In the next couple of weeks, at least a dozen parties and club nights dedicated to HBO Max’s surprise mega-hit Heated Rivalry are scheduled to take place across San Francisco’s nightlife scene, including events at Public Works (hosted by the Nicki Jizz), the Stud, Cat Club, and DNA Lounge. Most are already sold out.
If you have somehow yet to be inundated by Heated Rivalry press and explainers, it’s a smutty Canadian gay hockey drama following two elite rookies, Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, and their illicit situationship (and enemies-to-lovers arc) as they ascend into superstardom on the ice. The show’s ascendance into the mainstream is hard to explain, but is probably helped by the fact that it’s a pretty good, soapy (in every sense of the word) story, and that its fandom is totally comprised of three terminally online demographics: TikTok teens who read fanfiction, romance novel lovers, and gay guys on X.
Cip Cipriano, the co-owner of Q Bar in the Castro and a touring DJ, would like to stake the claim of Q Bar as the first venue in the city to announce a club night dedicated to the show. The way he tells it, his first event was born in the days after Shane and Ilya finally made their way to the cottage.
Cipriano and longtime collaborator Tu Vu, who runs the dance party series Club Harder Better, are Heated Rivalry heads themselves. They saw, like many other enterprising club owners across the country, an opportunity to get people through the doors even in the middle of cuffing season and the height of Dry January.
“We throw theme parties,” Vu explained. “And I kept seeing the show, just thinking that it would be a great fit for having people together around fandom, people who are like-minded.”
Heated Rivalry has broken containment from HBO Max’s outer-outer scroll to Top 10 status since its premiere in November. Its lead actors, Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, have done the talk show and awards show circuits, and have walked the runways. One of them is getting the Club Chalamet treatment as you read this. The show, created by Jacob Tierney, has been renewed for a second and third season thanks to the buzz of its six-episode first season, and the book series by Rachel Reid that it is based on has been sold out (and on hold at libraries, including San Francisco’s) for weeks on end. (To quench this collective thirst, a new entry into the book series, titled Unrivaled, has been announced.)
These hunks are everywhere, and so are their fans.
“It sold out in hours,” Cipriano told Gazetteer of the Q Bar event, the first of which is happening Saturday. “Then, we threw a second date up, which got sold out in six hours; so then we threw a third and final date on sale, and that sold out in, like, nine hours.”
Cipriano and Vu also plan to tour the Heated Rivalry rave across the country.
Central to the appeal, certainly, is that there is little else in the world right now that doesn’t feel rotten to its core. The vibes in this country are sexless when they’re not terrifying, so it’s not only fun to see two handsome men (with excellent butts) go at each other graphically and who then fall in love madly and deeply, its mainstream-ness feels a bit subversive if not necessarily radical. Heated Rivalry’s devotees are not just gay men, though there are many, but women of all sexualities. The show’s popularity among women has caused its own micro-controversy within the fandom, which I could write about at length, but my editor won’t allow me to. (If you are a Heated Rivalry enthusiast, my inbox is open to geek out. I can also provide recommendations for other niche gay TV shows worth watching.)
The show’s popularity doesn’t quite explain the total glut of themed club nights that have descended upon San Francisco (and elsewhere in the country). We haven’t seen this many singularly-themed club nights since Brat Summer in 2024. That probably has to do with the show’s genuinely surprising music supervision. In one episode, you get a clubby take on t.A.T.u.’s faux-lesbian anthem “All The Things She Said,” which will most certainly play at these nights; in other episodes are Canadian indie rockers Feist and Wolf Parade. (I can feel a ‘00s indie rock resurgence incoming.) The latter band’s signature anthem “I’ll Believe in Anything” plays in perhaps the climax of the season.
Outside of the show’s needle drops, Heated Rivalry heads are making salacious and/or sweet fan edits on TikTok set to Twice, Chappell Roan, Taylor Swift, and every other music genre imaginable. One edit, featuring a Megan thee Stallion song, was so raunchy that it got removed from TikTok and ended up circulating illicitly on Google Drives and less-regulated video streamers. Every scene has been remixed to oblivion, which explains the show’s freshness well into January. I saw an excellent edit to a song by ‘90s R&B prodigy Tevin Campbell, who hasn’t released a new album since the turn of the century.
All this is to say: Expect a lot of clubs all over the city to be playing the raunchiest Heated Rivalry fan edits (and a whole lot of Canadian indie rock) in the near-future. The culture demands it.
“Everything is geared towards being like, ‘This is the end of the fucking world as we know it,’” Cipriano said. “But then, all of a sudden, you put on this TV show, and it's just this beautiful, gay love story that ends on the best note ever. Like, could anything be better than the cottage?”
