ALL DECKED OUT
TV'S gay Christmas movies are as benign, charming and clichéd as we always hoped they would be, Hank Stuever writes.
In olden times, the people behind the so-called gay agenda wanted nothing more than what everyone else already had: marriage, kids, suburban bliss, job security and equal access to all the benignly merry things in life.
Some in the LGBTQ sphere fretted that this wish list, once granted, strips away some of the qualities that set us uniquely apart. What happens to the innovation, the rebelliousness, the tawdry fun that can only come from living on society's fringe? Does getting all the basic things make us too … basic?
Yet the gay rights movement continues to seek the last few crowning glories of the commonplace. And when it comes to that, in TV form, nothing is more smotheringly conventional than the made-for-tv Christmas movie.
Only by the good graces of irony has the Christmas movie become its own vaunted style of heterosexual camp. It's a safe space where actors of moderate fame are called upon, like old studio players, to don sweaters, traipse in fake snowflakes, cosy up and re-emphasize the season's sweetest recurring themes, especially the one in which self-absorbed, lightly cynical protagonists learn to let go and let love do its sparkly thing. Christmas TV movies — perfected by Hallmark, Lifetime and a few others (many available to Canadian viewers on Hallmark Canada, W Network and elsewhere) — pressed all the right buttons at once, except the one it was always too intimidated to press: They didn't believe in gay love.
This has been remedied with Lifetime's charmingly by-thebook The Christmas Setup (a Canadian date has not yet announced), which features two gay characters front and centre, played by two actors (Ben Lewis of Arrow and Blake Lee of Mixology) who are real-life spouses.
Rather than reinvent (or, God forbid, subvert) the form, The Christmas Setup assiduously proves that the Christmas movie genre was pretty much gay all along — for who else would so emphatically link ephemeral happiness to obsessive decor and splendid social gatherings?
All boxes here are duly checked once, if not twice: Lewis plays Hugo, an uptight Manhattan lawyer vying for a partnership at his firm. He invites his BFF Madelyn (Ellen Wong) to spend the holidays with his family in Milwaukee. But brace yourself, Hugo warns — his mother, Kate, is one of those over-the-top Christmas people, in charge of the neighbourhood's annual holiday party at the quaint old train station that is scheduled to be demolished.
But why go into all this when all I really need to say is that
Kate is played by Fran Drescher? There you have it: Your gay Christmas movie.
Kate's Christmas tree (one of many) is delivered to the house by none other than adorable Patrick (Lee), the older, openly gay popular boy whom a then-closeted Hugo pined for (see what I did there?) back in high school. The two men flirt and blush as they try to get something so large into a space so small, and yes, the double-entendres here are negligible but certainly intentional.
Crises and conundrums emerge (will Hugo give up his career and move home to be with Patrick the Perfect? Will the historic train station be saved? Was the man who so lovingly tended to the station and started the holiday traditions all those years ago himself gay?) but, in adherence to the genre, they are fairly low-stakes concerns. That's what is most interesting about putting gay characters in Christmas movies: In this world, nothing ever reaches a boiling point. Screaming is not allowed. Characters have to be something other than wildly dramatic. Doors have to do something besides slam.
The same goes, alas, for the passion: Hugo and Patrick get two big kisses in two hours, neither more nor less action than anyone usually gets in one of these things.
Also, Hugo's straight brother, Aiden (Chad Connell), strides in with distracting handsomeness and starts making goo-goo eyes at Madelyn, so no one is left out (except for Kate, who will always have her piles and piles of Christmas decorations). It was only this aspect of The Christmas Setup that gave me pause, as if the network, producers and writers are tacitly acknowledging that heterosexual viewers might not stick around unless they, too, are thrown a chastely romantic bone.
That is precisely all gay TV viewers have ever wanted, too — not to blow in and ruin things with our forbidden desires, but to be noticed and included, to the extent that Christmas can ever make anyone completely happy.
Noticed and included is precisely the approach Hallmark Channel took with The Christmas House, which W aired
Dec. 5 and has, for the first time in Hallmark's holiday movie history, a gay couple in the mix: They are Brandon (Jonathan Bennett) and Jake (Brad Harder), and although they are nowhere near central to the plot, the point is they're here, they're full of cheer, get used to it.