Not too long ago, LGBTQ+ people who wanted to see themselves represented in holiday movies could either (a) pretend or (b) settle for a second-rate film with a queer character who had very few lines, ambition, or development.
Early in the contemporary queer holiday canon, 2005’s The Family Stone, which stars gay icon Sarah Jessica Parker as a (shocker) snobby New Yorker spending the holidays at her boyfriend’s family home, became a queer hit for its B-plot gay couple with ambitions to adopt a baby. And while the film is still worth an annual watch, so much more has happened in seasonal cinema since SJP’s iconic spilled-strata scene with matriarch Diane Keaton. That is, gay and lesbian Christmas movies actually center queer people now — same-sex holiday revelers crush and fall in love, break up, regain romance, and just live the same celebratory December existence every heterosexual (or closeted) character has gotten for, well, ever.
Now if we could just get a smart, well-written, celebrity-cast lesbian Hanukkah rom-com.
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