This a single almost ruined me.

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

Which is how I felt when, halfway by Lifetime’s wholesome new Christmas film, I encountered a joke about strap-ons.

According to Life time, Beneath the Xmas Tree is its “first lesbian holiday getaway romance,” directed by, I child you not, a lady named Lisa Rose Snow. (The channel aired its first-ever LGBTQ Christmas film, The Christmas Set up, past yr, amid a slew of putatively groundbreaking queer getaway films.) In the accurate spirit of Christmas rom-coms, Beneath the Xmas Tree is chaste: Hearts are warmed, but nothing at all ever will get truly steamy involving Alma (Elise Bauman, practically upstaged by her bangs) and Charlie (Tattiawna Jones), who meet sweet in Camden, Maine, just right before Xmas.

Prior to we get to the strap-on scenario and the self-flagellating spiral it sent me into, I should make clear the premise of the movie. Alma is planning to acquire over her family’s having difficulties tiny business enterprise, a Christmas gift shop, when Charlie, a state worker, comes to town in search of the perfect Christmas tree for the governor of Maine. She finds one particular on Alma’s family members property, but Alma has a sentimental attachment to the tree and doesn’t want to minimize it down. Yet, the two ladies proceed to flirt above treats at the local patisserie (with … Ricki Lake … enjoying the meddling master baker). It’s evident from the commence that they like-like each and every other, and not like so many other Christmas comedies, there is no central deception to be solved. The stakes in Beneath the Christmas Tree are so low—will or won’t Alma make Charlie’s task less difficult by offering her the tree?—that a person of Alma’s chickens could stage in excess of them.

I didn’t even brain this deficiency of conflict so a great deal, because it can be awesome to look at the occasional movie that lowers the ol’ blood pressure. But for the 1st half of Underneath the Xmas Tree, the absence of intercourse in the women’s sexual orientation felt like a authentic bummer. Corny banter stands in for chemistry, and Jones’ million-dollar smile operates time beyond regulation to conjure the overall look of sparks—until, midway via the movie, as Alma buckles Charlie into some protection equipment ahead of they stage on to a cherry picker to examine a tree, this takes place:

CHARLIE: I like a very good harness to start your day.

ALMA: [cinches Charlie’s harness] Tighter?

CHARLIE: Of course. As restricted as you can get it.

And it was at that minute that I entirely disappeared into the crevice concerning my couch cushions, never ever to be heard from again.

Why, when the deficiency of strap-on representation in lesbian pop lifestyle has lengthy been a place of great bewilderment and annoyance for me, did this harness reference bring about me genuine actual physical soreness? Why did I come to feel like I’d just walked in on my grandparents confusedly rifling as a result of the box under my nightstand? These are the queries I’ve contemplated in the days considering that my viewing of Less than the Xmas Tree, as I have struggled to iron the cringe traces off my facial area. At 1st, I recognized my reaction as a symptom of internalized homophobia: Perhaps I was humiliated by the reference to queer sex for the reason that I’ve been socialized to see it as shameful, primarily in a completely healthful house like this motion picture. I’ve been queer for a lot more than 15 years—shouldn’t I have outgrown that impulse? What was wrong with me?

But after giving it a small far more thought—too a lot assumed, just one may well argue, for a Life span movie—I arrived to consider that there was some thing else likely on. A thing that doesn’t mirror poorly on society or on me as a particular person, but on the broader financial system of getaway leisure. That one thing is: lousy, bad composing.

Charlie’s line will make no perception as penned. I have replayed the exchange a number of periods, at good cost to my mind, and I am optimistic that she suggests “I like a great harness to commence your working day.” I like a superior harness to get started your working day? Huh? It is the type of issue a hopelessly awkward individual would say when they want to insinuate that they know about and have experienced sex, and want their crush to affiliate them with sexual intercourse, but simply cannot come up with a intelligent or organic way to deliver it up in dialogue. It’s a clumsy go in a lesbian mating dance that the self-assured and very easily charming Charlie by no means would have made.

The exchange is not just out of character for Charlie—it’s out of spot in the film. Regardless of its vaguely euphemistic-sounding title, there is almost nothing sexual about Below the Christmas Tree. Alma life with her moms and dads, so they engage in a distinguished (and seemingly welcome) purpose in their daughter’s burgeoning romance, offering it the juvenile sheen of puppy dog really like. When the at any time-paternal Enrico Colantoni, as Alma’s father, makes a toast “to the lesbians!,” he preemptively quiets any frisson of want we could possibly have detected. Who could come to feel the warmth of attraction with Veronica Mars’ father puttering all over in the subsequent space? When the two ladies ultimately share a initially kiss, Charlie cuts it brief since she has an abrupt revelation about Alma’s chickens. They under no circumstances resume building out. The whole relationship is performed as a parent-pleasant, virtually childlike endeavor.

So when the strap-on wordplay arrives alongside, along with a joke about tightness that I can’t even carry myself to unpack, it’s a jarring change in tone. A cutesy film about building gingerbread properties and halting at initially base has out of the blue acknowledged the existence of sex toys. You can just truly feel Enrico Colantoni and Ricki Lake hunting on approvingly, and it curdles the mood.

Less than the Christmas Tree was scripted by Michael J. Murray, a man who is aware heartwarming Xmas flicks. He’s penned approximately a dozen of them, and this 1 fits rather neatly into the proven mold of the genre. What that needs is a snowy city with a quaint thoroughfare, a subplot about a significant-metropolis executive who leaves her occupation to open a smaller business enterprise, and at the very least a person protagonist whose year-spherical character is Xmas. It does not call for advanced screenwriting or character advancement. If it did, Life time would not have been in a position to release 30 new getaway films this year. So although the network is marketing Under the Christmas Tree as a small lesbian milestone, it was no question created as quickly and cheaply as the others.

I want to enjoy what I think Murray and Life time had been hoping to do with the harness instant: acknowledge that though adore is like and all that, gay interactions are not just like straight kinds. Queer courtship gives an total entire world of pleasant particularities I must be satisfied to see their perfunctory inclusion in fictional narratives. But I’m now certain that, by inquiring for extra put up-coming-out queer like tales in mainstream culture and complaining about the absence of strap-ons from on-display lesbian sexual intercourse, I’ve set into motion a variety of “monkey’s paw” scenario, and my wishes are coming genuine in all the incorrect approaches. The protagonists are out and queer, but so significantly so that their loving parents have proven up to kill the vibe. Queer like is so mainstream it is corny. The strap-on is there, but without the need of the sex. Below the Christmas Tree is a pleasant addition to the chaste vacation rom-com canon. It is also a cautionary tale. Be cautious when you would like for pop-lifestyle illustration. You just may get it.