Features Editor RORY PATRICK GRAHAM on Heated Rivalry’s irksome sexual spectatorship and the importance of being outrageously queer.
One of the sexiest moments of Heated Rivalry has “All The Things She Said” by t.A.T.u. blasting over it—the montage where Shane and Ilya, our muscle queen protagonists, both try to have sex with women to make each other jealous. The two jocks imagine they are sweatily sodomising one another while Shane tries to stay hard in a vagina and Ilya jerks off in the shower. If you’re too busy rewinding this scene with one hand (like me), this mirage of bulging bodies could successfully swindle you from connecting some problematic thematic dots.
But connect these dots, with one hand, I shall.
The female duo of t.A.T.u., Lena Katina and Julia Volkova, famously “queerbaited” audiences in the early 2000s. Their live performances of “All The Things She Said” played into the female duo’s supposed lesbianism with longing stares and cheek-caressing, a decision made by their heterosexual male manager to inflame the duo’s staunch, lesbian fanbase. After commercial success, the duo later confirmed their allegiance to homophobic mother Russia and betrayed their new queer audience. Gay guys actually became more obsessed with t.A.T.u. because of this—yet another example of homosexual masochism, in which we cry out “mother!” to those who hurt us most.
Heated Rivalry is not “queerbaiting” in the traditional sense—a word that continues losing meaning as it becomes increasingly overused—because its protagonists are not straight (Shane is gay and Ilya bisexual). But this soft-pornographic drama, though sometimes tender, reminds me of the framework in which lesbian pornoraphy operates, a voyeuristic project designed for men that disempowers women. Heated Rivalry appeals to heterosexual women who “want to have two boyfriends and for those boyfriends to be boyfriends,” a trending fetish I can’t escape on TikTok. The algorithm knows how to harness my disdain for girls who turn gay guys into wind-up toys.
I tried to explain this fetishism to a Taylor Swift fan recently (my mistake) and, when I alluded to Heated Rivalry functioning like lesbian porn, they became uncomfortable. They weren’t disturbed because I was talking about pornography but because they assumed my critique must somehow be smuggling in some anti-woman sentiment. The Swiftie couldn’t articulate why they felt this way but felt like my conclusion must, in some way, be misogynistic.
What I have to say to that is: this ain’t my first time on the woke rodeo.
I raise you: homophobia is the other side of the ever-flipped misogynist coin. Think bigger. When gay men sever themselves from a palatable characterisation that contravenes the boundaries of mainstream heterosexual spectatorship, they are always labeled villains. The moment the queen is not cute, he becomes dangerous. The same is for women, which is why “fag hags” exist. The “fag” and the “hag” both occupy similar fringes of heteropatriarchal society; the former is not man enough and the latter not woman enough.
My queerness, for example, is permitted… until I make a complaint like this and highlight how cis-het women are participating in the same sexual spectatorship they themselves have been imprisoned by for centuries and that this does not progressivism make. At this point, my allies evaporate and cry sexism. I have overstepped the boundaries in which I am permitted to “tastefully” operate. I have destabilised the status quo which purports, in bad faith, to tolerate my avant-guarde gayness. A psychologist back in Berlin told me: “Everyone is homophobic. It doesn’t mean they don’t like you but it does mean that they see you differently.” I used to think this was reductive and defeatist, another lefty Neukölln platitude designed to justify ethical non-monogamy (my favourite oxymoron), but now it feels persuasive.
Drag queen Katya Zamalochikova valorised Heated Rivalry for its unflinching depiction of muscular butts (agree) but more for its wholesome ending. On her podcast, she said, “you can have your meth and death,” hating on the typical depiction of gay romances as drug-induced, AIDS-rampant tragedies. While I agree the innocence of Heated Rivalry is refreshing, the reason straight women, in particular, like the show is because of this overarching narrative package of purity—it suavely smuggles in sex scenes into a fictional world that will not scandalise straight audiences. Heated Rivalry exemplifies what gay men have being doing for decades: beautifying themselves to offset their innate deficiency as homosexual in a world that will love if them they are good enough to look at or witty enough to listen to.
Because Ilya and Shane are not “queer”, even though they sodomise each other (never with preparation or lubrication—riddle me that). They are straight-passing, deep-voiced, muscular jocks with masculine mannerisms and are immersed in athletic fraternity. They are heterosexual to the world and homosexual only to themselves. They only have intimate moments or sex in private. Their homosexuality is the narrative antagonist that disrupts the success they want. Narratively, it is “wrong” and thus it is “hot”. In this way, gay men are not merely permitted to exist as catty side characters in Heated Rivalry but are in fact pornographically elevated to main roles because their desire is clandestine, not despite it being so. In other words: two men fucking turns people on because its wrong, and therefore the show decides to hinge on how wrong it is… but I think that’s weird if you’re not gay.
Because queer pain is not an aestheticised television programme that you talk to your friends about over Blank Street matcha before going on to complain about the topic that actually matters: the west London metrosexual man who didn’t like your story despite viewing it. Queer pain, always intertwined with desire (a cheap trick by God), is an embodied experience of daily suffering. It’s difficult to look at, and worse, boring, too.
Heated Rivalry affirms the fantasy of having a visually heterosexual boyfriend who secretly “makes out with his friends”. Cis-het women can thus voyeuristically experience the thrills of sexual deviancy without ever having to experience the homophobic trauma that comes with it. This is how all fiction functions but there’s something about this specifically that just doesn’t feel fair. Emily from Surrey gets to imaginatively dabble her feet into the exotic waters of homosexuality and then go back to holding hands with her rugby-player-turned-LSE-finance-grad-boyfriend, Monty, under their open-pore Scandinavian-wood dinner table. This is the exact same formula straight men use to fetishise gay women: If they’re hot and it’s about my pleasure, then go for it.
And this is why Heated Rivalry has huge commercial success—it appeals to the majority it is framed for more than the minority it depicts. Emily from Surrey doesn’t have to imagine her boyfriend getting passed around like a fleshlight after LSE rugby training because she can just watch it on her computer. In the same way, Monty doesn’t have to imagine Emily making out with her best friend and can just open an incognito tab and find it himself (if he shamefully holds the phone to his face for 7 seconds while it takes an age-estimating photo).
Heated Rivalry is Heartstopper with sex appeal—switch out the British twink for a juiced-up Russian hunk. It’s been hijacked to titillate the heterosexuals who watch it, whose relationships are boring because there is nothing clandestine about them, whose desires have no fearful friction and thus produce no heat, so they search for warmth elsewhere, whose boyfriends nonchalantly say “faggot” with their mates not because they are secretly closeted or too dumb to know better but because they are—if you can possibly bring yourself to believe it—just homophobic.
The mainstream narrative will try and make you believe that homophobia has dissipated, especially in metropolitan areas. It is trendy to imply that men you don’t like are gay, to say that the man who has wronged you “has something to hide” or to call the guy who doesn’t like you an “evil twink”, and that aligning gayness and immorality in this way is funny. And maybe it is. I am a biased judge, injured beyond belief in the way all gay boys are, finding ways to recover and then thinking: “this is just another way to make me undeniable”. In any case, this long string of fear (always flipping into hatred) that runs unbroken across history has now mutated into something profitable. Freud correctly notes that repulsion and attraction are two sides of the same sexual coin.
Shane and Ilya are figureheads of masculinity. They do not disrupt straight society because they are assumed to be heterosexual. Gay guys cannot be “too much” (that is, too feminine, that is, too gay, that is, too real) because they will disturb the hegemony around them.
For example, Sock—non-binary diva with a septum piercing and microbangs—does not have their own TV show for a reason. Sock cannot assimilate into the heterosexual framework of voyeuristic sexual enjoyment because they are not good enough to look at. Neither Emily nor Monty are gonna goon for Sock, because they don’t want to see Sapphic polyamory (war) and well-made oat-milk lattes. Emily wants to see Shane, the actor she knows is heterosexual and has a long-term girlfriend, get pounded by the Russian guy with fat pecs and a big dick. It is her little poisonous slice of paradise.
Let me be clear, for the in-style sanctimonious: I believe women should have the right to mindlessly goon; but participating in the same heteropatriarchal shackles of sexual spectatorship women have been subject to by men for the past century does not progress make. When I say this, I am sometimes met with pushback. Who am I to police pleasure? A jaded muscle queen; dime a dozen. But when I’m the porn depicted, I must deserve a voice or two. Still, I am made to feel “too much”, the age-old, loaded insult I have still not learned to conquer. Are these performatively righteous misinterpretations of my point rooted in prejudices of gay men… cute pets until we bark too loud? My lock-screen wallpaper is a quote from Elektra Evangelista: “My whole life is dedicated to toning it up, about settling for more. More, more, more!”
I see this insidious characterisation all around me in various subtextual ways. Yet it is conveniently tossed aside as long as the gay guy in question is funny enough or beautiful enough to appease women (or strong or masculine enough to appease men). If he can satisfy any of these requirements, then the gay guy has successfully offset his innate deficiency as nonheterosexual and can successfully assimilate back into society. In other words: puppy stopped biting so puppy gets treats.
I think biting the magnanimous hand that feeds you is necessary if you want to eat something off the menu. If you can spin yourself into looking like a golden-age Hollywood leading-man, signal a palatable sexual normalcy, and neatly impose your faggotry onto a heterosexual blueprint that has strange-shaped schematics you’ve always seen but have never understood, then your “queerness” (the fragment that’s left) will be permitted. But if you can’t make that change, I don’t see how it will be.
Which is a shame, because that’s the show worth watching.
Featured image courtesy of @lizajudyfan.