Isaac Winkler | Next to You / 2017 [music video]

gay ballad of lost love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eli Lieb (songwriter and performer), Isaac Winkler (director) Next to You / 2017 [3 minutes] [music video]

 

In the past few years, we finally have a handful of major openly male gay popular singers and rappers such as Troye Sivan, Lil ‘Nas X, John Duff, Eli Lieb, the boyband Echo V, as well as others like Jesse Pepe and the Thumpasaurus band who often perform what appear to be gay songs, despite not openly expressing their sexuality.

      Of course, there is also Elton John and in the past Freddie Mercury; and David Bowie and Mick Jagger were known to or at least said to have had queer sex. And there was always Little Richard and Johnny Mathias. And several others. But the older musicians did not sing out ballads particularly about being gay the way Sivan, Lil ‘Nas X, Lieb, Echo V, and Pepe do today.*

    Iowa-born Lieb’s “Next to You” of 2017 is a perfect example of the new openly gay sensibility Although the song’s lyrics say nothing particularly about queer love, the video, directed by Isaac Winkler, makes it quite clear that the sad ballad of lies and a break-up in process is addressed to another man through the use of a backscrim film that shows the Lieb who stands singing in distress lying next to a handsome long-haired fellow, the focus of his sad pleas for the other to remain.

      Here are introductory lyrics and major refrain:

 

2am Friday night your picture on the bedside

Where do you run when you want to hide

Gave you everything my leather coat my beating heart

Where did they go

I'm reaching out but my hands are tied

You don't even say goodbye when I'm lying right next to you

I could take a million lies if I'm lying right next to you

and you're all I need oh, oh

I just want to live this lie lying right next to you

You've got me down so I'm getting high…

 

You don't even say goodbye when I'm lying right next to you

I could take a million lies if I'm lying right next to you

and you're all I need oh, oh

I just want to live this lie lying right next to you

 

*All through my youth I heard male singers warble out ballads about heterosexual love, but I always imagined some of their lyrics being addressed to another male. Now young people can know that at least some of the songs they hear on radio or, particularly those they watch on the internet are being sung to another male lover. It’s not enough to know that Freddie Mercury is gay while singing the vague referents to Bohemian Rhapsody—although Australian writer Gareth Hill has made a very good case, I’d argue that Mercury’s song is a coded message about coming out and his realization that he had just killed a man, his old heterosexual self, fearful of his religious mother’s pain and wrath. And Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” was far more obvious, in Italian basically meaning, “everyone’s a fruit,” and its original lyrics making it clear it was about anal sex:

 

Tutti Frutti, good booty

If it don't fit, don't force it

You can grease it, make it easy

 

Replaced by the record producers with: “Tutti Frutti, aw rooty.”

 

Los Angeles, March 9, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2025).