Merry Queermas! 2020 Is the Year of the LGBTQ Rom-Com

By Chris Azzopardi


Happiest Season director Clea DuVall had no idea she was going to be a piece of what has turned out to be A Very Queer Christmas 2020. Her rom-com about a lesbian couple caught in a Christmastime family member deception, which the gay filmmaker also co-wrote, broke Hulu premiere records as soon as it debuted on November 25. It wasn't making its point alone. With it came an army of nonhetero-led mainstream holiday movies, more than any other year in the past of pop culture: Lifetime's The Christmas Setup, Hallmark Streams The Christmas House and Paramount Network’s Dashing in December. "I thought we were going to be the only one this year," DuVall tells MTV News. "I didn't know about these movies up until fairly recently, actually."


Right now, the LGBTQ+ community is finally seeing versions of themselves looking pretty and coupled in outdoor fake-snow holidayscapes, lit softly and warmly — the light of progress in action.


Even Happiest Season’s stars, Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis, who play the onscreen couple, didn't foresee a yuletide quite this gay. Davis was shocked to find out Hallmark was doing a queer-inclusive Christmas movie since "they are historically not progressive, to mention the least," she divulged in a joint interview with Stewart for PrideSource. Right now they have to be," Stewart sassed, "or else they get left behind!"


Happiest Season director Clea Duvall with stars Mackenzie Davis and Kristen Stewart.


As history has demonstrated, nothing sparks change like irritated gays. Pat Mills, the director of matchmaking movie The Christmas Setup, thinks the furious backlash from the LGBTQ+ community targeted at Hallmark for pulling four commercials featuring same-sex weddings in December 2019 likely pressured the network (and afterward other networks, like Lifetime) to diversify. “To be sincere, I feel like this should have happened a while ago,” Mills says.


Last year, Hallmark execs apologized, reversed their decision, and called inclusion a “top priority” — and then they put words into action. The Christmas House, which premiered on the channel on November 22, carries a gay wedded couple hoping to adopt who get to be as sickly happy because the straight people in these movies. And yes, they kiss.


Gay Mean Ladies star Jonathan Bennett, who plays 1/2 of the couple (actor Brad Harder portrays his hubby, tells MTV News that the LGBTQ+ community "had enough of supporting these massive networks and not feeling represented in their storylines. They've had to expand the table."


All that uproarious public pressure, DuVall adds, has meant that even more conservative networks are right now having to catch up to the "reality that crowds hope to be able to see all different kinds of stories" right after being "presented stories through this very specific cis, white, male, straight lens for such a long time."


The expansion of LGBTQ+ representation on networks and the big screen has already been a reality in mainstream non-Christmas content. In several ways, Happiest Season is an extension of 2018’s groundbreaking rom-com Love, Simon, which also told a fairly orthodox story about coming out and young love. Like Happiest Season, it was a big-studio release with a gay character in the lead role. Queer love also took center stage in the rom-com The Thing About Harry, released earlier this year on Freeform.


As for this year's queer Christmas-movie boom, Jake Helgren, who wrote and directed Dashing in December and has produced several opposite-sex Christmas romances for Lifetime and Hallmark, thinks the political and social climate of 2020 made for the best time to challenge the status quo. "I don't know if the environment would have felt as comfortable last year," he says. "This year, it seemed like we battened down the hatches and we came in full force."


DuVall's Happiest Season had been in development since the end of 2017, two years before the Hallmark controversy. Though the film was procured by Sony TriStar, and eventually sold Hulu because of the COVID-caused closure of theaters nationwide, DuVall says it was not a hard sell. As an alternative, "there were a number of studios that were interested in making the movie."


Meanwhile, Dashing in December began as just another straight-focused film yet, thanks to producer Stephanie Slack's opinion, evolved into a love story about two gay boys (played by Peter Porte and Juan Pablo Di Pace), who meet by happenstance in rural Colorado. Execs beyond the scenes encouraged Helgren to impart his own experiences as a gay man into the script. (MTV News and Paramount Network are both owned by ViacomCBS.)


Mills, although, noticed that, at Lifetime, the baked-in formula of holiday rom-coms is more like a Haiku. "You can change some words, although you can't actually change the foundation at all," he says, relaying what The Christmas Setup writer Michael J. Murray instructed him. Although he had to adhere to Lifetime's restrictions, he wanted to "satisfy queer people and people like me who are begging to be able to see themselves represented," so he snuck in some innuendo while in a scene depicting the two gay leads, portrayed by real-life wedded couple Ben Lewis and Blake Lee, awkwardly configuring a Christmas tree. Mills had lines like "I'll just grab the bottom" (of the tree) and it also slid right in" (as in, the tree, uh, penetrated the tight doorway) written into the movie on the day of shooting.


With Dashing in December, Helgren was excited to give the gay community what the straight community has long been able to like as soon as watching these sort of ranch winterscape flicks: some skin, gratuitous dip pans, and also a guy in festive reindeer-printed  boxer-briefs. "I mentioned, hey, this is a scene that I dreamed of having in this film. Can I go do this?" Sure enough, it was a Christmas wish come true.


Mills departed from the gritty comedy fashion he cemented with his 2014 satirical movie Guidance to prepare The Christmas Setup, and in doing so learned that LGBTQ+ people, whose onscreen narratives have often dealt with hard topics like AIDS and coming out, really just wanted what straight folks already had: basic-cable meet-cutes and holiday happily-ever-afters. "People don't watch these movies to be able to see real life reflected back on them," he says. "I think there's something powerful about queer people in something that isn't hard at all."


But for some filmmakers, queering long-established tropes is simply insufficient. "It's imperative to show something that hasn't been seen — that's the only way to jump out says Otoja Abit, writer-director of A New York Christmas Wedding, a less-glossy gay Christmas love story with a Afro-Latina actress Nia Fairweather in the lead role, for Netflix. He calls it a "travesty" that this year, "with all of the different variations of stories told, at major levels, mind you, not one has captured a Sapphic love story with a wedding in a church throughout Christmas."


Still, this surprise wave of queered Christmas movies has surely left crowds feeling merry and bright. DuVall's been showered with gratitude from those in the LGBTQ+ community who've longed for representation in the mainstream Christmas-movie canon. Several have instructed her that, because of Happiest Season, they're far less afraid of coming out. "It really makes me feel very emotional," DuVall says. The same is true for Bennett, who was recently in tears immediately after seeing some Facebook posts expressing how good it feels to be able to see loving husbands embraced by family member on Lifetime. "It's bigger than people think," he says.


The Christmas Residence director Michael Grossman tells MTV News that this is a "transformative time in our history." He says, "I have directed over 200 hours of content in my career, and this is the initial time where my life experience was directly represented in the content."


Initially, Helgren thought Dashing in December was going to be a queer Christmas flick first, yet any time once he heard there were others in the works, he knew this could be a pretty movement and such a cute time for the LGBTQ+ community."


As for Duvall, she lights up knowing she's in good, queer firm with filmmakers who are revolutionizing the stale conventions of a classic form of 21st-century Christmastime Americana. And not only does she count on watching all of their films, although, she says, like any leaders who come with each other for a usual cause (albeit, pandemic-style right now, "we all need to have a Christmas movie Zoom."