My “Heated” Chat with a Scholar Who Wrote a New York Times Essay About THAT GAY HOCKEY SHOW

Hi, Caftaners! I hope you’ve been well. The weather is awful (at least here in NYC) and our ICE-terrorized country is awful, so let’s just skip all that and get right to this new chat.

Did you see gay scholar Jim Downs’ piece about Heated Rivalry in The New York Times recently?

I liked it a lot. I obviously cannot cut and paste the whole thing here for copyright reasons, but I think the heart of Jim’s theory about why the show is making people’s heads explode right now—I mean, have you not had at least one conversation about this show? I’ve probably had 100 in the past month—is this part:

“Maybe what we ache for now is not culture built to serve a political end but a focus on the intimate — someone on top of us, breaking down in tears as he confesses his love. What is turning us on is not the thrill of naked bodies but the shock of being emotionally known. That is what some of us have been missing.”

Well, I do think the thrill of naked bodies is a big part of the show, but Jim’s assertion that what’s truly shocking about the show is its depiction of not just gay passion but gay intimacy and vulnerability resonated with me. (I’ve often gotten this feeling from Andrew Haigh’s films Weekend and All of Us Strangers, less so his Looking on HBO.) So I reached out to Jim and asked if he wanted to chat and he said yes—and we chatted last Friday for about 90 minutes. Read on! Jim, who can be reached at his website, is also the author of Stand By Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation…

…which is all about how the gay 1970s, which we often associate solely with wild sex, were also a flowering of gay letters, culture, spirituality and more. I haven’t read it yet but that didn’t stop me from asking Jim to talk about it—after we wore Heated Rivalry into the ground.

Here’s Jim, who’s 53 and teaches at Gettysburg College in Pennsyivania.

And now here’s our talk!

Jim, thanks for talking today. I loved the New York Times piece and I hope my Caftan readers read it. So let’s get right into it. What do you think it is about Heated Rivalry? There’s been lots of shows with gay characters, and I feel like Fellow Travelers a few years ago got close in terms of showing gay sex and its dynamics…

But nothing has ever taken off like HR. Why?

I think there’s a pornographic undertone because they’re jocks, which is so interesting and fulfills every fantasy people have. So much gay porn involves jocks in a locker room.

Haha, that’s funny. My first thought about the show was, “This is the porn I’ve been looking for my whole life.” It has depth and emotion and story behind it.

It’s so much more intriguing seeing jocks being gay instead of the president of the Model U.N. To see a jock engage in sex with another man, then on top of it to see a man speak in an intimacy register—I mean, it takes a while to get there in the show, which does a good job of—

Building that slowly?

Yes. It’s very realistic that you can see they like each other but they were shutting each other out. But then by the final episode, which actually changed my whole mind toward the show, was that they started speaking to each other in a very intimate language. To see a man speak in that kind of intimate discourse is also a challenge to classic masculinity, which is why I think the show has gotten so much attention from straight women—because they’re getting to see these actors ventriloquize a kind of intimacy that they themselves want to hear, even if it’s to another man and not a woman.

It’s easy to forget the reason why so many people are turned on by this show is that they’re very masc. They talk like and have the affect of hot straight guys. Watching it, I wondered often if the next frontier would be that we see a love story between two kind of, uh, femme guys or nerds or something.

Right. We can’t say this is just about intimacy and bringing back the whole idea of dating. A lot of gay men have said on social, “I want to go on a date now after watching the show.” You mean you want to go on a date with someone who looks like that!

Also, I really think this show would not have hit so hard at the height of Black Lives Matter—because there would’ve been, and rightfully so, a critique about whiteness and centering white men. Even though the showrunners are really clear about establishing Shane as both white and Asian. But I think we’re in a moment now where that critique has been under assault and maligned as being woke. And that allows people to breathe around this show and say they really like it. We’re living in a different political moment.

That’s interesting. There’s definitely a white supremacy surge in this country right now that’s promoted from the very top, meaning the presidency, and in some ways it’s a backlash to what things were like five years ago, as you say. But a bit more mildly, I think the moment has passed where we feel that we can’t enjoy a TV show because it has white leads—or, in the case of HR, a leading couple that is 3/4 white. And yes, that could be because the left has cooled off a bit in the extremity of its online discourse. But I also think that if you had the same show with two actors of any race who were as ridiculously hot as Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams, and if the writing and acting were as good as on HR, the reception would be the same.

I agree.

I had an arc watching the series where I went from “This is so hot I wanna jerk off while I watch it” to, well, crying. What was the most erotic scene to you, and the most moving scene?

When they were in bed and Shane says to Ilya, “Let’s create a fundraiser and do it in honor of your mother’s mental illness.”

Same for me. When Ilya said to Shane about his mother, “She would’ve loved you.” That destroyed me!

That was the most emotional scene. But I actually didn’t find any scenes erotic. I thought it was performative and weird and I didn’t get it.

Not one scene turned you on?

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