sweet tooth
by Douglas Messerli
Daniel Nigro and Conan Gray (composers), Danica
Kleinknecht (director) Caramel / 2025 [4 minutes] [music video]
In some senses, the third of Conan Gray’s 2025 music
videos from his album Wishbone, Caramel which premiered in August,
was the consummate summation of his gay interaction with the characters
established by his friend Corey Fogelmanis and him.
Once
again, Corey plays the mean boy who lies to and cheats on the far more passive
lover played by Conan. You might even say that Corey represents in this “Brando”
characterization all the beautiful bad boys of the working class (in this video
he works as a supermarket check-out clerk who lives in a trailer), boys who
didn’t always play according to gender rules and often didn’t care who they
might hurt in their love.
Even
though this bad boy has terribly hurt Gray’s persona he can’t stop loving him,
remembering his kisses like the sweet taste of caramel. And in this case there
seems to have been a least a couple of times where his lover has left him only
to return, each time finding ready acceptance only because of the sweet memory
of their love.
Well, in the moment
You weren’t all that kind
You with your wide-eyed grin’s all I can see
When I think of that time
Promises spoken
All coming back as lies
But you with your soft, sweet kiss is all I miss
In the back of my mind
Did me wrong in the past
And I know it was bad
But you burn inside my memory so well
You caramel
You’re caramel
…..
Ooh
I heard you’re in town
I want you back now
Come over to my house
There’s space on my couch
Yeah, you burn inside my memory so well
You caramel
You’re caramel
In his
trilogy of videos, This Song, Vodka Cranberry, and Caramel,
Gray captures almost a kind of lost 1950s early 1960s sense of small town
America, where gay love hovers just below the awareness of its citizens,
breaking the hearts of those who dare challenge the community’s sense of
normalcy. But, of course, on a larger scale, this is the condition of a great
many sexual relationships of young people, straight and gay, who aren’t ready
to and haven’t the yet the ability to establish a long linear relationship with
others.
In an
interview with Billboard magazine, Gray described his overall album
title Wishbone as being a metaphor for the entire process of wishful
relationships which most often result in breakups. We now have to presume that
for Conan at least some of these were gay.
Los Angeles, December 2, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December
2025).
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