Jacob Tierney | Heated Rivalry (Season 1, Episode 3 “Hunter”) / 2025 [TV series]

let’s make love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacob Tierney (screenwriter and director, based on the novel Game Changers by Rachel Reid) Heated Rivalry / 2025 [TV series]

Season 1, Episode 3 “Hunter”

In this third episode of the already quite acclaimed TV series Heated Rivalry, the focus utterly changes. And, in some sense, the fairly radical cinematographical perspectives of the work become more apparent. Not only do we get repeated incidents set in a new location, as if the story has itself forgotten where he had previously been (a tactic occasionally used in Fassbinder’s works), but time becomes disjunctive, at moments images jumping ahead while simultaneously playing out a former scene.

    The break away from the story of Shane and Ilya is itself a rather radical device. The new characters featured in this episode did not even truly exist in the previous two episodes, but receive a love story every far steamier that the central figures. Once they hit the sack, these boys immediately know what it is they want—and get it. Here there are now longer any long impatient flutterings of the heart. It is as if the motor of the movie has gone into a kind of stutter before cranking up into an entirely new gear.

   A scene from “The Olympians” is almost repeated with the same figures, Scott Hunter (François Arnaud) and Carter Vaughn (Kolton Stewart), but this time instead of being at a café in Sochi, Japan during the Olympics, where the focus was entirely on Shane, it occurs in a small smoothie bar in New York, where once again, they encounter Shane, and somewhat casually comment on the bravery of the Russian gay figure skaters, but this time with the camera focusing on Hunter, making it quite clear that the observation has specific meaning for him that the others cannot imagine.

     And Hunter, the captain of the New York Admirals, who has not been having a very fulfilling season with absolutely no goals, soon after enters a local health bar where he meets up with the shop employee named Christopher “Kip” Grady (Robbie G.K.), a beautiful hunk of a man, to whom Hunter, rather amazingly given the fact that we have had no clues of his possibly being gay, appears to be attracted. Reading his badge, he calls him “Kip” twice, while the barista suggests the Blue Moon special (which obviously calls up a major lyricist celebrated in a move of the same year, the gay Lorenz Hart) to which Kip suggests he add a banana—the perfect sexual picker-upper that becomes necessary, we soon discover, for Hunter to regain his mojo and start winning again. As the synopsis blandly declares: “That night, Scott finally breaks a scoring slump.”  

   But any gay perceiver of this film, and all the woman who have embraced this narrative sense almost immediately, as well, I should add as Kip’s loyal (best girlfriend) Straw+Berry co-worker Maria Villanueva (Bianca Nugara) perceives, there’s something going on between the two rather emphatic acknowledgements of the barista's name and the return of Hunter to the smoothie shop for another order of the Blue Moon before the next game, even if Kip knows absolutely nothing about hockey and hasn’t a clue who Scott Hunter is.

    You can describe it simply as superstition, but the flirtation that Kip senses and Maria openly recognizes is quite apparent unless you are a dumb straight man sitting in the corner. If this had been Heartstopper little electric and heart shaped emojis would have danced across the screen.

Thank heaven Heated Rivalry has the wonderful jibes of Kip’s coworker and the members of his local gay pub to make obvious what even the barista can’t admit until he’s actually invited by Hunter to a hockey game and catches the man’s obvious nod and wink.

     And even his challenging hockey members notice that something is in the air, particularly after Hunter, losing games against the Raiders and the Metros, brawls on court, after the game, when Hunter cannot help but poke Shane’s so very secretive romance by comparing him to Ilya, the two breaking into a brawl.

     The tempest is about to explode even the politest of New England teapots when Hunter encounters Kip at another venue where the overworked barista is attempting to makes some extra money, only to discover his newfound heart throb is in attendance. They go home together, have glorious sex, and, as the saying goes, never look back as the recognize there is not going to be any turning back, that they are already wed as a couple.

    Yes, such events to happen. My companion Howard and I met, moved in together by the end of the week, and are still living together 56 years later!

     That is not to say there aren’t incredible problems. Neither Howard nor I, at least, were not famous athletes for whom, like Hollywood stars, such a relationship might mean the complete relinquishment of the lives they worked so hard to create. One could never imagine or more accommodating and comprehending companion than Kip, but, as his dear friend Maria whispers

into Hunter’s ear in a dance at another celebratory occasion, he is desperately suffering. How to remain silent about what one is driven to desperately shout about with joy, having found someone with whom you are finally desperate in love? How to pretend a perfect romance? Everything that gay couple does reveals their exceptionalness, we are special because there are still so few of us, and when we fall in love believing in the impossibility that we have been taught our very existence denies, how can we remain quiet?

    In a brilliant cinema moment, director Jacob Tireney, portrays Hunter delivering a truly inspiring speech about how, after his parents were killed in a car accident, the very organization that he is celebrating and seeking for further support helped to make him realize that he had another family in the world sports—with lover Kip and his best female friend Maria in attendance—at the same moment interweaving scenes of his Hunter and Kip’s return home and the latter’s first recognition that he must, at least temporarily, get away at least to revisit his beloved father. It is a bit like witnessing a train wreck while watching a film in which the speaker is praising the wonders and pleasures of train travel. Both are realities that cannot be denied, but how can one ever reintegrate the realities faced.

    Kip celebrates his birthday with his own friends at the gay bar, away from the person he so desperately wishes were there to celebrate their new life together. He falls into tears in his father’s arms without the truly caring father knowing how to even explain the phenomenon. Kip is happier than he has ever been in his life. Kip is more miserable that he has ever been in his life. That is, obviously, the central torture of deep love. It is no longer an issue of choice; you can only celebrate the pain.

     That a popular series would choose this message for its very third episode, interrupting its major love story with another suddenly intruding love story—perhaps even dominating the sensual first episodes—makes it clear this is not a truly normative soap opera. For one of the first times in gay cinema, the power of sexual allure, the draw of individuals to one another based primarily on bodily desire is placed openly in front of the viewers. These people don’t have complex intellectual interchanges; they are like most of us, animals when it comes to discovering who they love, drawn by forces beyond their control.

     If sex has always been at the sublimated heart of all Hollywood portrayed romances, it has generally been toned down, hushed up, kept steeping in the background, while the narrative attempt to explain what might actually be behind desire, confused moral compasses, childhood and adult abuses, and misinterpreted visions of what society has to offer become the dominant themes. Certainly not at the same sophisticated level, but with the same dynamic force, this work returns to what Tennessee Williams long ago made apparent: desire is something that truly can’t be contained and unless it is openly admitted and expressed, will destroy the individual and all his or her possibilities of love. You can’t hide love is the lesson that these (a)moral tales tell us, no matter how “perverse” the society might interpret that love to be.

    It’s truly interesting that women are behind the re-engenderment of raw sex to the world of gay love, after now so many years of pale male films celebrating our new ability to marry. Now perhaps we can get back to the lust in our souls and stop assimilating what the straight patriarchal world has determined is the right course on which we should proceed.

 

Los Angeles, January 27, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).