Heated Rivalry To Red, White & Royal Blue: Why Do Queer Sex Scenes Still Cause Such A Fuss?

It was recently announced that Red, White & Royal Wedding has received a R rating for sexual content, nudity and language in the US, and naturally, everyone wants to know what remarkably sexy stuff Alex and Henry will be getting up to. Fair enough. I support having hobbies.

As Star Observer reported, the classification of the sequel to Red, White & Royal Blue doesn’t tell us exactly what’s coming of course. But it does bring back memories of the first film accidentally becoming a sex education resource for people who apparently thought gay and bisexual men always fucked in one position, or something??? The straights truly do be wild.

And with Heated Rivalry also sending search interest through the bloody roof, there’s something worth unpacking beneath all that enthusiasm.

Red, White & Royal Blue’s sex scene taught the straights

“gay guys can do missionary?”

That was the tweet. Five words, and an entire heterosexual blind spot, apparently, was revealed.

After Red, White & Royal Blue arrived in 2023, that bewildered response to Alex and Henry’s intimacy went viral.

So much so, that the film’s director Matthew López shared it with the caption: “My work here is done.”

I’ll admit I laughed. Of course I laughed. But once you’ve finished laughing, you start to feel somewhat baffled.

Our community constantly gets told ‘WE DON’T CARE WHAT YOU DO, JUST KEEP IT BEHIND CLOSED DOORS!!!’ by a not-insignificant number of straight folks – but it turns out, they are kinda fascinated (albeit very oblivious) about what we actually can and can’t do with one another.

How thoroughly must queer intimacy be missing from someone’s cultural diet for two men having face-to-face sex to warrant online virality?

Straight audiences get decades of on-screen romances teaching them the choreography of sexual desire: inadvertent glances down at someone’s lips, nervous touches, the sex that’s passionate or awkward or tender or occasionally a truly terrible idea.

Then a gay prince looks into his lover’s eyes is in the zeitgeist and all fo a sudden we’re running a public information session on sexual positions.

Searches show the appetite for LGBTQIA+ intimacy on screen

Looking at data from Google Trends, it’s quite incredible the massive spikes in interest we see not only for the film/show themselves, but also people searching for the sex scenes within them.

If we look at worldwide searches online from 2023 to today, “heated rivalry sex” reaches the comparison’s maximum interest score of 100 around the turn of 2026, which coincides with the shows November release dat. “red white royal blue sex” peaks at roughly 23 in 2023 – nowhere near the scale of Heated Rivalry, but a massive spike nonetheless.

The searches for the sex scenes look quite similar to the title comparisons. Heated Rivalry, selected as the television series, peaks at 100; Red, White & Royal Blue, selected as the film, reaches roughly 38. Average interest favours the series, 7 to 3.

These are relative search-interest scores, not audience totals – obviously we cannot tell from a simple search term if the searcher themselves were horny, scandalised, made curious from the hype, or simply trying to find which episode the sex scenes were in.

Two titles also cannot stand in for every queer story, but the scale of attention here is hard to ignore.

However, on another note I found interesting: the novels that the film and TV series were based on, actually show opposite interest levels.  Casey McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue comes out significantly on top this time (pun intended), averaging 5 against Rachel Reid’s Heated Rivalry at 3, with peaks of 100 and roughly 40 respectively.

Make of that what you will. I haven’t read the books, so I have no idea if there is more or less sex in either of them. Personally, I suspect it was moreso the enormous hype campaign around Heated Rivalry helped make the show’s virality so massive, as did the fact that there is far more very hot sex scenes in the show than the RW&RB film.

Queer sex scenes shouldn’t need to justify their existence

As more and more athletes are coming out in professional sports, Heated Rivalry is extremely timely. It follows rival hockey players whose sexual relationship develops alongside feelings they struggle to express as professional athletes. Its creator, Jacob Tierney, has described sex as a way of showing that relationship evolve.

Which seems fairly obvious, but he was still asked the question, bedause queer stories are expected to explain why the sex needs to be there. There needs to be a valid reason, because for so long, we needed to adhere to that squawking demand from hysterical straight folks – keep your bedroom business behind closed doors, we do not want to see it.

So now, the world was evolved a little, and our bedroom door has opened just a tiny wee bit – but we still need to justify WHY it has been opened, lest the homophobes and transphobes arc up about it.

When was the last time you saw a director having to justify why a straight sex scene is included in a film? Basically never, because it is just assumed that if there’s any form of romance, there’ll likely be a sex scene of some kind. But queer TV shows and series’ – we need a reason for ours.

Sometimes you learn something about a character through who they want, how they touch someone, what they’re frightened to ask for. Sometimes the scene is just really hot. Both are perfectly reasonable things for a television show or film that is rated for adults to offer.

Personally, I’m delighted people are watching. Be horny, have your little crush, send your mate the sexy clip. Nobody needs a thesis to enjoy the gay hockey players slamming each other.

But I’m tired of queer desire having to earn its place through education or impeccable respectability. We deserve tenderness and mess and pleasure, including the kind that serves absolutely nobody’s moral improvement.

And yes, sometimes the fellas in our community can and do sometimes face each other while boning. Glad we’ve cleared that up.