In one of the pivotal moments in “Maurice,” E. M. Forster’s early-twentieth-century novel of homosexual love, the book’s titular protagonist—an upper-class young stockbroker battling secret gay desires—arrives at the British Museum to confront Alec Scudder, a working-class gamekeeper with whom he’s had sex. Fearing blackmail and attempting to deny his true leanings, Maurice has been fending off Alec’s advances since their encounter, and now, offended at being rebuffed, Alec has been threatening to publicly expose him. As the two wander around the museum—one pressuring, the other deflecting—the novel portrays their professed enmity as underscored by the force of attraction, even of love. “They would peer at a goddess or vase, and then move at a single impulse, and their unison was the stranger because on the surface they were at war,” Forster writes. “Alec recommenced his hints—horrible, reptilian—but somehow they did not pollute the intervening silences, and Maurice failed to get afraid or angry . . . . When he chose to reply their eyes met, and his smile was sometimes reflected on the lips of his foe. The belief grew that the actual situation was a blind—a practical joke, almost—and concealed something real, that either desired.”

Forster’s novel may have been written in 1913 (and published, posthumously, in 1971), but its portrayal of Alec and Maurice’s inability to openly articulate their love remains evergreen. This was what struck me as I watched “Heated Rivalry,” a deliciously enjoyable series that began airing in late November on the small Canadian streaming platform Crave, and, simultaneously, on HBO Max, where it quickly became a huge, unexpected hit. (It’s currently the most-watched non-animated show acquired by HBO Max since the platform’s launch, in 2020.) “Heated Rivalry,” which is written and directed by Jacob Tierney, and based on a romance novel of the same name by Rachel Reid, takes place, largely chronologically, between the years 2008 and 2017. Over its six episodes, it tells the story of two secretly gay athletes in the highly masculinist world of pro hockey: Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams), a half-Asian Canadian who plays for Montreal, and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), a Russian who plays for Boston. (Williams and Storrie are shatteringly hunky, and, though quite unknown when the series began airing, have since turned into media sensations, appearing in the past couple of weeks on seemingly every single TV show, podcast, awards ceremony, magazine, and website in North America.) After first meeting in the lead-up to their rookie seasons, clean-cut Shane and bad-boy Ilya become the captains of their respective teams and begin to carry on an intermittent love affair on the D.L., while also nurturing an intense rivalry on the ice.

Shane and Ilya’s antagonism is predicated on their direct competition as sportsmen. But, as is the case with Maurice and Alec in Forster’s novel, there’s also something about their overt hostility that is fundamental to their closeted love. When attraction cannot manifest publicly, its passion can only be portrayed as its opposite, and the violent interactions between the hard-bodied pair, who slam and check each other again and again in the rink, are part of this phenomenon. (This doubling is also fodder for comedy on the show: Shane’s mother, who is clueless about her son’s sexual activities, professes her dislike toward his foe by declaring, at one point, “Imagining he’s better than you? Fuck. Him. Right up the butt!”)

This public enmity means, too, that the pair’s attraction and love must be conveyed underhandedly, through a language of half-hidden signals. To try to tell if someone likes you—if someone might even want to have sex with you and, if so, when, and what that encounter might be like, and, once it’s over, when and how it might be repeated—can be one of life’s greatest pleasures. A second-best option is to observe how this uncertain path proceeds in fictional form. Shared grins during face-offs on the ice, meaningful glances across crowded dance floors, feet pressing together under a table during press conferences—much of the narrative tension and delight of “Heated Rivalry” relies on clocking these gestures as the two protagonists enact them, and then speculating on where they might lead.

It should be noted that, within the world of the series, this necessarily mute form of communication isn’t always a source of fun and games. That the show ups the dramatic stakes of Shane and Ilya’s romance by relying on the major obstacle of the closet naturally leads to plenty of fear and heartache and repression. “No one can know,” Shane warns Ilya, after the first time they sleep together, to which Ilya responds, gravely, “Hollander, look, I’m not going to tell anyone.” (When he later kisses Shane on the mouth outside a party, the latter explodes. “We’re both in our tuxedos, out in public!” he cries. If anyone were to see, both understand, they would be met not just with bafflement but with censure, in both their deeply heterosexist hockey-league environment and, more perilously, in Ilya’s homeland of Russia.) As a cautionary measure, the two take on the names “Jane” and “Lily” in each other’s phones, so they can message undetected, and the spectre of either one finding a girlfriend and “going straight” hovers over the other like a sad and largely unarticulated threat. In all this, “Heated Rivalry” follows melancholic texts of forbidden gay love that came before it, like Patricia Highsmith’s novel “The Price of Salt” (1952), Gus Van Sant’s indie drama “My Own Private Idaho” (1991), and Ang Lee’s film “Brokeback Mountain” (2005), which was based on Annie Proulx’s short story of the same name, originally published in this magazine. (As I watched “Heated Rivalry,” in fact, Storrie’s depiction of Ilya as taciturn top kept reminding me of Heath Ledger, whose Ennis del Mar, in Lee’s movie, is, like Ilya, the more morose and dominant of the two lovers that the work portrays.)

Beyond the brooding, however, there is the fucking. At this point, to talk about “Heated Rivalry” is to talk about the sex in “Heated Rivalry,” which is plentiful, quite explicit, and, I’ll say it, pretty hot—often depicted, with no cutaways, from start to, er, finish. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that Storrie and Williams both appear to be carved from God’s own marble, but, beyond the pair’s good looks looking good together, part of the pleasure for viewers, I think, is the show’s plainspoken articulation of desire, when the love that dare not speak its name finally does. It’s like Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers” if Zendaya had gotten lost on the way to that hotel room.

This articulation doesn’t happen, however, without the internal and external obstruction that precedes it. The seeming impossibility of Shane and Ilya’s homosexual love affair makes for an enjoyable sort of narrative edging. The will-they-or-won’t-they element here happens on at least two levels: Will they or won’t they be able to finally, finally stop playing hockey and instead let us watch them have sex, at any given moment in a particular episode? But, also, will they or won’t they end up turning this sex into capital-“L” Love? In an interview for Vulture, the actor Jordan Firstman, who is gay, said of the series, “It’s just not gay. That is not how gay people fuck,” implying that the sex between Shane and Ilya is too serious and rehearsed, and therefore conceived from a straight perspective. Whether this is the case or not (I certainly can’t say), much has been made of the depiction of gay sex in “Heated Rivalry” being especially enticing to straight-women viewers. (“Weird to be turned on by heated rivalry as straight woman? Lol,” a follower recently asked the content creator Tinx, in an Instagram A.M.A., to which Tinx responded, “Defs not!!! It’s the hottest show ever!”)

The genre of M/M or MLM fan fiction, which uses love and sex between two men as its theme, is, like fanfiction in general, mostly written and read by women. The manga genre known as Boys’ Love, or BL, which spins tales of gay romance, is also geared toward a female audience. “Heated Rivalry,” at least anecdotally, seems to follow this tendency. In an interview for Them on Instagram, Storrie and Williams were asked why they think the show has been especially popular with straight women. Referencing a conversation he’d had with the show’s female costume designer, Storrie suggested that “there’s something about this type of story and this type of love and this type of sex that has a lot to do with this almost, like, prolonged foreplay and yearning, and I think that’s what the female audience is really drawn to.” Below the post, an Instagram user wrote, “the YEARNING,” a comment that, at last count, has garnered more than twenty-three thousand likes.

In the afterword to “Maurice,” Forster notes that, to him, “a happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway, two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows.” The first season of “Heated Rivalry,” too, ends on a happy note, with Shane and Ilya professing their love to each other—and also, of course, fucking several times—while in a secluded cottage in the Canadian countryside, living out a Bruce Weber-style natural fantasia. (This conclusion, it should be said, provides a hearteningly optimistic vista for gay love, especially considering our particularly grim political moment.) I’d have added a spoiler alert here, but part of the show’s charm, for all its hedging, lies in the ultimate inevitability of its narrative trajectory, and in the satiation of the longing that it so incessantly focusses on. When I asked a friend what she thought of the show, she admitted that she felt compelled to keep watching it, almost despite herself. It was the sex, yes, but not just. “It activates all the fantasies I had and maybe still have,” she told me, “about the power of this emotional and physical connection with someone.” She felt embarrassed, she said, for yearning, for believing, and yet she couldn’t stop. I told her not to be ashamed. What would we do in life, really, if not for the ever and ever that fiction allows? ♦