Nowadays, there’s a ton of LGBTQ+ Christmas movies. But that certainly wasn’t always the case.
The genre started in the 1970s and then laid dormant until 1995 for Home for the Holidays, a film that’s technically a Thanksgiving movie. There was another drought until 2000, when a slow trickle started with one or two queer Christmas movies coming out every few years, like Holiday Heart (2000) The Family Stone (2005), Make the Yuletide Gay (2009), Scrooge & Marley (2012) and many more!
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But in the mid 2010s, the success of Todd Haynes’ Carol (2015) and Sean Baker’s Tangerine (2015) made it clear that the genre was not only viable but profitable. Now, every streaming platform releases at least a few queer holiday films every year.
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A quick history of LGBTQ+ Christmas films
Some of my Best Friends Are… (1971)
Perhaps the first queer Christmas film, 1971’s Some of My Best Friends Are…, is a drama that takes place in a Greenwich Village gay bar. The bar’s regulars, men and women, share stories about their relationships and lives. But despite the festive setting, the film, like many queer movies from this time, focuses less on queer joy and more on the hardships of being in the community.
The film, directed and co-written by Mervyn Nelson, stars Golden Girl Rue McClanahan, actress and Fried Green Tomatoes author Fannie Flagg, WKRP in Cincinnati star Gary Sandy, and transgender actress and model Candy Darling.
Vincent Canby from The New York Times didn’t like the film, comparing it unfavorably to the previous year’s The Boys in the Band. He called out the “sentimental screenplay that sounds as if it had just been let out after 30 years in a closet,” and called the characters “dopey” and full of “self-hatred and self-exploitation.”
While that mainstream critic didn’t like it, the film got a positive review in a 1972 issue of Drag: A Magazine About the Transvestite. Tony Volponi admitted that viewers “may find some of the dialogue a bit too heavy, and the situations a bit too tacky, isn’t life just like that sometimes?” He also had high praise for Darling’s performance, signaling out her defiance after another one of the bar regulars strips and beats her.
“De-wigged, defrocked and severely battered, Miss Darling emerges from the men’s room to deliver a simple and yet a most touching line…. Sitting next to a middle-aged shy and timid gay, responding to his asking her name, Candy murmurs and with quiet dignity, her head bloodied but unbowed, ‘My name is Harry.’ CANDY you are a DARLING!” Valponi wrote.
Female Trouble (1974)
The next LGBTQ+ Christmas movie has more crime and violence in it, but is also much funnier. It’s by everyone’s favorite filthmonger, John Waters, and his 1974 film Female Trouble is one of the auteur’s best.
Drag queen supreme Divine stars as Dawn Davenport, a high school delinquent who turns to crime when her parents don’t get her the one thing she wants for Christmas: black cha-cha heels. She runs out into the street where she has sex in a dump with Earl Peterson (also played by Divine), who knocks her up and then leaves her.
Dawn births Taffy, her hated daughter, while working as a stripper, burglar and sex worker. She eventually meets up with two deranged beauty salon owners operating under the thesis that “crime and beauty are the same.” They back Dawn as a model criminal, where she’s photographed beating her daughter with a chair and committing other crimes. Her artistic spree ultimately leads to Dawn enticing a nightclub crowd to “die for art,” before she wildly fires a gun at them.
Despite being relatively short, the film is absolutely packed. One favorite subplot centers on Aunt Ida’s fears that her son is straight. Ida, played by Waters regular Edith Massey, harangues him, “I’m worried that you’ll work in an office, have children, celebrate wedding anniversaries! The world of heterosexuals is a sick and boring life!”
Home For The Holidays (1995)
The number of LGBTQ+ Christmas movies seems to plummet after 1974 — apparently Female Trouble had said everything that needed to be said at the time.
The next one to get much notice is 1995’s Home for the Holidays, directed by out queer Hollywood legend Jodie Foster. Technically, it’s a Thanksgiving movie. That’s how desperate things got for Christmas queerness. But hey, it’s about eating massive amounts of food with family in winter, so close enough. Thanksgiving has always been Christmas’ little brother anyway.
In the film, Holly Hunter plays Claudia Larson who’s going home to see her family for Thanksgiving. As is common for comedies of the 1990s, the family is “dysfunctional” — once a useful psychological term to describe a family in turmoil, but quickly coopted by the culture at large to mean “prone to wacky hijinx.”
Claudia isn’t gay herself, but her little brother Tommy, played by Robert Downey Jr., is. Tommy’s brought a new man with him to dinner — and Claudia assumes it means he’s broken up with his long-term partner. But in a hi-larious misunderstanding, it turns out the new guy is just Tommy’s business partner!
The film was well-received by critics at the time, with Foster’s direction and Hunter’s performance particularly singled out for praise. It’s stayed in the cultural consciousness as a cult classic, and many families, queer and otherwise, check in with the Larsons every year.
While up until the 2000s, it was slim pickings for LGBTQ Christmas movies, that’s no longer the case. With most viewers streaming movies at home these days, there are plenty of heartwarming Christmas films from Netflix, Lifetime, Hallmark, Paramount and other studios and outlets.
This author, for instance, can’t wait to settle in and snuggle down with the brand new queer killer Santa flick Carnage for Christmas (2024).
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