Simon Walton - What About You?

Simon Walton (25) from Brighton has finished hismusic video about gay love. The following blurb is written by Simon:

I BELIEVE IN LOVE ... WBU?
(Openly Gay Music)

This video is part of my campaign to challenge perceptions of gay relationships in music. I have been working with the charity organisation ITV Fixers to document my project.

I am an avid fan of mainstream pop music and follow the songs that are currently in the charts. However, I feel that there are very few openly gay musicians in the mainstream who truthfully sing about their relationships.

It would seem that gay relationships are still considered 'taboo' and discussing them may even jeopardise an artist's record sales and popularity.

If we live in a more accepting and tolerant society- should this taboo still be apparent in the mainstream music industry?

I wanted to address this in my Fixers project, thus I recorded a song about another male (which is made clear by using the word 'boy' in the bridge section). I didn't want to over emphasise or dramatise that I was singing about a gay relationship, I just wanted it to be honest, the same way if a female were singing it about a male.

The concept for my video was to reflect the lyrics of the song 'WBU?'. This song is about my troubled relationship with my boyfriend. The first few scenes show this frustration and anguish. We used a perspex screen between us to represent a barrier of communication, again reflecting the lyrics of the song.

I worked with the creative director from the ITV Fixers team and we decided to create a world where gay relationships were considered the norm and straight relationships were the minority.

We wanted to show myself and my boyfriend being involved in our relationship, oblivious and unaware of straight people's relationships. We decided to also show a straight couple getting married and we wanted protestors to create a riot. Their signs were made similar to those used by the Phelp's family, shown in BBC's Louis Theroux's documentary 'America's Most Hated Family' (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOrz5k0jWdU). This family belong to an extreme religious group in the USA and I wanted for people to get an insight of how it would be if straight people and their relationships were fought against.

By no means is this video campaign meant to be an anti-straight or anti-religiuos movement.

The video then shows the protestors attacking the bride and tying her to a tree. This idea may seem shocking but it was based on a true story in the USA about Matthew Shepard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Shepard) who was attacked and tied to a fence because of his sexual preference.

At the end of the video I wanted the 'reverse world' to turn back around to reality and I (the gay character) am tortured on the tree.

I hope that people will realise that love is love no matter whether it's with a man or woman and I hope that other LGBT singers will be encouraged to openly sing about their relationships and the more of this we see in the mainstream music media, the less taboo it will seem and the more societies will appreciate that homosexual relationships are just as serious and significant as straight relationships.

Simon Walton
@simonwaltons

Category:

Music

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• what about you?
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• gay
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• straight
• love
• relationships
• reverse
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• pop
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• itv fixers
• itvfixers
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• persecuted

[TheChipJenkins]

This is brilliant - well done SImon! You are making it happen.... So so proud of you :-)

[quavver]

This an incredibly powerful video. Really clever in the way that it portrays the inverse of same-sex marriage in order to convey a message. Well done :-).