‘Heated Rivalry’ is fantasy. Wake up, it’s Miller time.
By Alfred P. Doblin
I was in a gay bar Sunday night and overheard two men talking about Heated Rivalry, the HBO surprise hit about closeted gay hockey players falling in love. The Canadian-produced series is drawn from Rachel Reid’s six-novel “Game Changer” series. As a struggling fiction writer, I say to Reid, “BRAVA!” All caps just like, well, I will get to that in a bit.
The two men in the bar were discussing which of the series’ four featured characters – three are hockey players and one is a graduate art student – is the most desirable. Both men dismissed Shane and Ilya, the main characters in the series. One went with Scott, the older hockey player of the three, and one went with Kip, the grad student.
Some have described the series as steamy, others smutty, and in a recent essay in The New York Times, as some kind of revelation on gay culture in mainstream entertainment.
Heated Rivalry is steamy. Smutty? There are dozens of other shows that have graphically depicted adults having sex in pretty much every way that adults can have sex. As to the revelatory part? A little boy with a toy shovel in a sandbox has broken more ground.
Let me state the obvious: It’s the story of impossibly handsome, physically fit, white gay men with money, power, and privilege, struggling to find happiness. The white part is glaring, yet no one seems to care. Perhaps when it comes to abs and a tight rear end, nothing else matters.
As queer people fall all over Shane, Ilya, Scott, and Kip a quote from the musical Cabaret keeps coming to mind.
“There was a cabaret. And there was a Master of Ceremonies. And there was a city called Berlin in a country called Germany. It was the end of the world, and I was dancing with Sally Bowles. And we were both fast asleep.”
Cliff Bradshaw, the disillusioned writer, says that at the end of the show, as he leaves Berlin. Lots of people quote it; not so many understand its significance beyond the musical.
This past weekend, the United States removed Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela. By all accounts, he was a brutal dictator who oppressed his own people and destroyed his nation’s economy. I won’t get into the moral implications of regime change – there are many – but move to another quote. This one is by Stephen Miller, President Trump’s trusted advisor who is playing a key role in much of the administration’s policy decisions on immigration and territorial expansion.
In an interview this week with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Miller said, “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” He added, “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
Tapper was not asking Miller about U.S. intentions in Venezuela, but in Greenland. Greenland! A few years ago, this would have been a joke, but this is real. Miller is deadly serious. He is not a provocateur. He is stating facts. And this moment in America is Miller time.
Oscar Wilde once said, “I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.”
There is something chilling about Miller’s complete confidence in stating the strongman’s credo. The world is not a nice place; it is not a place governed by niceties. Power is might and might makes right. Darwin, compared to Miller, was an effete elite.
Which brings me back to my gay bar and all the gushing over Heated Rivalry.
As an elder gay man, it troubles me that the queer community is not recognizing that society – not just American society – is veering dangerously toward a place we have not been since the 1930s. If power makes right, and the rule of law is a nicety that can easily be dismissed when it interferes with the agenda of the powerful, the guardrails that have protected us – queer people – will no longer stand.
The idea that what happened in Europe in the 1930s cannot happen here is foolishness on steroids. Miller said, “Nobody's going to fight the U.S. militarily over the future of Greenland.” I imagine German advisors in 1938 said that about the Sudetenland. And they were correct in 1938. But a year later, things changed – things changed forever.
There is nothing wrong that queer men are excited over a steamy series about wealthy white athletes struggling to come out of the closet in a homophobic environment. I get it. It’s fantasy. But that is all that it is. It is not groundbreaking. There have been many queer-themed series making better points about the struggle to find acceptance and to forge lasting intimate relationships, but perhaps because not all the principals in those series were beautiful, wealthy, athletic, young, and white, not enough influencers paid attention. Noah’s Arc is a brilliant example of a groundbreaking queer-themed series.
Times are changing and not in a good way for queer people, or persons of color, or non-Christians, or non-U.S. born individuals.
“Nobody's going to fight the U.S. militarily over the future of Greenland.” My message to queer folks: We’re Greenland! Wake up! Get off the dance floor!
We all need fantasy. And we need writers who can weave fun stories. Heated Rivalry is fun, but it is a distraction. It should not be the center of attention for queer people in 2026.
Cabaret was based on Christopher Isherwood’s novel Goodbye to Berlin. The title says it all.
There is a time to dance. There is a time to sleep. And there is a time to wake up.
Alfred with a P