"Hung" Preview: Third Season Offers Clients (and the Audience) Two Very Different Lovers

Stephen Amell (Jason), Thomas Jane (Ray), Jane Adams (Tanya)

Warning: This article contains minor spoilers about the upcoming season of Hung.

There's a new male prostitute in town, and he's young, hot, and maybe even heteroflexible – all things that are quite threatening to Ray Decker, the football-coach-turned-gigalo at the center of Hung, the provocative HBO series about a man whose most valuable asset is in his pants.

The show's star, Thomas Jane, raised eyebrows last month with some intemperate remarks that seemed to indicate that the actor had issues with same-sex sexuality as well.

"I told HBO, the year I end up with a penis in my mouth is the last year of the show," he said. "If they want to keep me around, there's certain guidelines they have to follow. Not all of us can be bloodsucking vampires. That's not all they're sucking, you know!"

Jane later clarified that his comments were just "good humor, good fun" and that he's a "fan of the gay community."

"I was surprised by that whole controversy he got into," says Colette Burson, the co-creator of the show, along with her husband, Dmitry Lipkin. "I was thinking, 'What are you doing?' He plays gay hustlers, he did the longest gay kiss [supposedly in movie history, in The Velocity of Gary]. He has a transgender woman in his family, he walks around nude [on the set]. He jokes that the cast is sick of seeing him nude, because we've seen him naked so many times – we see his penis in our sleep."

Speaking of penises, is the show's upcoming third season the one when the audience might finally see what the big deal about Ray is?

"What is the perfect penis?" Burson asks. "It's almost an impossible question to answer. What do you show? How do you show it? I will say that we take on the issue of Ray's penis. In episode four, you'll see what we're talking about."

Does that mean they finally show the goods? "We do take it on in some way," Lipkin promises.

No matter what happens in the fourth episode, and no matter what Jane's attitudes about same-sex sexuality actually are, Hung has one of the "queerest" sensibilities on television, especially for a show with no major gay characters. The writing staff is about half gay and lesbian. And Burson and Dmitry are tight-lipped, but they hint that this season the show will also take on the question of male prostitutes having male clients.

The new male prostitute in town, a discovery of Tanya's nemesis Lenore (naturally), is Jason, played by Stephen Amell, an alum of both Dante's Cove and Queer as Folk.

"It's nice to surround your main characters with people that will challenge them, draw them out," Lipkin says "There's something about Jason that drives Ray crazy. He's younger, but unlike Ray, he's willing to do anything."

Amell, Analeigh Tipton

"Because Jason is there, we learn more about Ray," Burson adds. "Sexuality varies from generation to generation. Ray has hang-ups, Ray has reservations and fears, but Jason doesn't have any of those. So it's interesting for Ray to be confronted with a younger rival who is more sexually liberated than he is. It really brings out his sense of competition."

Next Page! Jason or Ray? Two very different f**ks.