“Did you like sucking my cock?” Ilya Rozanov asks Shane Hollander as the hockey phenoms stand in each other’s arms up against a wall.
“Wow. Those English words just roll off your tongue,” Hollander responds quietly.
“You want me to lie on the bed and let you do it some more?”
Less than 20 minutes into the first episode, “Heated Rivalry” takes us inside the bedroom with its two male leads, showing in explicit detail their budding, secret romance.
There’s no question that the show—which has become an internet-breaking cultural phenomenon—is making girls, gays, theys and frankly everyone in between horny. The steamy, often minutes-long sex scenes between two hockey rivals—Canada’s Hollander and Russia’s Rozanov—show a depiction of sex between men on TV that I have never seen. It’s sweaty, passionate and fueled by an on-screen chemistry between actors Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie so palpable that you can’t help but feel something.
My two best girlfriends each cried during episode five. One told me she hasn’t felt this intensely about a show since she watched “The Notebook” in Grade 9; the other stayed on her couch binging the series and screening calls from her boyfriend.
The series, directed by Jacob Tierney as an adaptation of books written by Rachel Reid, is now Canadian streamer Crave’s most watched original show ever. It was the top debut ever for an acquired, non-animated title on HBO Max, and episode five became the second-ever TV episode to get a weighted 10/10 score on IMDB. The show has also penetrated international markets known for anti-LGBTQ policies: In China, it’s a pirated hit, and it has also caught on in Russia despite the country’s laws against so-called LGBTQ “propaganda.”
Before I binged the show this week, I was reluctant to turn it on, thinking “Is this just going to be porn that doesn’t go all the way?” But in the first 15 minutes, I was reeled in by the emotional pull of Hollander and Rozanov’s romance.
Scenes started tapping into feelings and moments through my life—before and after I came out at 16—that I’d never seen effectively depicted on television through the lens of two men. They evoked melancholy, nostalgia, euphoria and all the intoxicating feelings of falling for your first time.
The element of secrecy is something every guy attracted to men can relate to: watching Hollander and Rozanov make out in stairwells to avoid getting caught, check each other out in the locker room showers, secretly touch feet underneath the table at a press conference or have sex that feels 10 times more passionate because it is fueled by the intensity of the closet door.
While the sex scenes are captivating and have opened up mainstream conversations about women’s interest in gay sex (almost half of the viewers for gay male porn are women), it’s the intimacy and the complexity of a love affair between two men that makes this show stand out. Navigating who is going to top, who takes on which gender roles and how to communicate about open relationships when monogamy is often the exception rather than the rule.
But I believe Hollander and Rozanov’s romance has gone viral because it depicts a first love: yearning, fear, excitement and all the others feelings. At the same time, it displays the challenges the two men experience while playing major league hockey at a time when there has never been an openly gay active NHL player in history.
We see Hollander overthink the punctuation of a text to Rosanov so he doesn’t seem too into him as their crushes intensify. We see him fall for Rozanov as he watches him joking around with a group of kids, with the implicit understanding that he thinks Rozanov would make a great dad. And we watch him help Rozanov—who is less open about his emotions—grapple with the death of his father by listening to him grieve in Russian even though he doesn’t understand the language.
