all gays want for Christmas is a queer story that isn’t about the pain of coming out
We’ve all heard the phrase “representation matters.” The promise of this statement seems obvious: art imitates life and life, in its turn, imitates art. The cultural panic around pornography and video games highlights this very fact – in some sense, we all know that we are affected by what we see, even in fictional worlds. Accordingly, our advertisements, literature, and television shows have become increasingly diverse in their representations of race, gender, sexuality, and ability.
But it’s important that we don’t stop at mere representation.
Much buzz in the queer community surrounded the release of the lesbian holiday rom com Happiest Season, starring Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis. For me, the excitement dissipated into a familiar disappointment when I realized that Happiest Season followed in the footsteps of mainstream LGBTQ+ predecessors like Love, Simon and But I’m a Cheerleader in the ultimate trope of the genre: another coming out story.
Happiest Season, like so many other queer fictional narratives, emphasizes that queer people are “just like everybody else” by highlighting their desire to pursue the institution of marriage and to participate in the traditional family structure. Early on, we are given to understand that one of the protagonists, Abby, lost her parents years ago and with them, her joy in participating in Christmas. Abby’s girlfriend Harper, convinces Abby one night prior to Christmas to come home with her to be part of Harper’s family Christmas. Abby agrees.
Soon after, we discover that Abby is planning to propose to Harper on this very trip. She delivers this exposition to her gay best friend, John, who responds, “You and Abby have the perfect relationship. Why do you want to ruin that by engaging in one of the most archaic institutions in the history of the human race?” He goes on to tell Abby that “what you’re actually doing is tricking the woman you claim to love by trapping her in a box of heteronormativity and trying to make her your property. She is not a rice cooker or a cake plate; she’s a human being.” Abby playfully dismisses John’s critique as they walk to the jewelry shop where she plans to pick up the engagement ring she has procured. She goes on to tell John that while she understands that it is “very old fashioned,” she is going to ask Harper’s dad for permission to marry Harper and propose on Christmas morning. John responds sarcastically, “I’m sorry, ask her dad for his blessing? Way to stick it to the patriarchy. Really well done.”
This exchange quickly and subtly establishes one of the problematic arguments of the film – and one that we see often in mainstream queer media – that gay couples are exactly the same as straight couples, just with matching genders. In fact, John’s critique is one that has been voiced often in queer scholarship. In The Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam explains that “an ideology of family pushes gays and lesbians toward marriage politics and erases other modes of kinship in the process.” What Halberstam is describing is a phenomenon I’ve come to refer to as the straight gaze. Like the male gaze, the straight gaze is a way of viewing a marginalized community through the lens in which it serves, or is consumed, by its dominant counterpart. This is the trap into which so many queer narratives fall – we find ourselves so busy proving how normal and conventional the queer relationships featured are that we fail to challenge the structure that creates the heterosexism we are battling in the first place.
Coming out narratives make sense to a straight audience, because they directly involve the way straight people perceive queer people.
When Harper reveals to Abby that she has not come out to her family, she forces Abby temporarily back into the closet against her will, a dynamic that would raise many red flags for a queer audience. Over the course of the film, we discover that Harper has not only lied to Abby about being out to her family, but forces her to pretend to be straight, has outed her own high school girlfriend, and abandons Abby with her so that she can spend the evening drinking with her ex-boyfriend.
Alas, the denouement of the film reveals all too clearly the audience for which the film is intended. Happiest Season reflects the values not of the queer experience, but of the traditional holiday film/romantic comedy – the couple that ends up together, unwrapping presents under the family Christmas tree. This is the peril of mainstreaming queer fiction: ultimately, it is the acceptance of the family, particularly the approval of the father, that gives way to a happy ending for Abby and Harper, all other issues and red flags in the relationship itself aside.
My hope is that in the future we can move beyond simplistic notions of queer representation that revolve around the straight gaze and allow queer narratives the nuance and complexity afforded to their heterosexual counterparts. A holiday film about a gay couple in which the central conflict does not revolve around coming out would be a huge step forward in mainstream LGBTQ+ representation. If life imitates art, let us consider the possibility of imagining and creating the reality we want to see.
December 2020
Elizabeth Bradshaw 