[Article to be found in the spring issue of têtu·, available at your newsstands or by subscription.]
By Florian Ques & Laure Dasinieres
For Heated Rivalry
Beautiful boys, romance and good gay sex… We won’t deny ourselves the pleasure! Heated Rivalry is first and foremost eye candy. So okay, the choice of actors – Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie – doesn’t entirely escape the standards of the famous cover boys who have built têtu·’s reputation, but since they portray athletes, we can accept that they make us feel guilty for having forgotten the way to the gym. Especially since the lighting work effectively compensates for the laxity of the dialogues. Behind the camera and in the season’s script, the gay director Jacob Tierney, 46, has evidently drawn on his memories of gay porn à la Sean Cody. Vintage, we approve.
The anchoring of the series in a post-MeToo era is just as evident: here, the boys ask for permission before entering, a standing ovation. But we’re not only in Heated Sodomy: when the bodies are at ease, the hearts speak. In the third episode, centered on the real bomb of the series, the Québécois François Arnaud, the handkerchiefs are used this time to wipe our tears. Again later with this scene where Shane invites Ilya to pass through his native tongue, the Russian, in order to open up more easily, even if he himself does not understand it.
You will have understood that Heated Rivalry is a light romance, nothing more than a light romance. But a light romance where the boys nicely have anal sex, in choreographies that abandon the trope of the sloppy doggy-style between two doors, intended to vent an excess of internalized homophobia. The fact that a series so simple, but so gay, achieves such universal success would have been enough to enchant us. This enchantment is amplified by the satisfaction of having offered straight female friends a masturbatory alternative to the dark romance. You’re welcome, world!
Against Heated Rivalry
After all the buzz around the series, we do not arrive virgin to the first viewing of Heated Rivalry. Expectations are therefore high… but disappointed from the first minutes. You said gay sex? It is filmed with a heterosexual filter as modern as the first wig of Mama Ru. We were promised incandescent desire, groundbreaking ass, and we find ourselves facing sexy shower scenes like an ad for deodorant, soft porn from a late-night M6 TV movie for broadcast after midnight. We yawn loudly at so little creativity! The acting matches the dialogue, which one would swear was written by an artificial intelligence. The on-screen SMS messages finish an aesthetic that already screams 2000s software glitch.
We might have forgiven the straight gaze more easily if it hadn’t also infected the power dynamics between the two protagonists. Ten years after Fifty Shades of Grey, the plot replays the myth of the toxic seducer – because he’s full of trauma, we forgive him (no!) – but who will soften thanks to the power of love. Obviously, this toxic guy is Ilya, the Russian playboy; obviously, he is bisexual; obviously, he is a top. Do we celebrate the explicit consent in the sex between the two lovers‑rivals? It hardly leaps out in the first shower scene… and it does not erase the way Ilya verbally mistreats Shane for a large part of the series.
In 2026, we have the right to expect something other than stories born from hatred of the other (and of oneself) to sell us a transformation that, in real life, will never happen. A sad lesson for the youth. On those terms, it’s better to rewatch Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together, just as venomous, but aesthetically sublime. By the way, where’s the hockey?
