The Healing Power of Hockey Horn

For many of us, the last week of 2025 has been a delightful reprieve. A break from so many horrors every time we open our phones. Because clickbait headlines about AI slop, genocide, and the Epstein files have been temporarily replaced with bottomless images of Connor Storrie’s tig ol biddies. And his ass. And playful banter with Hudson Williams. Clips on clips of tireless young actors on their press tour, behind the scenes, shooting sexy spreads for GQ, Vulture, Interview, the NY Times. These boys are dutifully feeding a mob of feral fans, lined up like piggies at the trough, more and more and more content.

And I am pushing to the front of that line, vying for head hog. I am grunting and squealing and gobbling up every morsel. If Heated Rivalry’s audience is comprised of two primary buckets - hopelessly romantic women and fags of different shades of queerness - I straddle the intersection of those audience demographics. I’m a queer woman. I’ve experienced the aching, divine yearning of secret queer love. I’m a certified sexologist and career slut. I’m also a fervent fan of gay male adult content - having consumed hundreds of hours of it for pleasure, for science, and for my . And while I’m tempted to dig into why this show can feel safer to that demographic - no looming fear of women being exploited in a power dynamic, plus a romantic distance that makes the payoff especially delicious - I’m more interested in the mixed response from the gay male community.

One comment in particular stood out early: Jordan Firstman’s assertion that “It’s not how gay people fuck.” His remarks to Vulture caught fire, and he ate his words as quickly as they left his mouth, making nice with the cast after they called him out. And while I think what Firstman said was at best reductive and at worst kind of bitchy, I couldn’t stop thinking about what he might have actually meant. Because while part of me strongly disagrees, another part of me knows exactly what he was pointing to.

Before I proceed into commentary about the gay male experience, I’ll empower myself with a quote from Jacob Tierney, the queer man who adapted Rachel Reid’s book and directed the series: “Women are allowed to write about men. They are allowed to write about gay men. The question should be: how are they writing about us?” I feel compelled to write this, to speak up as an ally and on behalf of so many gay and queer male friends who struggle with a very specific subculture of gay sex. Who crave a different interaction. And I’m here to tell you that when Firstman showed his ass by blurting that out, there was indeed something revealing in his words.

On a practical level, there are in fact a few key elements missing in the man on man sex depicted in Heated Rivalry. We never see or discuss any prep, anal entry seems too easy, and (sung a la Black Eyed Peas) where is the luuuube? However, I suspect what Firstman was alluding to cuts deeper and feels almost tragic to name. What may have felt inaccurate or off - to anyone well acquainted with the realities of gay hook up culture - is that the sex in Heated Rivalry is potently intimate and dripping with sensuality.

When Ilya and Shane eye each other in the locker room showers, there is no lack of accuracy. For one of the men to casually escalate - from eye contact to openly jerking himself off - absolutely tracks. The story choices deviate, however, when we’re alone with these boys in a hotel room for the first time. Had I written this scene to reflect gay hookup culture, about two young men fumbling through their impulses and confusion about their sexuality, the scene might have begun and ended with a wordless blowjob at the door. Instead, we get long, deep kisses, fingers traced delicately along bodies, and even a fair bit of communication about interest and experience. And the intimacy only deepens as the season unfolds.

Gay hookup culture, particularly as it’s most often depicted in porn and in, say, gritty indie films, doesn’t heavily feature sensuality. And these depictions can be just as hot. (Pillion in theaters February 2026!) Gay sex is transactional, historically, by necessity. The first public record of a glory hole dates back to 1707, in court documents that describe a hole in a boghouse (aka bathroom) stall wall. For centuries gay sex has been forced into secrecy. Into bushes and brambles, bathhouses, back rooms, and browser windows. Shaped less by desire than by survival. Over time, that survival logic calcified into an erotic script, one where danger, anonymity, and emotional distance read as normal, and even sexy. And what began as necessity slowly became an aesthetic.

The ways this cultural trauma is eroticized today are numerous and deeply ingrained. Many men enjoy cruising in cities and spaces where it’s not necessity so much as recreation or preference. Fucking bareback is commonplace, and for some it can feel less safe to ask for condom use than to assume it won’t be on the table. “Straight conversion” porn - a genre portraying fantasy scenarios of straight, brotastic dudes either suddenly being open to or coerced into gay sex - is wildly popular. (Though interestingly enough, on the decline last year.) The allure of straight hookup fantasies often reflect a complicated engagement with straight male authority and aggression.

A high appetite for risk can be, at the same time, a flirtation with liberation and a reenactment of narratives of resilience. Transgression itself is sexually charged.

In kink- whatever sexuality is at play - we use structured power exchange and role play to perform an outright miracle known as trauma reclamation. Risk as arousal becomes a form of transmutation: with clear consent practices, trusted partnership, and carefully defined containers for play we can return to painful events with agency. In this way, survivors of harm can not only safely revisit past experiences, but rewrite them - turning what was once traumatic into something embodied and even pleasurable.

Eroticism is an incredibly powerful mechanism for healing. And that is exactly what Heated Rivalry achieves. I have to believe that Jacob Tierney knew exactly what he was doing with his depiction of sex in the series. And I therefore believe he is deliberately rewriting the erotic scripts so many of us have become accustomed to. He’s clearly operating with awareness of the sheer power of eroticism.

If sensuality is sparse in the world of gay sex, I wouldn’t be quick to assume it’s because gay men don’t want it. Historically it was hard to come by because safety was never guaranteed long enough for tenderness to take root. And now, it follows that the culture of gay sex has elevated risk and emotional distance to the point that intimacy itself feels inaccurate.

The series takes the scripts we’ve internalized about queer intimacy - risk, disconnection, eroticized danger - and deliberately grapples with and subverts them. Because the driving question at the heart of Heated Rivalry isn’t “Will they fuck?” but rather “Will they love?” Within the hyper-masculine, hyper-patriarchal world of professional hockey, Shane and Ilya’s love is radical. What might have once been a survival mechanism is here transformed into a space where eroticism itself becomes the tool for repair.

bell hooks taught us that patriarchy forces men to kill off the emotional parts of themselves. And queer men are not immune to that oppression, we just see it manifest differently. In many gay male spaces, the ultimate taboo isn’t sex, or kink, or risk - it’s emotional vulnerability. By letting Shane and Ilya linger in touch, communicate their wants, and to let shame melt away to reveal tenderness, Heated Rivalry presents intimacy as something restorative. A fantasy of safety and mutuality that has broad appeal - to those aforementioned female audiences too.

To be crystal be clear: I’m not making the argument that all gay men want or should feel any pressure to change their hookup culture. But it just isn’t productive to tell anyone else they’re doing sex wrong simply because it doesn’t look like yours. Firstman’s dismissal - that this “isn’t how gay people fuck” - drives home the point of the show. Girl, who hurt you?

By deepening the sensuality, intimacy, and love between our leads and by giving us happy endings - instead of retraumatizing a community with persistent portayals of violence or harm - Heated Rivalry doesn’t just depict queer sex differently. It applies it as a means of healing.

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