OPINION: Tyler Childers' "In Your Love" Video Is Flaccid
Steacy Easton wrote the essay in issue 3 of Rainbow Rodeo about Dolly Parton, which generated some controversy on social media. Well, for Steacy there are no saints and they’ve gone right for Tyler Childers’ throat after the introduction of a music video featuring a gay coal mining couple this past summer. Easton recently published the book Why Tammy Wynette Matters and their memoir Daddy Lessons.
After two decades of writing about country music, and queerness, and queer country music, it seems in the last few years, that there has been enough recorded and released, that it has become more than a niche; almost a movement. Enough, in fact, that I feel comfortable joking that the difference between Americana and Country Music, is that Americana might be defined as those who know or who are queer folks and Country is those who can’t or won’t talk about them in person. Tyler Childers’ new single, “In Your Love,” co-written by the gay poet Silas House, and with press shots by gay softcore photographer Sam Waxman, very earnest and very sincere, makes this argument. It might feel churlish to note how the song fails considering who tops the country chart right now, or in the previous year where Morgan Wallen had a number one for almost four months, but how Childers imagines queerness is limited and does a disservice to other musicians. It’s not that the perfect is the enemy of the good, but that a bandwagon is coming, and people sure want to come aboard.
I don’t think that the song, or especially the video, says anything new about queer life, or coal mining or Appalachia. The video, lensed by Brooklyn-based Brian Schlam, stars Colton Haynes and James Scully as coal miners who fall in love, and have decades of domestic love, before one dies if black lung, like a tuberculoer Victorian maiden. Brian Schlam has worked with Childers before, in the beautifully shot but mostly anodyne Angel Band–he also did a snarky video with David Cross, for a song by the Black Keys, and ads for Call of Duty and Dollar Shave Club–a man who has modulated his bro-ness, but has not eliminated it entirely.
I don’t know if Childers or Schlam hired Colton Haynes but he is the perfect model for Schlam’s camera in fact the perfect model for this kind of enterprise. Thinking about him in relationship to his fellow Teen Wolf cast mate Dylan O’Brien in the overly long video for All Too Well, they come from TV, they are pretty but not threatening, they aren’t big enough that producers have to pay them a fortune, but are big enough that they come with an audience. Their central quality is a prettiness without the dirt or sweat of actual adult sexuality. This coyness is especially egregious in the video–a little tussle, but none of the hunger or thirst which would sustain a relationship for decades.
The whole video seems to be an exercise in aestheticised whiteness. It seems significant to me that so many of the people who were brought on to make this video were white gay men, who were supposed to tell the story of Appalachia or coal mining have professionalized their aesthetic for a middle class audience, an audience that can admire Childers for his bravery, without having to engage the difficulty of class in the region.
It’s not that Childers doesn’t know isolation or horniness. He wrote a gorgeous, if racially problematic song about hotel room sex, with the immortal lines: “Lookin’ over West Virginia
Smoking Spirits on the roof/ She asked ain’t anybody told ya/ That them things are bad for you/ I said, ‘Many folks have warned me/ There’s been several people try/ But up ’til now, there ain’t been nothing/ That I couldn’t leave behind’” or the only great country song about jerking off in an hotel room: “I got the pictures that you sent me/ And how they fill me with desire.”
If he can write about desire with such adroitness, such loveliness, he can do it for queer people.
This article has been excerpted. Read the full piece when you subscribe to the Rainbow Rodeo Patreon.
