Trent Atkinson | Dear John / 2016 [music video]

the end of an affair

by Douglas Messerli

 

Brandon Stansell, Hailey Steele, Parker Welling (writers), Trent Atkinson (director) Dear John / 2016 [3.38 minutes] [music video]

 

Gay singer Brandon Stansell creates dramatic narratives, expressed in his official videos with other queer performers and generally a full—or vestiges of—a narrative plot, all with a country and western twang.

     Dear John is the age-old story of a lover having left the singer or story-teller for reasons basically unexplained, while the man remaining removes his ring and tries to forget the past as he seeks out a new life and love.

     The lyrics are simple, but quite eloquent, sung basically as couplets, often without end rhyme:

 

I'll move on just like you did

Let go of this life we lived

It's too late now to just forgive

I'll move on just like you did

Gonna throw away what makes me hurt

Paint the walls and move the furniture

Till there’s no proof of where you were

Gonna throw away what makes me hurt

Make the miss you drown

Gonna wash it out

Unlove all your love

Unlearn your lips and what you left me with

Undo what’s been done

 

    We watch the singer pack up the shared belongs, books and clothes, before he retreats to the street and finally, in the end, observe him on the roof strumming his guitar as he sings.

    There is some evidence of the past he is trying to erase, a party, perhaps when they first met or early in their relationship, and his discovery of his lover’s having abandoned him with a note posted to the locked bedroom door:

 

          Baby,

 

          I’m so sorry.

          I love you.

          Don’t come

                          in

          I’m sorry

    The message suggests that the singer’s lover is currently having sex with someone else and that either he prefers the other person or simply can’t control his sexual desires for the interloper.

    The clichés of this song remain unhidden, as the subject conveyed is clearly nothing original but simply about the singer’s current melancholia concerning the series of events.

     The country and western tradition, in fact, might be said to focus on the almost inevitable incidents that lead to the very difficulties the singer must now face, a perfect accompaniment for gay heartbreak.

     If the song were of another genre, we could have imagined the possibility that the sexual picadillo may have been remedied and even forgiven, but not in the traditional world of country/western blues, wherein even gays behave just as most heterosexuals do.

 

Los Angeles, July 25, 2025

Reprinted from My Gay Cinema blog (July 2025).