WATCH: Sexy New Music Video Offers Beautiful HIV Metaphor

Singer Lyon Hart (above), photographed by Lonnie Poupard Jr.

Gay singer-songwriter Lyon Hart has released a new music video for his single Falling For You (watch it below), which is about two men in a downwardly spiraling relationship, frought with violence and deception. It speaks to the nearly universal experience of staying with someone toxic even after they’ve broken your heart. 

"While the song isn't about HIV specifically, there's certainly a lot of overlap with the emotions in play when you're living with HIV or the uncertainty of new partners in general," Hart tells us. "Making yourself vulnerable to another person always carries some element of risk, both emotionally and physically. In the video, you follow this couple where one of them is clearly battling some personal demons and the other is trying to hold it all together. We get to follow their struggle and you see this interplay of being open and communicative versus closed off in a relationship in both the narrative and in the choreography."

Hart says he originally wrote the lyrics about his own toxic relationship, in which he kept repeating the same mistakes over and over. (Tellingly, the video is shot in such a way that if you overlay the beginning when the door opens and the very end you could essentially watch it on an endless loop.)

"We can all relate to finding ourselves in destructive patterns that we have to break free from to eventually find a sense of peace," Hart says. "I hope the song and the video ultimately speak to finding your way out of the darkness, whether that's a bad relationship, depression, intimate partner violence, or even a life-altering diagnosis."

Featuring stunning, fast-paced visual cuts and mesmerizing modern dance, the video was shot in part at a former rope factory warehouse in the industrial district of the Brooklyn, New York, waterfront. It was directed by Matt VanDaniker and James Manzello and choreographed by the video's two stars, Lonnie Poupard, Jr., who's also Hart's boyfriend, and Kile Hotchkiss.