Hallmark lgbtq christmas movies
Hallmark's First Lesbian Holiday Adoration Friends & Family Christmas Hits the Mark
Ali Liebert and Humberly Gonzalez in Friends & Family Christmas (Photo: Hallmark)
Over the last few years, Hallmark has slowly expanded the breadth of storytelling it chooses to invest in on its family of networks, which consists of Hallmark Channel and Hallmark Movies & Mysteries. Just this year, Hallmark’s slate of holiday movies — its most popular annual programming event — spotlighted characters not normally given center stage, from a lad with autism seeking to break a world document in A World Register Christmas to a visually impaired professor who adopts a guide dog in My Christmas Guide.
Hallmark has also made significant steps forward with queer-centric romances, a response to the 2019 controversy that arose it pulled a Zola ad showing two brides kissing. The company later apologized for pulling the ad and vowed to “better represent the LGBTQ community across our portfolio of brands.” The initial decision sparked backlash amongst viewers and advertisers, prompting the network to re-evaluate and reprioritize its programming mandate to be more inclusive and better indicate today’s
Lesbian Christmas movies: the last frontier. In a Christmas Movie landscape dominated by heterosexual workaholic girl-bosses returning to their hometowns in power suits and falling for heterosexual males who do artisan/manual labor, for many years nary a lesbian or bisexual girl, let alone a genderqueer person, dared to build an appearance. It’s usually been hard to detect any LGBTQ+ Christmas movies at all, but in recent years gay men have been emerging out of the corners into the Christmas spotlight in droves and also, occasionally, a wee lesbian, homosexual or trans woman or a non-binary person has earned a few minutes under the mistletoe. In 2020, Clea Duvall’s Happiest Seasonstarring Kristen Stewart broke records for Hulu, and subsequent years have even brought some queer stories from Lifetime (Under the Christmas Tree, 2021) and Hallmark (Friends & Family Christmas, 2023). Although we’ve rarely found ourselves in the mainstream Christmas production spotlight, we have shown up as side characters and in indie films here and there, and in this genre it seems we’ll take what we can get!
This list is in chronological command and includes every Christ A charming suburban couple welcomes a 6-year-old foster daughter on a joyous Christmas Eve. A successful New York lawyer and an ambitious Brooklyn photographer are set up on a blind meet by their parents and fall in love, just in time to mark Christmas together. One might think that these movies — “Christmas on Cherry Lane” and “Friends and Family Christmas” — are exactly the sort of heartwarming, family-friendly holiday romances that conservative culture warriors would cheer. But this year on the Hallmark Channel, there’s a plot twist: The main characters are gay. Christmas movies acquire dominated the family-friendly channel’s winter programming for nearly two decades, with millions of loyal viewers. Last year, Hallmark aired its first Christmas movie with gay central characters. This year, two new movies feature gay and female homosexual leading characters. Other movies have supporting LGBTQ characters as well. The right has attacked mammoth corporations favor Budweiser and Target for daring to show aid for LGBTQ Americans. Hallmark’s travel is not without risk: This year alone, Republ Have yourself a merry tiny Christmas, and make the Yuletide gay. That’s all any of us really want right? And despite a few queer holiday movies like Happiest Season, The Christmas Setup, and Dashing in December, the world of holiday love affair is still, well, overwhelmingly straight. Don’t get me wrong I love The Knight Before Christmas as much as anybody, but that still leaves some room for improvement. If a medieval knight traveling through time to descent in love with Vanessa Hudgens just in day for Christmas isn’t too far fetched, then I’m pretty sure gay love affair shouldn’t be either. The great news is, despite the slim pickings when it comes to movies, the world of gender non-conforming holiday romances in publication is (as usual) doing a bit better. We’ve got books about women falling in love at a holiday baking rivalry and single dads falling for their hot silver fox neighbors. It’s a queer Christmas extravaganza! This list is by no means perfect. I’d like to see a lot more trans, nonbinary, ace, and bi rep (to name a few), not to mention — always, always — more stories by authors of paint. But these 20 must-read queer holiday romances .In a year of anti-LGBTQ backlash, Hallmark’s Christmas movies are a welcome write of progress