Ford Fairchild | Hidin’ Somethin’ / 2025 [music video]

a housewife’s revenge

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chris Housman (composer and performer), Ford Fairchild (director) Hidin’ Somethin’ / 2025 [4 minutes] [music video]

 

This recent music video by country-style gay composer and singer Chris Housman consists of a simple revenge story right out of Alfred Hitchcock’s famed TV series, although perhaps this is a bit more perverse than even the master of murder and mayhem might have imagined.

      In bed together after spending the night love-making are too heavily tatted men, Housman and Gable LaDuke, the later playing the lying husband of preacher’s daughter Brauwyn Spinner. Housman wonders where, suddenly his night-time lover is on his way to. LaDuke simply mumbles something about the fact he has to do something that day, even though supposedly it’s his day off from work. However, he accidently leaves behind his wallet, and Housman discovers, picture by picture, the real truth through a picture and a hidden wedding ring.

   We quickly discover where he’s headed as we observe his wife (Spinner) reading an old love letter from another man she’s discovered in a box. From there on the song takes over, recounting her love and sacrifices for the man that all this time has been ‘hidin’ not only ‘somethin’,’ but his entire identity as a bisexual, gay-oriented man who has betrayed his wife and family.

     She cooks up a special pot pie which quickly puts him in a hidden grave, dug by hand, making her another person is now is “hidin’ somethin’.”

      But the whole story told in the lyrics about how many years she has put up with his “beatings and the cheating that…put her through hell,” reveals her fury and supposedly justifies her culinary murder.

     The heavily inflected voice and instrumentation on the chorus which repeats “hidin’ somethin’” is a powerful reminder of what is truly at issue in this musical narrative, again directed by Housman’s usual partner, Ford Fairchild.

 

Grew up at the crossroads of a preacher's daughter and a farmer’s wife

She thought she found a one woman man to love her ‘til the day she dies

But 30 years in, done raising his kids, and keeping his front porch swept

She found a box full of letters, he shoulda been better at hiding those secrets he kept

He finally found one hole that he can’t get out

‘Cause she’s got a shovel and a whole lotta ground

She goes way out where the lord can’t see

She ain’t weeping under those willow trees now

He’s getting what he had coming

She’s serving that backwoods justice

By the time that the sun comes up

He won’t be the only one hidin’ somethin’

She could take the beatings and the cheating hell that he put her through

But everything hit different when she read ‘bout the other folks he left black and blue

So on Sunday night, made his chicken pot pie, and she threw a little something else in

By the time it got dark she was rolling up a tarp, his cold heart won’t be beating again

 

‘Cause he’s found one hole that he can’t get out

‘Cause she’s got a shovel and a whole lotta ground

She goes way out where the lord can’t see

She ain’t weeping under those willow trees now

He’s getting what he had coming

She’s serving that backwoods justice

By the time that the sun comes up

He won’t be the only one hidin’ somethin’

 

     Clearly Housman has no sympathy whatsoever for the millions of men whose gay sexuality is kept a secret from their wives, family, and, at moments, even themselves.

 

Los Angeles, July 24, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).