The Gayest Christmas Ever: Inside 2020’s Big, Queer Holiday Explosion

Christmas 2020 is the gayest Christmas ever. This holiday season has gifted audiences with four—yes, four—gay Christmas romcoms: Hallmark’s The Christmas House, Hulu’s Happiest Season, Lifetime’s The Christmas Set-Up (December 12), and Paramount’s Dashing in December (December 13). There have been more mainstream gay holiday romcoms released in 2020 than in every other year in recorded pop culture history combined.

So… what took so long? Gays didn’t just starting loving Christmas this year. And why has the community loved a holiday that kept giving us coal? And why is 2020 the year that holiday entertainment finally caught up with reality? To unwrap the answers, Decider spoke with the queer actors, creators, personalities, and performers that made this a very merry Christmas for a community that’s been waiting a while.

Christmas Time Is Queer

“I think when they said make the Yuletide gay, they meant it,” said Jonathan Bennett, one half of the gay couple at the heart of Hallmark’s The Christmas House. By featuring a married gay couple front and center (Brad Harder plays Bennett’s onscreen spouse), the film is a major step forward for the network.

But what led to this shift? Blake Lee—who stars in Lifetime’s The Christmas Setup alongside his IRL husband Ben Lewis—had a guess: “After four years of the current political administration, I think that queer writers were like, ‘Fuck this, I want to see representation. I want to create the world that I want to live in.'” The networks—Hallmark, Lifetime, Paramount—finally donned their gay apparel, justifying decades of passion for this historically heteronormative holiday. Because, honey, the gays have always been here for Christmas—even if Christmas hasn’t always been here for us.

“It’s so classic, so typical that the queer communities have often loved a lot of these institutions that have not necessarily loved us back,” said Ben Lewis, the other half of The Christmas Setup’s gay power couple, sharing a sentiment echoed by pretty much everyone else interviewed.

Benjamin Bradley, the host of Netflix’s Holiday Home Makeover with Mr. Christmas, had a theory: “I think there are certain elements [of Christmas] that we didn’t fully experience as children, because there was already a recognition that maybe we were different and we weren’t sure quite where we fit in. And so I think for gay men, I think even for Christmas enthusiasts, I think we’re chasing after that childhood comfort and safety that maybe we missed at that time.”

Nina West, a drag performer with an all-consuming affection for the holidays, came to a similar conclusion, pointing out that Christmas is “safe and familiar, and it’s also this idealized life. So when you’re young and queer, you are afraid—or at least, I was afraid of losing everything that I ever saw in front of me, and Christmas was one of the most sacred things.”

“I talk a lot about my childhood Christmases in Connecticut, which were very on-the-surface, very storybook, very Christmas card, very Hallmark,” said BenDeLaCreme, a fellow RuPaul’s Drag Race alum who released a feature-length holiday special with Jinkx Monsoon this year. “But in true WASP New England fashion, that’s just the shiny glaze on top of the hardened fruitcake that nobody wants. I always felt as a kid that, even though all the trappings were there, something didn’t feel how it seemed like it was supposed to feel.”

“Christmas was always my favorite time of year, because it was a time that I really felt like my family came together and put things aside and committed to doing their best to be a happy loving family,” said Monsoon, echoing her collaborator’s sentiment. “It was only as an adult that I look back on things and realize yes, that was there, but it was also traumatic at many moments. That challenge of trying to create the perfect holiday is inherently stressful, and puts us through the wringer.”

This trauma and fear of abandonment are an essential part of the queer Christmas experience—as much as our shared love of “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” But this unique layering of joy and pain isn’t exactly like what you see in, say, A Christmas Story or even It’s a Wonderful Life. You do see it in Happiest Season, 2020’s addition to the Christmas canon.

Victor Garber—a hero to a generation of gay people thanks to his work on Broadway, Titanic, Alias, Legends of Tomorrow, and just being Victor Garber—played it straight in Happiest Season as closeted Harper Caldwell’s uptight politician father. But the struggle depicted in the movie rang true for Garber. “I grew up a Jewish kid in Ontario. Christmas was always just a family thing, and I think that if you are accepted in your family, then [Christmas is a dream]. Otherwise, it’s a nightmare. I remember meeting a lot of gay kids when I was growing up who weren’t so happy about Christmas and, not unlike Happiest Season, would have to go home and pretend [to be straight].”

“I think the queer community has a pretty love/hate relationship with with the holidays in general,” said DeLa. “We’ve been inundated for decades with imagery about homecoming and family that doesn’t include us, it doesn’t represent us and isn’t necessarily representative of our experience. But at the same time, Christmas is glittery, and it’s colorful, and everybody puts on sequined sweaters and puts their trees in drag.”

Troll the ancient Yuletide, Carol!

“Your house becomes this other thing for this season,” said Lee, touching upon many gay men’s reason for the season. “I loved dressing up when I was a kid, and playing make believe. To see my whole family get into it was so huge. Because you’re like, ‘You’re doing what I want to do all the time!'”

Obviously decking the halls is a major source of joy during December—or, if your nickname is Mr. Christmas, even earlier. “Typically, we don’t really even acknowledge Halloween around here,” said Bradley, who’s turned his passion for pinecones and garland into a career and a Netflix series. That series—Holiday Home Makeover—serves a different purpose in 2020’s avalanche of gay content. That show is hosted by an out gay man who casually refers to his partner in front of the straight families he’s been tasked to make merry. Seeing a gay man openly talk his your same-sex partner at Christmas around strangers? That’s a transformative notion for a lot of gay people.

Even celebrating the holidays with your same-sex partner can be a little transformative—just ask Victor Garber. “My life changed when I met Rainer [Andreesen], my partner. My sister and I and my best friend Nikki, we used to meet every year for Christmas and we used to call it ‘Three Jews on Christmas.’ And then Rainer came into my life and everything changed.” It turns out, Garber is married to his own Mr. Christmas. “The first time he decorated our living space, I didn’t know what to do. There was no place to sit! The decorations were lavish and beautiful, because he’s a brilliant artist. From then on, our Christmases became something else. I just fell into it and was a very fortunate recipient of his generosity and his love for Christmas. I was kind of indoctrinated into the whole Christmas world. And happily so!”

Even if gay audiences haven’t seen literal gay characters on screen, we still have our touchstones. Benjamin Bradley loves Christmas in Connecticut for gay icon Barbara Stanwyck, and Nina West returns to White Christmas every year thanks to the looks and stunts of Vera-Ellen and Rosemary Clooney. BenDeLaCreme realized as an adult that Christmas at Pee-wee’s Playhouse is “the gayest thing,” in part because “Miss Yvonne is the best Christmas drag queen anyone could ever hope for.”

But when it comes to queer Christmas entertainment (pre-2020), it’s all about the Muppets. “I identified with A Muppet Christmas Carol, because I think Muppets are the closest thing to drag queens,” said Jinkx Monsoon. “I think I think you can justify that Miss Piggy is a drag persona.”

Ben Lewis (The Christmas Setup) agrees 100%: “A Muppet Christmas Carol is huge for me. Frank Oz, for example, is not a gay man, but somehow created Miss Piggy, who is the most iconic, most canonical ‘gay’ character.” While thinking aloud, Lewis realized why so many Christmas specials seem so low-key gay. “There is something very gay about puppetry and stop motion animation, just in general. Particularly with stop motion — to put that amount of painstaking detail, the amount of hand glittering that must have gone into the making of any one of those movies, is textbook gay.”

Another unlikely queer Christmas icon: the Grinch. “He’s this amazing bitchy gay guy! I kind of love that, with his little dog,” said Blake Lee of The Christmas Setup.

“I think an honorable mention would be the Jim Carrey Grinch movie,” said Monsoon, eliciting a teeny bit of surprise from BenDeLaCreme. “It inspired multiple drag performers to do sexy versions of the Grinch. [Laughs] Which, I love a sexy Grinch and I love a sexy Krampus. But also because Christine Baranski is in the film, and any film that Christine Baranski is in becomes queer with her presence.”

Santa’s Got a Brand New Bag (it’s Prada)

“I think that’s why drag queens love [Christmas]. I mean, girl, you can go into a Michael’s and grab ornaments off of a shelf and make them into earrings,” said Nina West, angling for her own holiday crafting show on whichever streaming service is smart enough to make it happen.

Mainstream cable networks are just catching up to something drag queens have known for years: Christmas is a time for content, honey. Just look at BenDeLaCreme and Jinkx Monsoon, who have been performing over the holidays individually or together for a decade. 2020 marks their third year in a row collaborating on a holiday spectacular.

“We look at what the holiday traditions are, and then analyze what they’re rooted in, and then decide how we’re going to tear that apart,” said Monsoon of their creative process. “It’s taking something that continues to uphold the 1950s idea of what normal America looks like — and then just blowing it wide open and saying, ‘This is what it could look like, if queer people were considered.'”

West, who dropped a Christmas EP titled The West Christmas Ever in 2019, also makes the holidays an essential part of her drag. “I’m trying to stick to something that feels nostalgic, fresh, and from my point of view,” said West. “Because the holiday is — whether it’s Hanukkah or Christmas or Kwanzaa, whatever you are in the market to celebrate during this time of year — people are steeped in tradition.”

Tradition? Meet COVID-19. Fortunately for West, she had an entire EP of holiday tunes—like “Cha Cha Heels”—just waiting to be brought to life via music video. “I just couldn’t let the season pass — being that I was at home, being that I had the ability and some support, and some incredible partners — to just put something together and celebrate the holiday with a new video. I thought it was something I could do, so why not?”

The pandemic threatened to derail DeLa and Monsoon’s annual, all-new holiday experience, as it’s always been a stage show. “I think both of us somewhere in our minds were like, ‘Eh, someday we’ll [make a film],'” said DeLa. “But you know, 2020 said, ‘Now.'” The result is The Jinkx & Dela Holiday Special, a 67 minute long film that they pulled off while staying safe and distanced. “We not only sort of rose to the occasion of getting to create this type of content for ourselves, but we also got to deliver it at a time when it feels most needed.”

All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Gay Leads

“I think [Happiest Season is] groundbreaking because it’s an honest-to-god holiday-themed romcom that is for queer people, by queer people,” said Jinkx Monsoon of Happiest Season, Hulu’s star-studded, major studio gay holiday romcom starring Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis. Monsoon and DeLa were cast as local drag performers by director and co-writer Clea DuVall—herself a queer woman and drag superfan. For Monsoon, that authenticity comes across. “I see a lot of queer representation in media that was clearly written and directed by straight people, and is geared towards straight people. So at the end of the day, I’m watching something that’s totally queer and not relating to it at all. Whereas Happiest Season is not like that at all.”

The cast of Happiest Season knew they were doing something different. “We all felt like we had something quite unique and special,” Garber said of playing mayoral hopeful Ted Caldwell in the film. “I couldn’t believe this feeling on the set, just how everybody just clicked. It was amazing. And I think everybody was aware of it, and everybody you talk to would say the same thing. We just had a wonderful time. It just felt immediately like a family.”

On the small screen side of things (Happiest Season was slated for a theatrical release before COVID-19, thus its arrival on Hulu), Jonathan Bennett was keenly aware of the importance of Hallmark’s The Christmas House from day one. “I remember getting in the van, the first time I met [onscreen husband] Brad [Harder], and we were driving to set and I looked at him and I said, ‘You realize what we’re doing right?’ And he turned to me and said, ‘We’re making history.’ And right then, we just looked at each other and we knew.”

Gay creators have been trying to make history for a minute. Jake Helgren, the writer/director behind Paramount’s Dashing in December, is a veteran of the holiday TV movie business. He learned years ago, however, that even putting queer characters in supporting roles irked certain online trolls. That may be why he didn’t initially consider making Dashing in December a gay romance—and then leapt at the chance to make this particular dream come true (a dream starring out actors starring Peter Porte and Juan Pablo Di Pace).

“We originally pitched [Dashing in December] as a straight movie and at some point [producer Stephanie Slack] suggested [we make the leads two men],” said Helgren. “I said it would be a dream come true for me to tell that story.” This simple tweak opened up the entire story for Helgren, turning what was just a couple sentences of plot into a full-fledged screenplay that speaks to not only the holiday season, but to the specific experience of being gay in a small, rural community. Helgren was encouraged by Paramount to make Dashing in December the sweeping, theatrical romance he’d long dreamed of making: “If Brokeback Mountain and Sweet Home Alabama and Hallmark all got together and had a love child, [it would be Dashing in December].”

By casting gay actors, the performers felt emboldened to put their own experiences into their characters. Bennett felt incredibly lucky to be co-starring in an adoption storyline in The Christmas House alongside Harder—who’s gone through the adoption process twice with his husband. The baby that characters Brandon and Jake adopt in the film is even Harder’s real son.

The scene that mattered the most to Bennett, and every single queer person watching The Christmas House at home, was Brandon and Jake’s kiss—yes, a gay kiss on Hallmark. “That scene mattered more than any other scene in my career,” said Bennett. “When we were done with that scene, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. One of our art department guys who’s gay came up to me and had tears in his eyes. And he said, ‘You know, I do art department for a lot of Hallmark movies, and for the first time, I feel like I’m part of the family now, too.”

“[The Christmas House] is so inspiring as it [represents] so many different types of people that haven’t been able to share this story of love, family and Christmas,” Brad Harder wrote via email. “Diverse stories are needed because we matter, our stories matter and it’s important for these stories to get told.”

Ben Lewis felt compelled to make sure that his character’s emotional arc in Lifetime’s The Christmas Setup would resonate with gay audiences. “One thing that we wanted to see more of in the script was a sense that this community in Milwaukee had this strong, progressive, queer movement happening,” said Lewis. “The traditional narrative of these movies is the big city kid — which was me, in this case — gets drawn back into their hometown, and sort of reevaluating what their priorities are. And so I think for my character, who has this really thriving career in New York, it’s like, what is realistically going to draw him back to Milwaukee? And the answer is Patrick and the queer initiatives that he’s sort of spearheading in their community.”

May your gays be merry and bright

“It’s so refreshing to see something that really just gets to be lighthearted and heartwarming,” said BenDeLaCreme of Happiest Season. “So much queer representation is always tinged with that assumed tragedy of what it is to be a queer person. I mean, there are struggles [in Happiest Season]. The protagonists have to overcome things, but they’re still common, relatable experiences that seem like they’re in the canon, and not uniquely tinged with that sadness that we get put upon us, [sadness] that is not necessarily a part of how we enjoy the holidays.”

Brad Harder also felt proud to provide families with a film that’s filled with love. “Christmas can be a tough time of year as an adult. I haven’t been connected to my family since I came out, so it can be a sad time of year. The Christmas House is so important because it gives so many of us with these experiences the hope and joy of seeing a family of unconditional love and acceptance.”

It’s also not hyperbole to say that these movies, part of incredibly popular cable lineups that have become a 21st century tradition for millions of families, will change lives.

“These young people who are maybe in the closet and afraid to come out to their parents, maybe this Christmas will be a little different for them,” said Dashing in December writer Jake Helgren. “Maybe when they sit down and they see this film and other films like that are coming out, they’ll feel more comfortable having these open conversations with their parents.”

And if they don’t get the chance this year, there’s going to be plenty of opportunities next year. This is not a fab fad, and Jonathan Bennett knows it. “I’m so proud of Hallmark Channel because we already have projects greenlit for 2021 that are in development that are going to make the holiday table even bigger and better next year.”

“We love to watch stories about love, especially young people, they won’t have to wonder if they’re gonna find love,” said Helgren. “They’ll be able to see this and say, ‘No, I have a real chance at it.'” And that’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

The Christmas Setup premieres on Lifetime on Saturday, December 12 at 8 p.m. ET

Dashing in December premieres on Paramount Network on Sunday, December 13 at 7 p.m. ET

Where to watch Happiest Season

Where to watch The Christmas House

Where to watch The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Special

Where to watch Holiday Home Makeover with Mr. Christmas