We need gay love songs that end well

For a long time, if you were a gay lad looking for love stories like your own, you had two options. Either the story ended badly, or it didn't exist. Death, illness, a family that won't accept it, a lover who marries a woman, an ending on a station platform with someone in tears. The films knew it. The novels knew it. The songs, on the rare occasions they dared say anything, knew it too.

I'm not saying those stories had no reason to exist. Many of them told the truth of their time, and some are masterpieces. But if that's all that reaches you, you learn a dangerous lesson: that people like you, by definition, end in tragedy.

The happy ending as a political act

It sounds like an exaggeration to call a happy ending political. But think about it. Straight love songs can afford to end well without anyone calling them naive. There are thousands of songs where boy meets girl, they like each other, end of story. Nobody asks them to justify their happiness.

When two men love each other in a song, on the other hand, it seems the story has to pay a toll. Something has to go wrong. As if the listener wouldn't believe it if everything went fine.

And that toll has consequences. A boy who has only ever seen stories like his end in a hospital or a goodbye learns to distrust his own happiness. When he finally falls in love and everything's going well, he braces for the blow. He can't quite enjoy it, because he thinks he's living the first act of a tragedy. That seems a very heavy inheritance for something as simple as loving someone.

I want songs that don't pay that toll. Two lads who fancy each other, get together, argue about who does the washing-up, move in together, get bored on the sofa on a Sunday. And carry on. That may not sound like much, but it's almost revolutionary in a repertoire that for decades only knew how to tell our story in tears.

The hard part of writing happiness

Now the honest bit. Writing love that works out is much harder than writing love that doesn't. Drama has its own engine. Conflict drives the lyric, and every line has something to resolve. Happiness, by contrast, has no conflict. If everything's fine, what are you going to say?

I've lost count of the times I've started a happy love song and it's ended up a birthday card. Pretty, yes, but with nothing inside. I find it hard. I admit it.

What I've learnt is that love that works out has conflicts too; they're just small ones. The sock on the floor. The one who snores. The mother-in-law asking when you're getting married with suspicious enthusiasm. Humour helps enormously here. A happy couple told with humour stops being a postcard and becomes a house with people in it. And PLANETA GAYFOLK humour, so often aimed at exes, works for this too: for laughing fondly at what's going right.

There's another trick that works for me: putting the conflict outside the couple. The two of them are fine, and what goes wrong is the world, the neighbour, the waiter asking if you want separate bills. The couple become a team against the outside, and that's a story that ends well too. Maybe the loveliest kind.

The trilogy ends in liberation

When I planned the GAYFOLK trilogy, I knew exactly how it had to end. The three albums are heard as a single story in three acts. The first, «Descubierto un nuevo planeta llamado GAYFOLK» (A new planet called GAYFOLK has been discovered), is the discovery of a place where you can be who you are. The second, «Ojalá se pudiera viajar a GAYFOLK» (If only you could travel to GAYFOLK), is the longing to get there. And the third is called «El día de la liberación» (Liberation Day).

It isn't a sad title. I chose it on purpose. I could have closed on a loss, on nostalgia, on an "almost". In a way that would have been more elegant, more art-house. But I didn't want anyone who listened to all three albums in a row to finish with the same old lump in their throat. I wanted them to finish with the feeling of having arrived.

That's my small answer to the tradition of the sad ending. A long story, told across three albums, that ends well.

For whoever's listening alone

I think a lot about the lad who listens to my songs with his headphones on, in a room where nobody yet knows what he feels. For him, a gay love song that ends well works as information. It's telling him it's possible. That there are people who love each other, who stay, who grow old together and keep arguing about the air-conditioning temperature.

I'm sure plenty of people would have benefited from hearing that sooner and more often. I don't say that bitterly; I say it the way you'd notice something missing from a shelf. Now I'm trying to put it there myself.

Nor do I want to fall into the opposite trap and only write happy songs. That would be another lie. Break-ups exist, exes exist and some of them deserve a whole song. I write about all of that. But I want there to be balance overall, so that anyone looking for a story that ends well can find one without having to dig too hard.

My dream, if I have to name one, is that one day a happy gay love song will be so ordinary that nobody notices. That nobody needs to write an article like this one. That it plays on the radio among other love songs and nobody thinks it's special.

We're not there yet. That's why I keep writing them.

The GAYFOLK trilogy is a free download, no sign-up, at mikesaintlouis.com/descargas.