Deck the halls with boughs of holly because bitch, ’tis the season to be hella jolly—and by jolly of course we do mean gay.
Whatever your religious affiliation (or lack thereof), many queer and trans folks rightfully have a complicated relationship with the winter holiday season. The idea of spending extended time in close quarters with extended family may not be all of our cups of tea, especially when paired with the incessant heterosexual Christmas movie machine that’s churning out entries faster than Santa’s sleigh and the overall capitalist sentiments of this season.
And while Big Christmas has caught up to the queers and brought us a selection of our own mediocre holiday fare (seriously, Single All the Way and Happiest Season were hardly going to win any Oscars), it would surprise no one to realize that the gays have been finding our own touchpoints in Christmas culture for a long time.
Whether it’s under-the-radar new fare that has to been seen to be believed, or reading old classics through a queer lens, Xtra staff came together to curate some of our favourite queer (or at the very least, sort of queer) holiday picks for you to dive into this season.
A New York Christmas Wedding (2020)
You all thought I’d pick the Clea DuVall-Kristen Stewart joint Happiest Season as the best lesbian Christmas rom-com of 2020, didn’t you? No, it’s another film that has captured—no, I’d even say haunted—my heart since I first laid eyes on it. I can truly say I’ve never seen a movie like it.
The premise of writer-director Otoja Abit’s Netflix film sounds like a pleasantly benign queer twist on Christmas films we’ve come to expect: Jennifer (Nia Fairweather) is planning her Christmas Eve wedding to a male fiancé (a role Abit has cast himself in), when an angel shows her a different timeline where she ends up marrying her female best friend Gabby (Adriana DeMeo). Jennifer gets to spend two days living in this new life and planning her wedding to Gabby, where she finds a new appreciation for an old friend, works through some of her regrets and comes to terms with her sexuality. Sounds mostly normal, right?
But it is not normal. At all. A New York Christmas Wedding is simultaneously one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, and also a new holiday classic in my household. Without spoiling its greatest twists and turns, I’ll just say the film has everything: a weird thigh-centric sex scene, a gay angel, Catholic guilt and some of the most batshit line readings I’ve ever experienced. It has all of the terrible tropes of the worst queer movies, and yet still manages to surprise with how far it takes them. The acting is mostly bad, the direction is baffling, the politics of it are atrocious and the plot makes absolutely no sense. But I love it.
A New York Christmas Wedding is best enjoyed with a bunch of your queer friends ready to embrace everything that makes it terrible. And you’ll never hear the name “Gabison” the same again.
—Mel Woods, senior editor, culture
My So-Called Life, “So Called Angels” (Season 1, Episode 15; 1994)
It will shock no one who knows me that I picked an episode of a ’90s teen show, arguably not a movie, but it definitely has its gay and holiday themes. Like many festive season favourites, this episode is both amazing and terrible, but notably impactful. Amazing: representation. Having a Black gay teenager on TV might not be a revelation in 2022 (I’m looking at you, Sex Education), but in 1994 you most certainly weren’t seeing this often on the small screen. In fact, Wilson Cruz, who plays Rickie and is Afro-Latino, was the first openly gay actor to play an openly gay teen on prime-time television. In this episode, Rickie—a friend of Claire Danes’s Angela—finds himself homeless at Christmastime. Queer kids being abused and thrown or pushed out of their homes was unfortunately a norm of the time, and the show didn’t shy away from these realities.
If you came out as a queer woman in the ’90s, some of your life probably revolved around girls with guitars and this episode also taps into that root, with Juliana Hatfield (yes, the one on the Reality Bites soundtrack) appearing as a homeless girl we find out is actually a ghost (see: it’s also kind of terrible). Hatfield plays her own music in the episode. (Pretty sure it’s safe to include spoilers on shows that have been out for nearly 30 years …)
And this is all without noting Rayanne Graff’s (A.J. Langer) chaotic bisexual energy—which, I would be amiss to leave out, even if her character is never explicitly said to be bi.
—Tara-Michelle Ziniuk, senior editor, power
Anna and the Apocalypse (2017)
What do you get when you cross Shaun of the Dead with High School Musical and set it during Christmas? The answer is the 2017 British musical horror-comedy Anna and the Apocalypse. After a zombie virus breaks out in a small Scottish town shortly before Christmas, high school student Anna and her group of friends become trapped at the local bowling alley and must battle their way to the school, where the rest of the community have been hiding.
One of the members of Anna’s survival posse is Steph, played by Sarah Swire, an ambitious lesbian transfer student. Though she’s a supporting character and the audience only hears mentions of her off-screen girlfriend, Steph is proactive, kicks ass, rescues the group from zombie attacks many times and (miraculously!) does not die at the end.
Now. Is this a good movie? That’s debatable. It probably didn’t need to be a musical, as the songs aren’t particularly memorable, and it’s extremely corny and melodramatic, especially toward the end—but it’s also a damn zombie apocalypse movie set during Christmas, jam-packed with some hilarious kills and pumped full of camp. (The tyrannical school principal getting knocked into a pile of zombies and crowd-surfing on them did get a good laugh out of me.) Who doesn’t want to see zombies getting beaten up with a giant plastic candy cane?
If you’re a bit of a Grinch like me and the holidays aren’t exactly your favourite time of year, Anna and the Apocalypse is a good option for a moderately festive watch with a cool queer character.
—Jordan Currie, community coordinator
How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966)
Okay, hear me out: nothing screams queer villainy more than a surly, side-eyeing queen who lives sequestered at the top of a mountain with his tiny dog. And don’t even get me started on the pointy little Grinch fingers.
How the Grinch Stole Christmas! is not a canonically queer film by any means. Other Dr. Seuss works have been rightfully criticized for racist and anti-semitic imagery, and the author was no vocal supporter of queer rights.
But if you squint, a queer reading is possible. The central tension in How the Grinch Stole Christmas! is one that many LGBTQ2S+ viewers can surely relate to: the profound discomfort and grumpiness that comes from feeling alienated during the holidays. Given the choice, many a queer would likely prefer to live in blissful silence on Christmas Day than have to be reminded of their own exclusion. The Grinch certainly would prefer that silence—and he decides the best way to get it is to make sure the villagers in neighbouring Whoville can’t celebrate Christmas at all. So, after some dedicated plotting and scheming—two notably gay activities—and some suspiciously proficient sewing (the man works more efficiently than a Ru girl on a sewing challenge week) the Grinch heads on down to Whoville to steal Christmas. With the help of his tiny twink accomplice (the aforementioned dog), he slinks and slides through the night, pilfering every festive item in sight.
If the movie’s central tension is relatably queer, so is its resolution. After the Whos manage to find holiday joy in each others’ company rather than in material objects, the Grinch is forced to go through his own internal accountability process. Moved by the joy of music and the power of community, the Grinch finally opens his heart.
—Ziya Jones, senior editor, health
C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005)
The late director Jean-Marc Vallée’s breakout film was a crowd-pleasing, award-winning sensation for many reasons. There’s the profusion of fantastic needle drops (10 percent of the film’s budget allegedly went to songs from the likes of Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, The Cure, Patsy Cline and Charles Aznavour), the delicious depictions of 1960s and ’70s working-class Québécois style (That hair! That car! That wood panelling! That Ziggy Stardust makeup!) and the heartwarming coming out/coming-of-age story based on the real-life experiences of co-writer François Boulay.
But with protagonist Zac (played in his most grown-up form by Marc-André Grondin) being born on Christmas Day 1959, and many of the film’s pivotal moments taking place on his birthday, C.R.A.Z.Y. (so named for the initials of Zac and his four brothers) is also quite decidedly a holiday film. “As far as I can remember, I’ve always hated Christmas,” is one of its first lines, delivered in voiceover by adult Zac as he, as a newborn baby, is dropped on the floor.
It’s elementary-school-age Zac’s underwhelmed reaction to the too-butch gift of an National Hockey League tabletop game that first makes his father suspicious about his fourth son’s queerness. It’s at a 1975 Christmas party when Zac becomes aware of his first same-sex crush (on somebody he really only sees at Christmas). And it’s at a 1980 Christmas dinner when serious rifts in the family (Zac’s not the only troublemaking son) undergo a tectonic shift.
All of which serve as a reminder that the holidays bring out heightened emotions, whether we want them to or not. And a family brawl amidst tinsel and bottles of Spumante Bambino can be both a horror and a delight to watch.
—Paul Gallant, contributing editor
Bonus New Year’s Eve viewing: The Poseidon Adventure (1972)
What better way to usher in the New Year than with a camp-as-tits disaster movie? Mayhem and overwrought acting strike the cruise ship SS Poseidon after a tsunami capsizes it just seconds after midnight on New Year’s Eve. Under the leadership of a rabid reverend (Gene Hackman), a cohort of survivors tries to find their way to safety. Only a handful survive. What fun!
For all its camp appeal, the movie still stands the test of time exactly 50 years later. It looks great. Directed by celebrated filmmaker Ronal Neame (Great Expectations, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, I Could Go On Singing), the film features an all-star cast that includes Shelley Winters, Ernest Borgnine, Hackman, Red Buttons and Jack Albertson (each an Oscar winner; Winters and Hackman have two each). Despite heralding a series of schlocky 1970s disaster films like Towering Inferno and Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure would go on to receive eight Oscar nominations (winning two); the only films with more that year are Cabaret and The Godfather (!?).
Here’s a terrific party trick for a not-terrific New Year’s Eve party or for those of you partying on the couch: queue up the film to start 25 minutes before midnight (at exactly 11:35:16 P.M.). That way you count down to midnight with the film! Everyone will be there in their little paper hats: the former sex worker (Stella Stevens) who married the cop (Borgnine) who kept arresting her (!?), the snot-nosed brat (Eric Shea and his immortal line “Shove it! Shove it! Shove it!”), the dispeptic bachelor (Buttons) and the talentless chanteuse Nonnie (Carol Lynley), all blithely toasting each other. Then midnight strikes and you get a few moments of everyone celebrating while Nonnie sings “Auld Lang Syne” and wiggles her arms in the air. Then, slowly at first, with increasing severity, everyone starts to slip, fall and plummet; all hell breaks loose. It’s a terrific scene. So satisfying. And an apt depiction of the year ahead.
Happy holidays, folks.
—Gordon Bowness, executive editor
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