A new country music video is making waves for centering around a gay couple in the 1950s.
Tyler Childers’ “In Your Love” mixes bittersweet lyrics (“We were never made to run forever / We were just meant to go long enough / To find what we were chasing after”) with a heart wrenching story of love and loss starring Colton Haynes and James Scully.
The two actors play coal miners who meet and fall for one another on the job, which they choose to leave behind after being found out and confronted with violent homophobia. They built a life and a home together, but the coal mining work ultimately catches up with them in a devastating manner.
Silas House, who penned the script for the video, noted on Instagram that they believe it might be “the first-ever country music video with a gay storyline to be released by a major label,” which Childers told NPR was important to him because he has a cousin he was close to growing up who is gay.
“He graduated from Northern Kentucky, went to Chicago and never came back,” he recalled. “And [I was] just thinking about him not having a music video on CMT that spoke to him.”
And despite a tragic ending, the video doesn’t depict the two as struggling with their sexualities, or living isolated from the world after deciding to be together. It balances the the realistic bad with the aspirational good, while matching the overall melancholy tone of the song itself to an effective end.
“If you look at the way rural, working class and poor people, Black people, gay people are portrayed, especially on TV, it focuses a lot on the despair and not enough on the joy,” House said. “We wanted to have the joy in there. Because that’s what makes a full life, right?”
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Read More: Colton Haynes & James Scully Are Coal Mining Lovers In New Music Video