In Your Arms I Would Start A War

A Heated Rivalry Notebook

Hudson Williams in a screenshot from a video of his photo shoot with Timid Magazine.

I.

I kept thinking all last fall that I needed a boost. A break. Some simple pleasures. ¹

Regular readers of this newsletter are probably aware my mother was released from her stroke rehab facility a week before Christmas and I tried, as best I could, to prepare her home for this return. If there was a class I would have taken it gladly. There was so much I didn’t know. Including that a caretaker living in her home who neglected her physical therapy over two weeks time could thus undo much of the 90 days previous. And so on January 2nd I had to run back to Maine from New York City, as she was experiencing vertigo, which can be a symptom of a stroke. I wasn’t in the city more than 12 hours.

In healthcare, the holidays typically mean that the people you need to reach are away. At each step of the process someone had left on a vacation, leaving something undone or unfinished or handed off to someone who didn’t know the story and who was either waiting for their vacation or who had just returned. I am the gay son, the teacher gay son, the ex-waiter who used to run through crowds with five plates on an arm up flights of stairs full of drunken finance guys. I have had a dogged kind of stamina for trouble that surprises me all the time. This is the first time it felt elusive. And so I apologize for the accidental break in posting here.

But what I’m describing is not just a mess at the end of the year. We are, of course, and have been, under attack via a method known as resiliency targeting. If you feel like you can’t catch a break, if you feel exhausted, it may be that you can’t because of the way that method of assault goes after our ability to recuperate.

At the most miserable part of that week before Christmas I searched the aisles of big box stores for things my mother needed on a list given to her verbally as she left the facility, a list that should have been emailed to me directly before she got home and was not for reasons I will never learn. So I found myself walking the aisles at Dick’s Sporting Goods, hoping to find a device that will allow my mother something of the experience of exercising on an elliptical but while seated, due to her condition. The website inventory said it was in the store but it was not, and so I watched over the shoulder of a clerk as he ordered the device online for me. This sad errand stole hours of my day and most of them did, a miserable kind of scavenger hunt.

As I was doing this, if I checked social media or the news, I noted articles like how the ICE raids had taken 70,000 people so far this year. Minneapolis, where I’d just been in mid-December for a wedding, has come under assault in unthinkable ways. I often think of how all this horror and misery is just to fill private prison quotas in the contracts the government signed with those companies. When I turned back to what I was doing, I could see the way the ICE raids were also affecting the availability of healthcare workers inside of the facility my mother was in. I had to hire freelancers to help her due to the missing staff or even just to visit with her.

People have been checking in on me and will often lead their emails with “I hope you’re having a relaxing holiday!” but also, in academia, your “vacations” are when you are ostensibly supposed to do the writing you don’t get to do otherwise. So I am, it should also be said, waking up at 6AM to write before anyone can fail me and thus make a job for me that might take me away from the writing. You get weird when you don’t write, my therapist told me last fall, a few weeks into this crisis, which began when my mother had her stroke at the end of August. I might make it a t-shirt or even my eventual second tattoo.

Anyway that is what was going on around me as Heated Rivalry arrived. To the extent I felt any relaxation or even pleasure, much of it came with this show.

II.

The choir needs preaching to too, someone said, and if you know, tell me who said it—it’s been repeating in my head.

The week of Thanksgiving when the show Heated Rivalry debuted on HBO, the actor Hudson Williams had around 7,000 followers on Instagram and now he and his costar, Connor Storrie, have over 2 million, a number I know partly because my husband has taken to telling me the rising numbers daily like they are the weather report.

We are following the story of the show and the story of the young actors’ meteoric rise to stardom—they both have new agents and new managers, the show was renewed for a second season before it finished airing, and the author is writing at this moment a third novel about the two hockey player lovers, Shane Hollander, played by Hudson Williams, and Ilya Rozanov, played by Connor Storrie, that will be the foundation for an eventual third season. The Canadian streamer, Crave, who producer/writer/director Jacob Tierney turned to when American companies wanted to suppress the sex in the story, used Canadian taxpayer money for the adaptation of Rachel Reid’s popular series which first debuted in 2018 with Game Changers. The show Heated Rivalry is adapted from the novel of the same name and parts of Game Changers.

Shane Hollander is a gay Japanese Canadian mixed Asian and White hockey player, Ilya Rozanov is a Russian bisexual hockey player, and they are the heated rivals of the title, top draft picks for the NHL that year, specifically 1 (Ilya) and 2 (Shane), and they are then hired by competing teams with a history of competing against each other intensely—Montreal and Boston—and while some fans might hate them for being gay, others would hate them just for crossing that line. Season 1 sees them overcome their initial obstacles inside themselves towards being together. Season 2, we’ve been told, will confront the external obstacles.

Until Season 2, there is Season 1.5, taking place on social media where the craze has created a long-running miniseries of reels and posts on Instagram, aka my international Heated Rivalry group chat and message board. Each day has new surprises. The Price Is Right just posted about this show as did The Guggenheim and Canada Dry Ginger Ale, the favorite soda of Shane Hollander. In December I watched a series of Instagram reels of people freaking out over the show before, during and after watching it, and as the show reaches different countries, these continue in different languages. I watch reels of people taping their parents watching the show, also their husbands, wives, lovers, friends, couples watching it together of any gender. There are the first reels of Hudson and Connor—fans call them by their first names—going to their first West Hollywood gay bar, a little afraid no one knows them or the show, and then a week, maybe two weeks later, reels appear of people watching the show in gay bars and sports bar. Now there are tapes of night clubs playing the now-famous blow job scene where Shane is on the phone and Ilya is trying to distract him while “Telephone” by Lady Gaga and Beyonce shakes the walls.

I love especially the re-enactments of the various scenes from the show made using Calico Critter mice dolls, one of them printed with Shane’s freckles somehow, though maybe just with a highlighter. Other kinds of doll re-enactments enter the feed, also stuffed animals, pets, lookalike lesbian booksellers doing lip syncs. Fans of the novels tape themselves renting a sports bar and sitting like kings with their cocktails as the episodes air. Bookstores post reels of people buying the books in brown paper wrappers in the first two weeks but soon no one is hiding, people are showing off, they are bragging, I have the book!, just ripping them out of the boxes, twirling the rolling carts of book stock before the customers run in. Before Christmas, a romance bookstore in Portland had set up a pop-up store in the arena where the Maine Mariners hockey team plays so as to sell hockey romances including the Heated Rivalry series and I cannot even tell you how incredible that is for Portland.

One of the supporting cast, Francois Arnaud, just appeared on Gayle King’s CBS morning show this week and Oprah surprised him backstage to give him a hug and a short inspirational talk. “It’s the talk of the gym,” Oprah said to him, as if she went to Equinox or Planet Fitness, and she confessed she too was a fan of the show. I wondered who she talked to about the show in her gym at home and if it was Gayle. She looked rapt, maybe even dazzled, though she excels at excitement. She of course had not been taping a show but came because she’s Oprah and Gayle is her best friend.

Arnaud’s character, Scott Hunter, is a well-known hockey player who has been closeted his whole career and finally comes out when he cannot take the loneliness of it any longer, having lost a relationship to that closet—a young man he fell in love with who had a normal out gay life with friends, and an accepting and loving father, refused to join him inside of his secret. But he returns to him in a spectacular fashion.

“There’s a lot of sex in this show,” Oprah says to Arnaud. “A lot of love,” he replies, with some affection but also the proprietary air of a parent.

Shane and Ilya at the cottage, a place in the story that has become symbolic for the shelter the obsession provides.

III.

Am I dreaming, I wondered on Friday, November 28th, 2025, as I watched the first episode. This was the first of many times I thought this. Watching the show felt like like finding temporary refuge in a beautiful nightclub during the America disaster. We are taking your queer characters and stories away, the villains had shouted at us in the years leading up to this moment after they made bomb threats at libraries and pursued the erasure of trans people and queer people from public life and trans and queer friends fled the country. The immense popularity of the show has felt as if these characters fought back with an intensity that overran the regime’s various systems. One week before this show aired, GLAAD published statistics showing the number of queer characters being taken off shows. Another recent study said many of us are planning to lead less public lives as of last month. This is part of resilience targeting, depriving us of the comfort of living publicly without fear or finding our stories in stores, on television, on film, in books.

The meteoric rise of the show, the return of the novels to the bestseller list, and the intensity of fans, all are reminders that the regime’s attempt to use political power to enact cultural power was not equal to the task of keeping this from us. And so it is sweeter, even tinged with revenge, to devour basically all the content around this show, including the brand posts.

I remember back when I first heard about the gay hockey romance genre and I found it implausible. I was another person then. This was six or seven years ago. A friend was trying to tell me about the novels and I could not believe there was more than one of them, fool that I was. Now I am someone looking for a good Boy Aquarium² t-shirt.

Ilya, played by Connor Storrie, holding onto Shane’s head for dear life, in a screenshot from the show during Episode 6.

Hudson as Shane holding Connor as Ilya’s face as he kisses his forehead.

IV.

Hudson Williams, the actor who plays Shane, is Korean Canadian. If you don’t know this about me yet, I am mixed Asian and white also, Korean and white specifically, and the childhood photos of Williams that have emerged look so much like myself or my brother when we were younger I was startled by them. One of my young relatives had asked me at Thanksgiving what I thought my life would be like if I was his age and coming out now. My new answer is that I’d have what I never had back in the 1990s. Not quite a role model but a mirror, if I wanted it. I’d be aspiring to be like him, in some way. I’d be relieved, too.

Shane’s Asian heritage is under-described in the novel and the show both but Hudson is, for example, considered a role model by the brands backing his hockey player character, and he struck me as driven to be the best in a way I understand, doing it hoping it will protect you from racist harms. Which it won’t. Only community can do that, and family, loved ones. There’s a lesson ahead of him that community is can protect him and the status quo he aspires to belong to may never accept him. That was the most authentic part of his Asian diasporic heritage to me.

V.

A friend asked me what the series was about when I asked if she was watching. She is a bisexual polyamorous friend with a fetish for beautiful shoes and sub dom play. We have been friends for almost 40 years. “I think you’d like it,” I said. “It’s about a young man discovering himself as a gay submissive bottom.” She laughed. “I might like it,” she said.

Shane and Ilya are two men overwhelmed by the feelings they have for each other from their first meeting, feelings they find easier to express through sex than language. The games they play against each other allow them to meet up and have sex, and gradually, as they fight against what they’re feeling in different ways for reasons they discard, one by one, they find that language for their feelings.

For weeks now I’ve seen critics refer to the sex in the show as only steamy or spicy but they don’t mention this aspect of the story, much less Shane’s discovery of the pleasure he takes in being sexually dominated as well—he’s not just a bottom but a submissive as well. But online, on Tumblr for example, where the below screenshot is from, the fans are more direct.

When Shane confesses to Ilya in the first episode that he has practiced on himself at home with a dildo, I knew I would watch the show until the end.

How many times have you seen a man ask to be fucked on cable television, expressively, politely, urgently? How many times have you seen a man say he preferred it and the story turns on that admission? And he weeps as he says it? How many stories have you seen where a man discovers this kind of sex is his greatest joy and he will risk everything in order to continue to have this with a man he loves?

When Hudson tries to be like Ilya, to have sex with women, he finds perhaps the kindest of girlfriends, an actress, Rose Landry, above, as played by Sophie Nélisse, who explains how bad the sex is they had together. She turns out to be an expert on men like him, having been a theater kid herself. “Like, 70% of my boyfriends have turned out to be gay.” Then she pauses, as if doing the sum. “80%.” When Shane tells her he prefers to be the hole and not the peg, she laughs with surprise, and compliments him. “That is the most awesome thing any of my gay boyfriends have said,” she says. Because even for an experienced woman who has been disappointed repeatedly by the gay men in her life first trying to be her boyfriend, even she has not heard this admission.

I have a theory about coming out. That you won’t do it unless you fear losing the love of someone else. Everything else is bearable otherwise. But only that which makes it unbearable brings it about, like losing love. There’s a world made possible and real when Shane and Ilya have sex and they discover it together, and they want it more than they want anything else except maybe the Stanley Cup.

The sex is the story and tells the story. It is inherent, and this also is a relief in a year when we saw discourse fomenting against sex scenes in novels as gratuitous and unwanted. These men have sex like two people discovering themselves and each other both, learning what they like, learning what the other likes. They are in the grip of the paradise they are building. Some of the most amusing memes for the show mock the real estate that gets nicer and nicer the more they have sex but this landscape is a metaphor for the sex they are having, the world it is building between them.

Shane has been the perfect son for his parents for so long they never dream he might have a sex life. Shane in the novels is someone who practices for sex even more than the show’s mention of a dildo suggests. Much of his story in the novel is about preparing himself to take Ilya because of his size, my husband reported back to me after finishing the novel in the first two days of the year after the series ended. I made a point of getting him all six novels in the series.

IV.

The friend who first told me about Heated Rivalry, Brian Zabcik, I remember thinking he had fallen into some kind of trap. Gay hockey romances? I thought maybe he’d made a mistake in what he’d said to me. I could back then imagine, maybe, a novel, but not a series, and not a genre. Now I know better.

I text him and ask how it is for him to see the show explode like this, and the novels as well. I ask if he feels vindicated.

Brian: It’s really fucking weird seeing this little niche culture that no one outside of it took seriously turn into a mainstream pop culture phenomenon.

He also texts me a quote from James Baldwin I keep thinking about. “For the act of love is a confession. One lies about the body but the body does not lie about itself; it cannot lie about the force that drives it.”

Brian: I’m curious how you feel about the hot sexy Asian representation.

Me: Well I feel great. It’s an uncomplicated lust he seems to generate. And he’s the romantic hero out to get his man.

Brian: It’s really highlighted two things —many queer people have been desperate for happy endings, and many straight women have been desperate for decent men.

We have an exchange about Gordon Merrick’s women fan base, the idea that women are the primary fan base for these novels, and the lesbians we know who love gay porn. Brian asserts that as gay men we are ancillary audiences. I ask if he still feels that way given Jacob Tierney, the director, producer and writer of the screen play is a gay man. He acknowledges Tierney did a great job but sees the author, Rachel Reid as the primary creator, given she’s the source material author. I think about whether I feel ancillary. I don’t. I feel like I’m in an enthusiastic crowd that keeps expanding unpredictably after seeming to shrink alarmingly.

Me: I feel like the show is about a bottom learning his power and pleasure also (Shane) Which I don’t think we ever see.

Brian: Yes Shane is the proud bottom hero we’ve always needed. And Ilya is the caring and affectionate top.

For me the show is about how sex can turn into love.

VI.

The idea of a young man preparing himself for someone, or someones, a life, an erotic life—a lot of gay men do this, a lot of queer people do this. I am thinking of Cherríe Moraga’s quote, “I am used to imagining what it must be like.”

This kind of story to my mind is typically relegated to porn but is not inherently porn. This is the bottom’s journey of discovery, and we never really see it dramatized in, say, a show on HBO, that I can think of, and the star of such a story is typically famous to gay men—I am thinking of the 1980s porn stars Joey Stefano, for example, or Kevin Williams, or the sadomasochistic comics of Tagame. But these stars are on late night television, as Hudson Williams was, getting on his knees in front of the audience, the crowd screaming and cheering, as Jimmy Fallon said, like they did for the Beatles. The leads are doing morning shows and fashion shows as well as late night, and probably need some sleep.

Shane Hollander is the world’s most celebrated submissive famous gay bottom right now and Hudson Williams is the actor who brought him to vivid life. Shane’s journey with Ilya is practically forbidden to describe in the mainstream because the man who will submit to what a misogynistic and homophobic world believes to be the most degrading thing and enjoys it, what else would he do?

The world they keep building between them changes this one too.

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A fundraiser for Powderhorn, a Minneapolis community targeted by ICE. Sanctuary Depot Mutual AID there is also raising money and accepting donations.

Interactive map of ICE contractors nationally.

ICE agents are going door to door in Minneapolis and also checking people’s documents at the airport.

1. [For the full effect, please click on this YouTube Playlist of music from the show. Letter title is from Cailin Russo’s song “Bad Things,” the last song of Episode 6, Season 1.]

2. Women fans of men’s hockey have used this expression for the rink during men’s games. Gay men have adopted it.