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On Heated Rivalry and Queer Desire as an Unequivocal Good
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Heated Rivalry
On Heated Rivalry and Queer Desire as an Unequivocal Good
In a world where queer desire is nearly always framed as something that destabilizes, this series gives its audience an alternate narrative
By Olivia Waite
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Published on February 9, 2026
Photo credit: Sabrina Lantos/HBO Max
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Photo credit: Sabrina Lantos/HBO Max
Queer desire is too often played as an aberration, even in stories that center queer relationships. At best it’s a detour, at worst a catastrophe. Stede fleeing his marriage and family and finding Ed and a gaggle of queer/poly pirates, but having to stay constantly on the run in Our Flag Means Death. Louis in Interview with the Vampire, who follows Lestat into the underworld of New Orleans nightlife, flees Lestat to a sketchy postwar Paris theater—and then flees with Armand to a penthouse in Dubai. Carol, in Carol, whose road-trip love affair with shopgirl Therese complicates her divorce and ultimately costs her custody of her daughter. Their loves may be true, they may even be irresistible—but structurally, queer love in these stories is narratively an interruption. It flings you off-course.
There is power in disruption, we know too well, and some laws deserve to be broken. But I think one reason why Heated Rivalry has hooked so many of us is that Shane and Ilya’s romance insists that queer desire and love belong at the heart of the world, not on the margins. It gets you where you live.
Or, more succinctly: Coming to the cottage is the reverse of going over the rainbow. Rather than having Shane and Ilya escape to some gay paradise elsewhere, Heated Rivalry maps queer desire onto its characters’ actual lives. Not as interruption, but as improvement. You’re here, you’re queer—and it’s good for you, actually.
Heated Rivalry is already notorious for the speed at which our leads bone down. Within minutes in the first episode they’re panting beside each other in a gym, then naked and aroused in the shower, then having some sex Shane acknowledges as “such a bad idea” even as he leans in for another kiss. Early responses when the first two episodes dropped were all a-flutter at the speed with which clothes came off. Sex scenes in most television shows are slowly built up to, edging the audience as though on-screen orgasms are only allowed when they sync up with the climax of the external plot.
Credit: Sabrina Lantos/HBO Max
But the idea that there is only one significant climax, and that every other sex act has to build up to that, you know what that is? That is straight nonsense. A lot of queer sex isn’t simultaneous; it’s reciprocal. Not a single all-important orgasm, but many—at least two, minimum, I would say. As Ilya says to Shane in their first encounter when Ilya’s been satisfied but Shane hasn’t yet: “I would not leave you like that.”
And Heated Rivalry is about what happens as a result of that kind of specific queer mutuality, the consequences of a series of orgasms. So we’ve gotta do that part first. You can’t tell a story about how a hookup becomes true love if you delay the hookup until the last minute.
The upshot of doing so much queer sex early in the story is that the sexual/romantic relationship becomes the prism through which we view the rest of the world on screen. Queer love is built-in from the beginning: it’s where we as the audience live. Hockey becomes foreplay, whether it’s Russia versus Canada or Boston versus Montreal. Sex-inflected insults—Yuna’s “Fuck. Him. Right up the butt,” Shane’s teammate saying “If Rozanov fucks you tonight, I’m gonna fuck him back”—have a delicious, sparkly little gloss of entendre. Even when we focus on Scott and Kip’s story in episode three, where our main couple only briefly flicker into sight, we start with this pair of gay men meeting and how the weight of that connection bends time and space around it. We see how this new couple is also pressured to keep their relationship hidden. It’s an education in clocking: We’re learning to see through the façade the world puts up to tell us this kind of love either doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter.
How can it not matter when it affects everything else?
Ilya’s story is much closer to the familiar narrative pattern of gay opression and escape—in no small part because it was then and is now illegal to be queer in Russia. The show frames Russian scenes as both geographically and emotionally distant: cold, dark, formal, paranoid, and claustrophobic. As if compulsory heterosexuality were a country. The only times the camera sees sunlight in Russia is during the Olympics, or brief moments when Ilya pauses in the middle of a run to text with Shane.
Credit: Sabrina Lantos/HBO Max
Playing hockey in Boston offers Ilya a way out of this trap, so Boston is better—but with apologies to Sondheim, better is different than good. As a Boston player, Ilya is discouraged from even being friendly with a Montreal player, much less anything more intimate. The realities of professional hockey keep both Ilya and Shane moving, from one airport and one city to another for years, while they steal a few hedonistic mutual hours in hotel rooms. And even in Boston, without a counterweight to his home country’s influence—the combined demands of legal status, family, culture, and lifelong habit—Ilya is unhappily drawn back to Russia time and again. It’s only when his father dies, when he confesses his love to Shane by telephone in a language Shane doesn’t speak, that Ilya is able to make a permanent break with family who have only ever offered him degradation.
This is realistic: Some laws deserve breaking. Some places are not safe.
Shane, however, has a loving, involved Canadian family. He attempts to turn down the trip to Wimbledon and the chance to meet and presumably fall in stilted heterosexual love with a Swedish princess. He doesn’t want to escape anywhere; he wants to stay put. This is in the immediate aftermath of the scene where he visits Ilya’s house for the first time, where in addition to the usual orgasms—which Shane’s comfortable wanting by now—Ilya gave him a ginger ale and a tuna melt and the sound of Shane’s first name on Ilya’s lips. It’s suddenly more than a hookup: Shane realizes he has stepped into the sphere of Ilya’s actual life. And that he likes it! Shane promptly freaks out and leaves, like any self-respecting self-disciplined autistic closet case would. He gets heckled into attending a party—another false escape—and tries to bury his yearning for Ilya by dating super-hot, super-nice superstar Rose Landry. He’s learned he wants to build love into his life; he’s just hoping he can do it with someone who isn’t Ilya.
Ilya catches the headlines, bristles with jealousy, tries to stomp away, and accidentally slams a foot into an excercise bike. Queer heartbreak is dangerous! And worse, he and Shane both play terribly when they’re not consistently fucking—the show expresses this as a kind of disappearing from the map: “But where on the ice was Shane Hollander? Where was Ilya Rozanov?” Vanishing is the danger, not the solution.
Credit: Sabrina Lantos/HBO Max
At the end of episode four, we have that devastating club scene—the one where the bassline throbs like a pulse, and the slow-motion makes every gesture a heartbreak as Shane and Ilya realize the full depths they’ve sunk to. They’ve caught feelings and they’re miserable about it: jealousy and desperate longing overcome them as they glower down the barrel of the camera lens during orgasms where their images on screen flash back and forth so quickly that even though they’re having sex separately in different places, it feels like the two characters are merging into one.
The club is classically a place of queer liberation and euphoria, from Stonewall to Fire Island to the Pink Pony Club. If any real place is over the rainbow, it’s there. (And if you liked Heated Rivalry but haven’t yet seen the delightful modern-set gay Asian Pride and Prejudice retelling Fire Island, what are you waiting for?) But the song playing in this club keeps telling us, over and over: “This is not enough.” Ilya and Shane stand frozen in place, staring, the only still points in a writhing crowd. You can’t escape feelings: you carry them with you wherever you go. Having a club to dance in for a night is not the same as having a whole life. Queer love can’t thrive if the club is its only space.
Shane’s girlfriend gambit almost works. Rose is delightful! But Rose has gay ex-boyfriends and friends, she knows the patterns of queer camouflage. She softly, kindly talks Shane into revealing the truth, in a lovely scene parallel to the one in Our Flag Means Death where Stede tells his ex-wife Mary about his feelings for Ed. It’s healing in some fundamental way to see freshly self-aware gay men finding acceptance and support from former partners. The closet is a cruel reality, but Mary and Rose are not the ones most harmed by it.
Credit: Sabrina Lantos/HBO Max
At this point in our hockey romance, the most obvious and boring move—the one all the basic bitch writing guides would steer you toward—would have been to put Shane and Ilya’s sexual relationship at odds with their hockey careers. Conflict is good storytelling, right? They might have faced off in a contest for the cup, where episode four’s neon-pink jealousy would translate into masculine competition, and romantic anguish would find expression in physical aggression on the ice. We’d be asked to root for one to triumph over the other.
Neither the book nor the show make this mistake, thankfully. This is a romance novel. We’re not here for one man’s victory: we’re here for both. Rose’s acceptance—a uniquely queer moment of grace passed via a straight ally—changes nothing about where Shane lives, but it completely changes how he acts within the borders of his own life.
Maybe it’s just that I realized I was bisexual long after I was happily married, but for me, accepting my queerness has been as much an internal journey as an external one. It’s about seeing my own life more clearly, how the ebb and flow of the current was there long before I had the words to measure the tides. I came out not by going out, but by coming into myself.
This is precisely what Heated Rivalry asks Shane to do.
When he sees Ilya next in Miami for the All-Star game, playing together rather than as opponents—Shane is, for the first time, the one moving the relationship forward. He tells Ilya that he’s not dating Rose—he initiates a conversation about their feelings when they’re alone that night—he straddles Ilya’s lap and wraps him in comfort when Ilya talks about his dad’s dementia—when Ilya tells him he asks too many questions, Shane says sorry, then deflects with a cocky line of dialogue taken right out of Ilya’s book: “I wasn’t clear. I’m sorry in advance for tonight’s game. We’re gonna destroy you guys.” He is able to offer support when Ilya’s father dies, via a cross-continental phone call where distance and language barriers turn out to mean nothing at all in the face of love and need.
And then—Shane’s injury, and a too-familiar scene: a queer man slipping into the hospital room of the man he loves, uncertain if he’ll be allowed to stay. The realization of how much it hurts to be on the outside of Shane’s life, as far as the public and his parents are aware. Shane, doped to the gills, asking Ilya to come to the cottage; Ilya only feeling brave enough to accept after Scott and Kip kiss on center ice—the heart of the hockey world—a stunning moment of reunion and a reversal of the show’s whole polarity. Queer grace leads to queer grace, courage breeds more courage.
The cottage is private and safe, Shane promises; it looks like the escape, an idyll, Sebastian and Charles sharing champagne and strawberries at Brideshead.
Except: the cottage is the heart of Shane’s whole existence: “My favorite place in the world.” It’s Shane welcoming Ilya in, not running off somewhere new. They fuck, they swim, they cook, they say “I love you” for the first time. They talk, endlessly, luxuriating in hours and days they have no need to rush through. When Hayden calls, Ilya cheekily blows Shane while he’s mid-conversation—a mirror image of their former pattern, where Shane and Hayden shared a room and Ilya was only present on the phone.
Credit: Sabrina Lantos/Crave
Shane grew up on this lake, and his parents live so close they can stop by unannounced. Which, of course, by the laws of comedy, they do. It’s funny, but it’s also a blatant metaphor: you can’t maintain walls between the people you love the most. And then we see Shane and Yuna talking, in the house Shane grew up in, being fully honest and open with one another about something delicate and painful: forgiveness. Something broken in this family has been repaired on account of the queer romance.
It’s still not easy: Shane has to melt down a little again as they sit around the table—the hearth, the heart of the house—to plan for the couple’s shared future. But Ilya returns grace for grace, as we’ve seen throughout this show: he’s seen that Shane’s parents aren’t going to react like Ilya’s father and brother. He gives them one questioning glance and then puts a hand on Shane’s back and says: “Your family is here, your boyfriend is here… You’re good here.”
Those three words are just as necessary as the “I love you.” This is queer love and acceptance as strength, as union, as healing.
Credit: Sabrina Lantos/HBO Max
And when we drive off into the sunset—toward that golden future—it’s not toward some faraway imaginary heaven. They’re going back to the cottage, Shane’s favorite place. They have dinner plans with the parents (“We’ll text,” David insists, while the audience snickers.)
The message is not: “There’s something better for you somewhere else, if you leave your whole world behind.” It’s: “Your actual world could be better, and anyone who truly loves you will want this for you too.”
This is a narrative of queer thriving that includes people like Ilya, who have somewhere to leave, and people like Shane, who need to find themselves where they are. Not an escape, but an expansion, stretching the boundaries of the safe places. The club spills into the street, and refugees deserve to be welcomed. It’s hard work, but it’s work the generations before us have always done.
There is no over the rainbow: there’s only us, here, together. Through acts of care and kindness, we make our own safe places.[end-mark]
The post On <i>Heated Rivalry</i> and Queer Desire as an Unequivocal Good appeared first on Reactor.
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