Bubba Fish and Doug Locke | #ThisCouldBeUs / 2014 [music video]

lamentation for lost love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bubba Fish and Doug Locke (director) #ThisCouldBeUs / 2014 [4 minutes] [music video]

 

This music video was the featured song on Los Angeles singer Doug Locke’s 2014 album, Blue Heart.

    The cinematic narrative directed by Bubba Fish begins with an older version of Locke (played by Billy Mayo) visiting the house of his long ago gay lover, Ben (Robert Fleet), now with a breathing apparatus in his mouth and obviously not that far away from death.

     For most of the rest of the work the narrative shifts between the older Doug’s visit of Ben and their younger selves at a time when Ben (Bradon Loyd) worked as a lifeguard on a beach, coming to the rescue of Ben, who comes out of the water breathing, the two quickly falling in love.

     The song, by Doug Locke and Eric McNeely, is basically a lament for what these two men have lost. The two might have become a couple, have lived their lives together, and spent their later life looking after one another had it not been for Ben’s choices.

      The lyrics, sung by the younger Doug standing outside of the older Ben’s house express the romantic longing, particularly the second stanza and chorus:

 

I need a parachute

Cause I was falling for you

I gave my heart too soon

Now its black and blue

You take me to the moon

When you’d kiss me that way

Had me going insane

But now I’m chasing fumes

Since you went away

I only want you to stay

CHORUS:

 

This could be us but you playin’

Driving up the coast and singin’

Drinking on the beaches naked

Oooohhh

This could be us

But you couldn’t be the one I needed

Oh I don’t wanna lose this feeling

Dancing til moon is sleepin’

Oooohhh

This could be us

This could be us but you playin’

 

   The vision of their youthful selves dancing and kissing on the beach is deepened by that fact that even the older Doug still wishes that they might have lived their lives together. But obviously Ben couldn’t commit, and eventually he married, his elderly wife (Barbara Oilar) breaking the spell of Doug’s lamentations at the end, announcing the time for him to once more leave his now old lover behind.

     As Locke responded about the song to James Nichols in the Huffington Post: "We all have those former loves that, while life may have lead us in different directions, we find ourselves reminiscing over, daydreaming about what could have been. I'm a firm believer that once you give a person a piece of your heart, you never truly get it back."

     The single hit no. 32 on the iTunes Hot 100 chart and this video went viral with more that 1.3 million views to date, heavily embraced by the LGBT community.

 

Los Angeles, January 22, 2026

Reprinted in My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).