If u are a queer woman 

Take to the cinemas NOW

Clea DuVall’s Happiest Season just got released 

Go with your friends and squeeze their hands as 

K Stew kisses MacKenzie Davis. 

Clutch your chest. 

Walk to the bathroom afterwards, lock the stall door, and freak.the.fuck.OUT. 

“I feel like I can’t breath woooo” 

Say it to yourself over & over & over. 

Feel a quiet kinship 

With all the other lesbians in the cinema 

And laugh at the one straight couple 

On their “date night” lol. 

Try not to dismiss the film if you can 

Or judge it, or judge yourself for loving this.

Remember what Susan Sontag tells us: 

We should pursue an erotics of the art

Instead of a hermeneutics of suspicion, 

or an interpretation of paranoia.

“DUCK! As the train comes toward u”

Jump! As the Tegan & Sara song drops.

Yes, the film is homonormative 

Yes, the film is very white 

Yes, the film is a rom com 

(And worst of all!) 

Yes, it is a Christmas movie. 

This isn’t Brokeback Mountain or Call Me By Your Name or Moonlight

(Namely because it is about queer women and not gay men) 

This isn’t a dramatic, black & white film about queer oppression. 

You will not see Happiest Season

At Cannes or at the Oscars 

But honestly, fuck that 

Remember that you were once 11 and in your bedroom dreaming of this 

Remember that E.K Sedgwick once asked, “how to tell kids who are never supposed to learn – that out there, there exists worlds where this is possible?” (THIS, this is how).

We used to have to smuggle this shit

In the secret lining of our backpacks

In the covers of our mattresses

And now, now it is in HOYTS!  

And remember, please remember

You lived long enough to see this.

Happiest Season is now showing in Australian cinemas.

**********

Tina Huang is a Chinese Australian writer based in Sydney. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Lifted Brow, Cordite Poetry Review, and Overland. In 2020, she was also a NSW state finalist in the Australian Poetry Slam. Her first performance work, ‘C’est La Guerre,’ is forthcoming from the Diversity Arts Council.