Colton Haynes & James Scully play gay couple in country singer Tyler Childers’ new video

It’s been a particularly eventful few months for country music. Luke Combs scored a major crossover hit when his cover of queer icon Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” peaked at No. 2 on Billboard’s Hot 100, while more recently, Jason Aldean was widely criticized following the release of the video for his song “Try That in a Small Town” for featuring violent and racist imagery. Both artists and their records sparked plenty of discussion about the genre and its politics.

Into that cultural atmosphere comes singer-songwriter Tyler Childers’ new music video for his latest single “In Your Love,” the first off his upcoming album Rustin’ in the Rain. As NPR reports, Childers asked out poet and author Silas House, Kentucky’s poet laureate, to write the storyline for the video. Something akin to an Appalachian Brokeback Mountain, the video stars out actors Colton Haynes and James Scully as two Kentucky coal miners who meet, fall in love, and later build a life together in the mid-20th century.

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Childers, who has tackled racial injustice on his album Long Violent History and religious intolerance on Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven, said that he was partially inspired to make the video by his gay cousin.

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“He graduated from Northern Kentucky, went to Chicago, and never came back,” Childers told NPR’s Ann Powers. “He taught me so much about singing; he was my first tough critic. And just thinking about him not having a music video on CMT (Country Music Television) that spoke to him.”

According to House, Childers wanted the music video to tell the story of two gay men in rural America “because he has friends and family who are members of the LGBT community, and are part of the story of Appalachia, too. These are human stories, not political stories.”

“To see yourself in art is a really important thing, especially when you’re from an ‘other’ place,” House added. “You rarely see LGBT people in rural settings in a positive way. You often see them getting murdered there, or escaping from there, but that’s it. That’s why this matters, especially for country music.”

“Even if you have the privilege of walking through this world unfazed, it’s more important than ever to stand with and for and up for things, to be vocal,” Childers said of being an ally.

Childers is aware that the video will be polarizing for some country music fans. “For all the ugliness that it’s going to bring out that just can’t be helped, this video is going to make real conversations possible,” he said. “This is a story of two people sharing their love and living a life together and experiencing loss. That’s pretty powerful.”