On Amazon, the ensemble dramedy “Some of My Best Friends Are …” (1971) was set on Christmas Eve at a bustling Greenwich Village gay bar, featuring moving performances from Rue McClanahan and Candy Darling.
2020 gay movies serial#
There was “Naked City: A Killer Christmas” (1998), a Peter Bogdanovich film that used the fear of an Andrew Cunanan-style gay serial killer in service of a lurid thriller. Whatever the opposite of “The Christmas House” is, I watched it. Or as BenDeLaCreme, the “RuPaul’s Drag Race” star, put it: “the beautiful, bizarre things that queer people exposed themselves to when they had to search harder.” BenDeLaCreme is doing her part with a saucy new holiday special on Hulu with the “Drag Race” Season 5 winner Jinkx Monsoon. To counter the new gay sweetness, I binged renegade holiday movies about queer people who are raunchy, vulgar, camp, deranged.
2020 gay movies movie#
If gay people want straight people to believe our love deserves a holiday movie, don’t be surprised when straight people expect that movie to look like theirs. But that’s what happens with assimilation. That’s not the Lifetime or Hallmark brand, so that’s no shock. What you won’t see in these new films are activists, leathermen, butches or foul-mouthed drag queens. By the chaste standards of holiday rom-coms, “Dashing in December” is “Cruising.”Īnd yet - it’s not. “Dashing in December” is a little more sexually adventurous, and by adventurous I mean a scene in which Wyatt, in just underwear, encounters a wet Heath in a towel. Couples of all orientations rarely get heavier than a kiss in mainstream holiday fare. (She was played by Lori Shannon, the drag stage name of Don McLean.) That same year, “All in the Family” ran groundbreaking Christmastime episodes about the murder of Edith Bunker’s friend Beverly LaSalle, who refers to herself as a transvestite.
Paul Lynde starred in “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” a 1977 ABC special. Liberace’s television show featured a Christmas episode in 1954. Performers surreptitiously conveyed stereotypical gayness - through winks, camp, sass, frippery - that was evident to in-the-know audiences but sailed over others’ heads. holiday entertainment has roots in the days when the word “queer” landed with a punch to the face. “It’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever been a part of and the one I’m most proud of.” “We knew what we created was something beautiful,” said Humphreys, who has worked on several Christmas films.
Jake Helgren told me he wrote and directed “Dashing in December” as an Americana romance and a “love letter to the ending” he wanted in “Brokeback Mountain.” Lawrence Humphreys, the film’s production designer, said the set was a teary mess as he and other crew members, straight and gay, watched the leading men kiss. “Not everybody has a great relationship with their family or has pristine memories of yesteryear.” In holiday movies, he added, queer people “get to live in the Christmas they always wanted or didn’t get to have.” “Movie Christmas is a lot different than real Christmas,” Varrati said. What holiday films provide - nostalgia, predictable formulas and an escape from real-world adversities like Covid-19, bankruptcy, bigotry - can be especially comforting to queer people, said Michael Varrati, the screenwriter of several holiday films, including the new “Christmas With a Crown.” “I feel like these writers with these stories were like, now’s the time.” “We are four years into a presidency that has attacked the L.G.B.T.Q. She plays an Afro-Latina woman of fluid sexuality in the new indie “A New York Christmas Wedding,” now on Netflix. In this chaste genre, that’s a milestone. As I recently reported, this year there are six new holiday-themed films with gay and lesbian leading characters, including “Happiest Season” (Hulu), “The Christmas House” (Hallmark Channel) and “The Christmas Setup” (Lifetime).
2020 gay movies tv#
Leading men just don’t kiss each other in the conservative fraternity of holiday TV movies. But there was something so surprisingly renegade about the movie’s smooch.
Watching it made me feel like Santa put me at the top of his nice list. I involuntarily inhaled as Wyatt, a stuffy venture capitalist, locked lips with Heath, the sweetheart ranch hand. It happened during “Dashing in December,” a new holiday film on the Paramount Network about two men who fall in love on a ranch. I gasped so loudly, it sounded like Judy Garland had shown up at my Christmas party.