total tops, vers tops, pure verses, vers bottoms, total bottoms, and sides who don’t enjoy that sort of intimacy, mixed with sides who will indulge in it now and then. Most people are somewhere in the middle. Ilya could be a total top. Shane could be a total bottom. In yaoi manga, almost everyone exists in a strict position. There’s little to no trying of anything else.

In shipping fights within fandoms, you’ll find fans vociferously defending their idea of who should top and who should bottom. Is it SasuNaru or NaruSasu? It’s rare to see anyone arguing for versatility. Why?

Because, and I’m not saying everyone does this or that it’s conscious, they are asking that question: Who is the woman?

If you introduce versatility, if the guys flip, even if it’s only on occasion, you go back to the pegging issue. To bottom is to be emasculated. To bottom is to be the woman. It is to be the object. Lesser. This is sexist homophobia. 

I find this far more objectionable than the mere idea that there are women who objectify or fetishize gay men. It is the classical insistence that queerness by its very nature de-mans a person. As I talked about in my essay on privilege, this homophobic idea used to motivate custody hearings against us in the American criminal justice system. Based on their comments about feminine men and their consistent censorship against gay media, this seems to be one of the underlying ideas behind the CCP’s homophobic policies. Gayness, says the homophobe, is feminizing, and there is nothing worse for a man to be, says the sexist, than to be a woman.

I hope Ilya bottoms for Shane just one time in one of the future seasons, even if Rachel Reid doesn’t write it in such a way, because the overly online fandom has to confront this homophobia. Because, like it or not, this bleeds into the real world. It affects how people interact with gay men. And it reinforces patriarchal ideas. That’s not great.

But you know what was pretty great?

Three - The Cottage

When Shane and Ilya are in the cottage, they engage in a bit of roleplay. Shane shows Ilya one of the bedrooms and says it isn’t available to guests. He takes on the role of a bellboy while Ilya plays a demanding customer. 

Ilya throws Shane on the bed. 

As Ilya straddles him, Shane says, “Sir! I’m just a bellboy. You can’t treat the staff like this.” 

They’re grinning at each other as Ilya grabs his hands. Before they start kissing, Ilya says, “Oh, I think I know how the staff likes to be treated.”

Everything here is consensual. They’re smiling. They’re into it. They kiss. There’s no actual distress here. They’re roleplaying, as couples sometimes do. It’s fun. It’s sexy.

Pause.

This is where I reveal that, secretly, this is episode 4.5 in my censorship series. Look at their roleplay. What are they engaging in? It’s a classic erotica/pornographic scene. A member of the staff is used for a customer’s pleasure, making up for disappointment in a service or product. There’s a power dynamic here. The bellboy's job is at stake. This is the eroticization of dubious consent.

Because the two characters are clearly consenting to this eroticization, you could call it a very light form of a consensual non-consent kink. After all, the domineering customer entirely ignores the bellboy’s denial. 

“You can’t treat the staff like this,” the bellboy says.

Ilya’s line translates to his customer character saying, “You can say no, but I know how a slut like you wants to be treated.”

Heated Rivalry has become an intense sensation. People find it hot. Cute. Romantic. Erotic. It’s probably made a pretty penny for Crave, HBO, Rachel Reid, and her publishers. And because of this moment, it could have become a target of the anti-art censorship stances of Visa and MasterCard.

Earlier in the series, while in one of his weird and grumpy moods, Ilya is drinking while watching Shane pleasure himself. Underwear is thrown at his face, and he doesn’t sniff it because he’s not a real lover-boy at this point. Shane begs for him, and Ilya goes to him.

Uh-oh.

This is a nice scene. This is an erotic scene. This is an emotional scene.

This is also, strictly speaking, considered dubious consent by self-publishing outlets like Amazon and Draft2Digital. So if Reid were a self-published author utilizing KDP, there’s a chance this scene would get her account nuked out of orbit. It would be immediately banned on OnlyFans and JustFor.Fans. The mere presence of alcohol turns it into bannable art on many platforms.

You might be thinking, Damn. That’s ridiculous. It’s outrageous.

Correct.

If you are a fan of Heated Rivalry, I encourage you to consider how it would be attacked by the monetary industry, an industry that has decided that it is the arbiter of free speech. 

Consider proposed legislation in the UK, in which, if you want to take it to the extreme, if Shane ever called Ilya daddy during a sexual moment, that could get the art banned. 

Imagine if Ilya gripped Shane by the neck, just a bit. Hot, right? Banned in several countries.

Ilya was subjected to plenty of homophobic abuse. Imagine, with Shane’s consent, he brought a slur into the bedroom. Banned.

Art is under attack. For now, television projects and novels that are passed through studios and traditional publishing houses are allowed to engage with legal themes that credit card companies, payment processors, and banks dislike. Indie filmmakers and authors often do not get that privilege.

And there’s a chance your government is trying to take away more free speech.

If you fell in love with this show, you owe it enough allegiance to fight for its existence and the right of other artists to make art and get paid for it.