Those Tuna Melts in Heated Rivalry Are So Gay

The queering of a sandwich.

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How do you code a sandwich as gay? How does it become a crucial signifier in a romantic drama about queer love, queer desire? I wrote a book decoding queerness in food across eight decades of the 20th century. Today I’m turning my decoder onto Episode 4 of Heated Rivalry, the Canadian-produced series streaming on HBO Max (based on the novel by Rachel Reid) about elite pro hockey players who carry on a raging affair in secret. At the heart of this episode is a sandwich we all know as homely, fish-fragrant, grease-slicked, mayo-lubed, often loved, just as often hated: the tuna melt. The question before us: How does food, a sandwich even, gain narrative power through the act of being queered?

Tuna kisses / HBO Max

Let’s get started. Toss me the remote.

Oh but first I guess I should explain, in case you’ve spent the last two months in a remote ashram with your phone in a lock pouch, that Heated Rivalry features the Russian phenom Ilya Rozanov (played by Connor Storrie), captain of the fictional Boston Raiders. As the scene in Episode 4 opens, Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams), star of the fictional Montreal Metros, has arrived at Ilya’s door and, well, they f*@k a lot. Then, this:

“You like tuna melt?” Ilya says with his Russian accent and clipped cadence. (He and Shane have moved to the kitchen after thrashing, spooning, and falling asleep in Ilya’s inky-blue sheets.)

“You want to…make me a tuna melt?” Shane says, with the briefest of mid-sentence pauses and a flash of an unguarded smile, which he almost immediately seems to suppress.

“I was gonna make one for me,” Ilya says, “I can make two.” It comes off as a verbal shrug, a casual offer, even if his controlled denial hints otherwise. Ilya opens his colossal fridge. He removes a stack of three square food containers, prepped and ready, it seems, for this very moment.

Ilya: Ginger ale cold enough?

Shane: Yeah, it’s great. [He looks away; we see disappointment, possibly frustration, in his face, and it’s not clear why.]

Ilya: Good. Food’ll be ready soon.

What are we to make of Ilya’s contemporary, art-filled house of clean lines and brooding masc energy? In this space of light and shadows, a wall of glass looks onto a patio guarded by deep flanks of evergreens, opposite banks of dark kitchen cabinets and black or near-black stages of action, like Ilya’s sheets and his long, black sofa, planes of emotional ambiguity.

Till now, Shane and Ilya’s transactional arrangement, conducted strictly on the DL, has been mostly in hotel rooms on the road, despite a semi-anxious hook-up in Shane’s apartment. So this daytime sesh at Ilya’s is a small but important escalation, a setting more intimate than a Park Hyatt, with its risky hallways, its moaning common walls.

And the tuna melts—Ilya’s act of fixing a reviving snack for Shane—they too loom like an escalation, an intensification. By the end of the scene, after the sandwiches are polished off, the boys fool around on Ilya’s long, black couch, only it’s different this time: it reads less like sex and more like making love. Late in the scene, as the orgasms hit, the boys do something for the first time—they cry out each other’s first names (up to now it’s been strictly Rozanov and Hollander). Shane leaves hastily, with awkward apologies. “Thank you for the tuna melt,” he says. “I’m sorry. This…I can’t. I can’t…do this.” Of course we know what this means: pretending it’s just sex when his heart, it’s obvious, is open and vulnerable. Shane has fallen in love. He’s scared, which explains his conflicted expression earlier. We suspect Ilya has fallen, too—suspect it partly because the tuna melts have told us so.

Bro: tuna melts?

HBO Max

“I’m sorry to say a tuna melt is one of the most unsexy foods in existence.” That’s Sam Stone, staff writer at Bon Appétit. “If we start with texture,” he writes in an email, “there’s a kind of unpleasant softness to the tuna mixture that I’m not wild about. Odor, obviously, plays a huge role here as well. Tuna is smelly—there’s no getting around it. You’re gonna have tuna breath after eating a tuna melt and that is profoundly unsexy. In terms of foods I don’t want to see a man eating, tuna melts rank somewhere above, say, egg salad, whitefish salad, and below deviled eggs (barely).”

For Erik Piepenburg, author of Dining Out, an essential look at LGBT restaurant culture—and self-described diner gay, the tuna melt was an anathema to hooking up. In the 1990s, when Erik was single and a regular at Chicago’s dearly departed Melrose Diner, it was the reddest of red flags. “Every time I went to the Melrose, I was hoping I would meet someone and, you know…have a date or at least a goodnight kiss, and a tuna melt is generally not something you want to be kissing with,” Erik tells me in a call. “And it’s not a very bottom-friendly food,” he adds. “If that’s your thing.” Which, emphatically, is the thing for Ilya and Shane.

What’s crucial here is how canned tuna spent much of last century trying to make itself appealing to men—trying to sell itself as, uh…sexy?

The turn of the 20th century sees the birth of the albacore canning industry in Southern California. By the 1950s, companies like Chicken of the Sea are flooding the so-called women’s pages in North American dailies with items touting the affordability and versatility of canned tuna, employing nameless home economists to develop recipes designed to be cut out and stuffed into recipe books for keeping.

Within the nuclear, patriarchal, gender-coded family realm of North American home cooking after World War II, many recipes try to persuade the homemaker that a couple of 30-cent cans of tuna will appeal to her husband and sons if she knows how to jazz them up with the lusty things men are supposed to crave: horseradish and curry powder, salty crushed potato chips, Worcestershire sauce, and tangy cheese. The papers fill with recipes for “Nippy Creamed Tuna,” “Cheese and Tuna Delecta,” “Tuna Paprikash,” and “Tuna on Curried Almond Rice (Men Love This).”

The tuna melt begins life as tuna rarebit (a.k.a. rabbit): a beer-spiked, fish-chunked cheese sauce spooned on toast, the place where canapé inches toward open-face. The third edition of Joy of Cooking (1943/1946) offers up “Tuna Fish Sandwiches with Cheese,” with slices of skinned, sugared tomatoes lurking beneath flaked tuna and broiled cheese. And then in 1957, something like the modern tuna melt makes its debut in the women’s pages as “Hot Tuna and Cheese Sandwiches”: bread smeared with mustard butter and heaped with tuna salad, baked under a slice of cheese and sprinkled with paprika. Quickly, I imagine, it finds its way to diners like the Melrose, the lunch counter, and coffee shop under a streamlined name. (The word melt is straight from the short-order lexicon.) Over the decades, it’s comes to seem inevitable, a go-to at Denny’s and Nordstrom Cafés, and a blueprint for riffs like the ‘90s-era Tuna Melt Pizza at CPK, which, god help us.

Within the tuna melt’s DNA, however, is this stubbornly woven idea of comfort. Long after feminists and queers breached of the post-war institution of the patriarchal, rigorously gendered family unit, the tuna melt abides as fuel for nurture.

That’s how Sam Low reads it in the scene with Ilya and Shane. Sam’s a cookbook author and winner of Masterchef New Zealand 2022 who lives in Auckland. He recently posted a TikTok recipe for tuna melts inspired by the one on Heated Rivalry. “Tuna melts,” Sam writes in an email, “or tuna salad (the filling component), are often seen as a ‘housewife’ or domestically coded food item, where it tends to have a kind of softness to it, which could represent the comfort that [Ilya and Shane] are both finding with each other.”

And here’s where Ilya’s tuna melt begins to look as if it signifies, in Barthesian terms, something he might not be able to vocalize. Erik Piepenburg says he watched Episode 4 with his partner, David, who in a diner will always, Erik says, always order the tuna melt.

“That scene was so personal to us, we looked at each other and laughed. There was something so specific about it,” Erik says. “Ilya didn’t say, ‘I’ll make you a sandwich.’ He said something very American, very comforting—a sign of love, maybe. And that specificity, I think, made that scene just extra sweet.”

Okay, sweet. But isn’t there something about the form of a sandwich that reflects Ilya and Shane’s sequestered reality? “The characters are masculine-presenting athletes,” Sam Low writes, “but also closeted gay¹ men, and the tuna melt is kind of a representation of this: a high-protein (nutritionally fitting) meal that’s hidden in sandwich form. Anything can be hidden in a sandwich and still pass as a sandwich like the rest.”

Erik cites Telly Justice, chef and owner of HAGS in New York City, a trans woman, who talks in Dining Out about her layered style of plating as a manifestation of experience. “How sometimes,” Erik says, “there are foods covered and buried underneath other foods. And only when you remove the top layer do you see there’s something really wonderful underneath, which is a queer expression. Tuna covered by cheese, on top of bread—it all works together, but you do need to peel back certain layers to find what’s underneath. You may not see it at first, but once you do it’s this wonderful thing.”

Can we say that what queers the tuna melt in this scene is the subversion of our culture’s stubborn rules about gender and care? That between the soft, stanky, creamy, molten layers of the tuna melt, we find Ilya’s carefully concealed tenderness, how Robert Duncan, in his 1968 poem “The Torso,” describes pecs, with their nipples, as “sleeping fountains of feeling in a man, waiting above the beat of his heart…to be awakened.” The tuna melt he fixes for Shane at this emotional inflection point signals Ilya’s awakened feelings.

And as if the sandwich itself is too private, too intimate for the viewer’s gaze, we never actually see these sandwiches, which in the shot where they’re eating on the sofa, they’re obscured by coffee table tchotchkes—the way, in the show’s sex scenes, a carefully staged sheet or flexed thigh shield from view the organs that give Ilya and Shane so much ecstasy. It’s clear now, the essential connection between the blackish planes of action in this scene: that Ilya’s sofa, which has become his dining table, is as much a zone of pleasure and connection—of love—as his sheets. #

1. In Ilya’s case, bi.