This a person practically ruined me.

Have you at any time gotten a rogue onion ring in your get of fries? If you like onion rings, it’s cause for celebration. But if you absentmindedly bite into it and imagine it is going to be a strip of potato, the slimy sweetness could possibly make you gag.

That is how I felt when, halfway as a result of Lifetime’s wholesome new Xmas motion picture, I encountered a joke about strap-ons.

According to Lifetime, Less than the Xmas Tree is its “first lesbian getaway romance,” directed by, I kid you not, a woman named Lisa Rose Snow. (The channel aired its initially-ever LGBTQ Christmas movie, The Xmas Set up, last yr, amid a slew of putatively groundbreaking queer vacation movies.) In the accurate spirit of Xmas rom-coms, Below the Xmas Tree is chaste: Hearts are warmed, but almost nothing at any time gets genuinely steamy amongst Alma (Elise Bauman, nearly upstaged by her bangs) and Charlie (Tattiawna Jones), who meet sweet in Camden, Maine, just right before Christmas.

Prior to we get to the strap-on situation and the self-flagellating spiral it sent me into, I must clarify the premise of the movie. Alma is preparing to just take above her family’s battling compact business enterprise, a Xmas gift shop, when Charlie, a point out employee, arrives to town in look for of the great Christmas tree for the governor of Maine. She finds 1 on Alma’s family members house, but Alma has a sentimental attachment to the tree and does not want to minimize it down. Yet, the two women of all ages keep on to flirt about treats at the nearby patisserie (with … Ricki Lake … actively playing the meddling grasp baker). It’s noticeable from the start out that they like-like each and every other, and not like so many other Xmas comedies, there is no central deception to be settled. The stakes in Under the Xmas Tree are so low—will or will not Alma make Charlie’s task a lot easier by providing her the tree?—that 1 of Alma’s chickens could phase more than them.

I did not even intellect this deficiency of conflict so considerably, mainly because it can be pleasant to check out the occasional film that lowers the ol’ blood stress. But for the very first 50 percent of Beneath the Xmas Tree, the absence of sexual intercourse in the women’s sexual orientation felt like a real bummer. Corny banter stands in for chemistry, and Jones’ million-dollar smile performs overtime to conjure the appearance of sparks—until, midway by means of the movie, as Alma buckles Charlie into some protection equipment ahead of they action on to a cherry picker to examine a tree, this takes place:

CHARLIE: I like a superior harness to commence your day.

ALMA: [cinches Charlie’s harness] Tighter?

CHARLIE: Yes. As limited as you can get it.

And it was at that minute that I thoroughly disappeared into the crevice amongst my sofa cushions, under no circumstances to be read from all over again.

Why, when the lack of strap-on illustration in lesbian pop tradition has very long been a level of great bewilderment and annoyance for me, did this harness reference induce me real physical agony? Why did I come to feel like I’d just walked in on my grandparents confusedly rifling via the box below my nightstand? These are the thoughts I’ve contemplated in the days due to the fact my viewing of Less than the Xmas Tree, as I have struggled to iron the cringe strains off my deal with. At first, I recognized my response as a symptom of internalized homophobia: Possibly I was humiliated by the reference to queer intercourse because I have been socialized to see it as shameful, specifically in a extensively wholesome area like this motion picture. I’ve been queer for much more than 15 years—shouldn’t I have outgrown that impulse? What was improper with me?

But after giving it a minor additional thought—too significantly believed, just one could argue, for a Life span movie—I arrived to think that there was one thing else going on. Anything that does not reflect inadequately on modern society or on me as a particular person, but on the broader financial system of holiday break leisure. That a thing is: terrible, negative creating.

Charlie’s line tends to make no sense as penned. I’ve replayed the trade several periods, at wonderful expense to my brain, and I am beneficial that she claims “I like a good harness to get started your day.” I like a great harness to get started your day? Huh? It’s the type of factor a hopelessly awkward person would say when they want to insinuate that they know about and have had intercourse, and want their crush to affiliate them with sex, but just can’t come up with a intelligent or all-natural way to provide it up in discussion. It is a clumsy transfer in a lesbian mating dance that the self-assured and very easily charming Charlie in no way would have produced.

The trade is not just out of character for Charlie—it’s out of area in the motion picture. Irrespective of its vaguely euphemistic-sounding title, there is nothing sexual about Under the Christmas Tree. Alma lives with her mother and father, so they engage in a notable (and seemingly welcome) purpose in their daughter’s burgeoning marriage, providing it the juvenile sheen of puppy dog like. When the at any time-paternal Enrico Colantoni, as Alma’s father, tends to make a toast “to the lesbians!,” he preemptively quiets any frisson of need we might have detected. Who could truly feel the heat of attraction with Veronica Mars’ dad puttering all-around in the upcoming space? When the two females finally share a to start with kiss, Charlie cuts it quick because she has an abrupt revelation about Alma’s chickens. They hardly ever resume producing out. The entire romance is performed as a mother or father-friendly, virtually childlike endeavor.

So when the strap-on wordplay arrives together, along with a joke about tightness that I cannot even deliver myself to unpack, it’s a jarring shift in tone. A cutesy film about building gingerbread houses and halting at 1st foundation has quickly acknowledged the existence of intercourse toys. You can just come to feel Enrico Colantoni and Ricki Lake on the lookout on approvingly, and it curdles the mood.

Below the Xmas Tree was scripted by Michael J. Murray, a person who appreciates heartwarming Christmas flicks. He’s written almost a dozen of them, and this 1 matches very neatly into the proven mildew of the style. What that demands is a snowy city with a quaint thoroughfare, a subplot about a significant-metropolis govt who leaves her occupation to open a smaller business enterprise, and at least 1 protagonist whose year-spherical personality is Xmas. It does not have to have refined screenwriting or character enhancement. If it did, Lifetime would not have been in a position to launch 30 new holiday break movies this season. So even though the network is selling Underneath the Christmas Tree as a insignificant lesbian milestone, it was no doubt generated as swiftly and cheaply as the many others.

I want to take pleasure in what I think Murray and Life time have been striving to do with the harness instant: admit that though like is love and all that, homosexual relationships are not just like straight types. Queer courtship gives an overall planet of delightful particularities I need to be satisfied to see their perfunctory inclusion in fictional narratives. But I’m now confident that, by inquiring for more write-up-coming-out queer love stories in mainstream culture and complaining about the absence of strap-ons from on-screen lesbian intercourse, I have set into movement a kind of “monkey’s paw” situation, and my needs are coming true in all the mistaken techniques. The protagonists are out and queer, but so substantially so that their loving moms and dads have revealed up to eliminate the vibe. Queer love is so mainstream it is corny. The strap-on is there, but with out the sexual intercourse. Under the Xmas Tree is a pleasant addition to the chaste holiday rom-com canon. It is also a cautionary tale. Be thorough when you would like for pop-lifestyle representation. You just might get it.