By: Karen Frost
By now, everyone knows the story. The wedding planning website Zola.com submitted to the Hallmark Channel six wedding ads, four of which featured a wedding between a same-sex female couple. After one of the ads ran in December, the conservative Christian organization One Million Moms—a subsidiary of the American Family Association, one of the nation’s leading anti-LGBTQ groups—gathered a petition with 35,009 signatures and complained directly to Bill Abbott, CEO of Crown Media Family Networks, Hallmark's parent company, about both the ads and Abbott’s publicly expressed “openness” to Hallmark airing LGBT content. Crown Media responded by pulling the four lesbian ads but not the two straight ads.
The outcry was immediate in the LGBT community and throughout the more liberal parts of the Internet, the counterprotest dwarfing the size of the original protest. Every major news outlet ran with the story while #BoycottHallmarkChannel trended on Twitter. Sensing the direction of the public opinion winds, Crown Media backpedaled. The next day, Hallmark tweeted that it would not only air the ads, but that it would work "with GLAAD to better represent the LGBTQ community across our portfolio of brands."
Zola, a wedding website service features a couple kissing. Credit: Zola
In less than a day, the kerfluffle turned into a triumphant victory for the LGBT community (and Zola, which couldn’t have bought better publicity). Hallmark’s reversal demonstrated that at least some corporations can be influenced to reverse a publicly anti-LGBT stance by negative press and pushback on social media. The conflict brought the conversation about queer representation in TV ads and on the Hallmark Channel to the attention of the general heterosexual public, shining a spotlight on the discrimination the queer community still faces in 2019. And finally, it put the ball in Hallmark’s court for (one day) airing a much hyped/protested LGBT movie that gives a nod to tolerance and inclusivity without irretrievably angering the over 85 million viewers who watched Hallmark Christmas programming in 2018, a tall order.
Missing from most of the discussion about this flashpoint, however, is a way to convey to readers the sheer magnitude of the LGBT representation problem in holiday oriented films produced by the mainstream. It’s not about an ad or about a network, it’s about a much, much bigger problem. Everyone knows that “Hallmark style” movies are all but exclusively heterosexual, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant stories about upper middle class protagonists (incredibly, Hallmark didn’t have a movie featuring people of color until 2018). That’s not news. But let’s look at what the numbers tell us about queer female representation across all holiday films:
As of December 2019, the Hallmark Channel has aired 232 Countdown to Christmas movies and Lifetime has aired 88 Christmas movies. The queer female community is 0 for 320 on that count. But those movies are just one part of a larger group of movies with a Christmas theme. This year, the Washington Post used an algorithm to search IMDb for “Christmas” movies and determined that 31,034 movies dating back to 1913 include Christmas themes. How many of those movies had queer female protagonists? I count five full-length movies: “Rent” (2005), “Carol” (2015), “Ghosting: The Spirit of Christmas,” “Let it Snow,” and “Season of Love,” the latter three airing in 2019. A tiny lesbian subplot was cut from “Love Actually” (2003) for time or it would have made six. (Some have argued that “Anna and the Apocalypse” counts, too, but although the character of Steph reads as queer, she’s never overtly identified as such in the movie.) Mathematically, that’s 0.016% of all Christmas-themed movies. Hallmark actresses Danica McKellar and Holly Robinson Peete have each been in that many Hallmark Christmas movies alone.
What these statistics effectively tell us is that when it comes to movie demographics, queer women don’t exist. If we assume that queer women make up around 6% of the global population, the current rate of representation is about 1/400th of what it should be. This isn’t just erasure. It’s intentional obliteration. It’s what happens when sexism meets homophobia. An entire segment of the population disappears on screen.
It’s no secret that for years Hallmark and Lifetime, avowedly conservative networks with no desire to “rock the boat” with their viewer base, wouldn’t allow queer female characters in their movies (or non-white people, or non-Christians, or disabled people, etc.). But to blame just those two networks for homophobia is to miss the forest for two trees. It’s not just them. It’s every major studio. A quick search of “LGBT Christmas movies” immediately reveals an outline of the problem: in the extremely rare instance mainstream Hollywood has added a queer presence to a Christmas movie, it’s been a gay brother/son—“The Family Stone” (2005), “Holiday in Handcuffs” (2007), “Twinkle All the Way” (2019)—or sassy gay friend—“A Christmas Prince” (2017), “A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding” (2018), “Christmas in Evergreen: Letters to Santa (2018),” and other gay coded Hallmark characters.
It’s not just Christmas. Lesbians have been excluded by major studios for other major holidays, too. “Home for the Holidays” (1995) has the prodigal gay son returning home for Thanksgiving. In the American “Love Actually” knock-off “Valentine’s Day” (2010), one of the storylines is about a gay football player struggling to come out. Freeform’s upcoming “The Thing About Harry” (2020) puts queer, teenage boys at the forefront of the network’s first Valentine’s Day rom-com. But queer women have only been represented in Thanksgiving movies by way of indie film: “What’s Cooking?” (2000) and “Lez Bomb” (2018). They haven’t been in any Valentine’s Day movies at all. (Queer women dominate Halloween movies, but that’s a separate conversation about the sexploitation of women and fetishization.)
Lez Bomb the Movie. Written & Produced by: Jenna Laurenzo
Make no mistake: the problem is not one of queer men vs. queer women. After all, the men aren’t doing much better, statistically. The problem is there’s only been one mainstream Thanksgiving movie made with LGBT characters and it was 24 years and four Presidents ago. All members of the LGBT community are being disadvantaged.
With the few one-offs noted above, there’s not a single major studio in Hollywood, Hallmark or otherwise, that has cast queer female characters in movies centering around holidays. It’s not a Hallmark problem, it’s an everyone problem. When it comes to Hallmark and Lifetime, the issue of LGBT representation is tied to the broader culture war. These networks have chosen a very narrow white, straight, Christian focus so as not to upset what they view as their core conservative Christian viewership (unsurprisingly, Hallmark as of 2018 was reported to have a policy against showing interracial couples even in the background, proof that 2019 is the new 1950). But the policy restrictions that apply to those networks don’t apply to the same degree to other studios. The creators of “Bad Santa,” for example, aren’t afraid to ruffle feathers. So what’s everyone else’s excuse for not having decking the halls with lesbians?
When tello Films created “Season of Love” to fill the queer female representation gap, it was a gift to the queer female community, but it also represented a failure of the mainstream. After years of organizations like GLAAD pushing for increases in representation across all genres and by all studios, movies with a holiday theme have remained steadfastly exclusionary. Put plainly, the queer female community had to crowdsource its own holiday film because of blatant, overt discrimination on the part of the entire film industry that went unchallenged for decades.
The road to LGBT representation on the Hallmark Channel or on Lifetime is uphill. Hallmark aired 98 new movies in 2019 (not all holiday, of course) and has even more planned for 2020…none of which have queer characters. To match its content to global demographics, Hallmark would have to produce about 6 queer movies in 2021, something the network won’t do.
But there is hope. By coincidence, a huge number of actresses who have been in Hallmark channel movies have also been in high profile queer roles. These include: Ali Liebert, Jennifer Beals, Sarah Paulson, Katie McGrath, Kim Delaney, Teri Polo, Mia Kirshner, Alexis Bledel, Katrina Law, Chyler Leigh, Amy Acker, Heather Morris, Bridget Regan, Emmanuelle Vaugier, Rachel Skarsten, Jes Macallan, Kat Barrell, and Elise Bauman. As a result of the #BoycottHallmarkChannel movement, several of them spoke up in support of more queer content on Hallmark. Liebert offered to be Hallmark’s first lesbian bride. Regan requested to be in a “heartfelt lesbian Christmas comedy.” Barrell tweeted her disappointment and Bauman issued an open letter. Hallmark’s own stable of actresses is pushing for change.
What this means overall is that the talent for a queer female holiday movie produced by the mainstream is there. The willingness to act in that movie is there. The writers are there. So when the time comes, all Hallmark (or whomever) has to do is greenlight it.
