three christmas celebrations
by Douglas Messerli
It’s the day before Christmas, and for weeks
before this special day of anticipation family-friendly networks—Hallmark,
Hulu, Lifetime, Disney, Paramount and other such television producers I usually
try to evade—have been airing their numerous annual Christmas movies.
I
have nothing against family or family values, although in my experience as a
gay man—as I’m sure it was for thousands like me—things were always a bit
“dodgy” at holiday time. I seldom returned home for Christmas since my husband
Howard did not like to travel and my parents, in those long-ago days, were
themselves uneasy about having me and Howard to Christmas dinner. Even
entertaining me alone at holidays seemed to be something to endure instead of
simply enjoying it as a family event. My brother and sister showed up at their
door with parcels of children; I did not.
So “going home for Christmas,” a
recurrent theme in the Christmas movie genre, was not particularly something
with which I identified, let alone with the saccharine love stories, past and
present, that dotted the landscape of such movies. Feeling “different”
throughout most of my high school years, I had no close friends—at least none
who had settled down in my Iowa hometown. Certainly, I had no childhood
romances to re-ignite or even with which to stoke my curiosity as these
Christmas film features inevitably had. And I had little nostalgia—a crucial
ingredient in the Holiday film genre—for the town in which I grew up. I had had
no heterosexual experiences whatsoever, so the thrill of the inevitable
Christmas kiss meant little to my lips. Finally, after living for years in
California, snow no longer held the wonders it necessarily must for any
card-carrying fan of holiday-themed flicks. A Christmas away from Howard was
just a lonely and fairly forlorn affair.
Those years are long past, however, and Howard and I developed our own
special Christmas traditions, often celebrating Hannukah before or after
trimming our Christmas tree, and always planning for—Howard’s favorite holiday
activity he reminded just yesterday—on cooking an enormous Christmas dinner for
just the two of us.
This year, with the shadows of Trump, COVID, and Howard’s own health
problems, we’ve decided against the tree, gifts (we certainly don’t need more
possessions) and even a “big” dinner.
But something has changed, as TV newspaper
commentators have noted, in the landscape of these Norman Rockwell-like
portraits of holiday life in the US. As Erik Piepenburg put it in The New
York Times, if “leading men just don’t kiss each other in the conservative
fraternity of holiday TV movies...they do now. ...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). In this chaste genre, that’s milestone.”
These three works are carefully-wrought machines built to provoke
sentiment and little else. Despite the often excellent direction and acting of
these films the genre allows for only one thematic to be expressed:
celebration. Yet, for a few moments at least, I actually had the opportunity to
share in that celebration. Like The New York Times critic described it,
when the leading men and women kissed, I gasped. And I shed a few tears just
out of joy for being seated at the table without having to explain why I was
there.
Los Angeles, December 24, 2020
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and
World Cinema Review (December 2020).
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