ride'em cowboy!

Country singer Chris Housman wrangles a daddy in defiantly gay new music video

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Image Credit: ‘Guilty As Sin,” Chris Housman

Y’all means all, and gay country crooner Chris Housman is working to make notoriously conservative genre a safer space for queer people.

The Kansas-born singer-songwriter first gained attention through TikTok with his song “Blueneck,” a cheeky ode to “liberal rednecks” and Southern progressives about how there should be room for everyone in these “wide open spaces.”

With funny yet poignant lyrics (“George Straight or George Gay, there’s no difference,” which references the country music icon, is our personal favorite), the tune became a viral hit and garnered Housman all sorts of media attention—though it notably failed to receive radio play on traditional country stations.

@chrishousmanmusic APRIL 7th!! Let’s blow this up one more time b4 it’s out. 💙💙💙#countrymusic #queercountry #rednecks4rainbows #progressive #blueneck ♬ original sound – Chris Housman

But now, as Housman readies to launch his debut album on May 31—also titled Blueneck—he’s doing so with the support of CMT, the mainstream television network devoted to country music. And we reckon that’s a pretty major deal!

A few weeks after Housman made his red carpet debut at the 2024 CMT Awards—looking like a vision in blue, we might add—the network is hosting the premiere of the music video for his newest single, “Guilty As Sin,” a song and visuals which are both unabashedly, undeniably gay.

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(Interestingly, there’s a track titled “Guilty As Sin?” on Taylor Swift’s highly anticipated new album, The Tortured Poet’s Department, so perhaps there was some strategy involved in getting Housman’s single out there beforehand.)

Better still: CMT’s not hiding it either. Heck, they put it on the biggest screen possible, in the middle of Times Square! Now that’s allyship!

“Guilty Is Sin” is a proper country ballad, one about falling for another man and trying to reconcile that queer attraction with the good ‘ole boy Christian morals he was raised on.

“If I had to spend forever in heaven without you, might as well be in hell,” he sings in the chorus, joining a growing lists of queer artists like Rina Sawayama (“This Hell“) and David Archuleta (“Hell Together“) who are defiantly reclaiming homophobic rhetoric through their music.

“The idea for this song was inspired by the one and only time I truly tried to ‘pray the gay away’,” Housman shares in a press release. “It took a long time to get there, but this song is about my journey to accepting that there is absolutely nothing wrong with loving someone else.”

The brand-new video follows suit, depicting Housman and another man (played by the handsome Gabe LaDuke, who’s sort of giving us “Murray Bartlett by-way-of Nashville”) hanging out in a shed, drinking beers, and getting close.

Director Ford Fairchild basks the lovers in alluring, candy-colored lights, and while there’s not much in the way of plot, it’s still powerful to see two scruffy, tatted-up men in flannel and denim slow-dancing together.

Related:

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“As a 64-year-old queer man, this is an absolute gem of a message.”

As Housman tells CMT, it wasn’t so much the man-on-man intimacy he was worried about—it was really having to “act” in a video for the first time: “I was a tad nervous… But our friend, Gabe LaDuke, who played my romantic interest, was so great and easy to work with. I remember having a hard time on more serious parts because he was cracking so many jokes!”

Look, we’d have no performance issues when it came to cozying up to LaDuke either!

“As someone who grew up glued to the TV watching music videos but didn’t see a lot queer love stories in country music, being to create one myself means the world to me,” Housman shares. “I hope anyone walks away with an ‘awww’ feeling by the end of the video.”

Well, if this is just a taste of what’s to come from Housman and his debut album Blueneck, we can’t wait to hear (and see!) the rest. Yee-haw!

In the meantime, we’ll be sure to add some Chris Housman to our playlist round-up of queer country bangers, which you can check out below:

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