Hot Men Pashing In A Sweaty Scrum: Mitch Brown & Ian Roberts Star in ANDY’s Music Vid For ‘Can’t Wait’

The scrum in ANDY’s new music video Can’t Wait begins with boots grinding into wet grass, shoulders locked, bodies braced for impact. Then somebody pauses long enough to notice whose head is beside whose thigh, hands wander away from the ball, and this great monument to Australian masculinity melts into kissing, sweat, Gatorade, rain and strains into a glorious queer release.

Let’s get that established early, in case you’re about to watch this video while at work: this music video is incredibly fucking hot. But there’s real work being done, under all that muscle and sweat.

From gay Australian pop artist Andy Cook and directed by Harry Welsh, the video for Can’t Wait stars two men who cracked open sporting silences decades apart: rugby league legend Ian Roberts, who came out publicly in 1995, and former West Coast Eagles defender Mitch Brown, who last year became the first male AFL player, past or present, to publicly identify as bisexual. It took the competition more than 100 years to produce even that one piece of open queer male history. Roberts stood alone for an unconscionably long time.

Inside those sporting worlds, Andy has launched a video asking what might happen if queer men could bring desire, tenderness and their entire selves onto the field.

For Andy, the collision between sport and sexual intimacy was there long before the song. He grew up in Sydney’s Manly and attended what he describes as a Catholic, all-boys “rugby prison”, whose frustratingly ‘yeah the boys’ motto was “turning Manly boys into Manly men”. Its culture treated vulnerability and queerness like a character defect; meanwhile, the boys wrestled, showered together and enacted rituals of physical intimacy, provided nobody named what could be humming beneath it.

But acknowledging that homoeroticism, despite everyone being able to see it, had the potential to incite violence.

“It was terrifying and horny all at once,” he said. “I would never say anything because in one flash you could just see it in someone’s eye. You could just see that maybe they were aroused too. But if you ever misread something, you were in serious danger.”

Years later, after the end of a long-term relationship, Andy entered a period of sexual liberation that many of us can identify with. Dating and exploring his sexuality awakened something he had not possessed the safety to feel when he was younger.

The foundations of the track are, delightfully, as gay as the music video. Andy actually samples audio of his own ~intimate sounds~ in the song — the choice to do so, he laughingly describes to me as “just SO homosexual”. He threads those intimate sounds through football victory chants and the muscular grunting of male-dominated contact sport, then layers breath over a thick beat – so the song seems to pant, strain and climax.

“For so long around my own relationship with sensuality, there was a lot of shame — heaps of shame,” he said. “I was also raised Catholic too. So to have this song out there feels really liberating… it feels beautiful.”

Can’t Wait features queer sporting icons Ian Roberts & Mitch Brown

For Mitch Brown, saying yes to taking part in this video was immediate. Andy had actually just written the track shortly before Mitch publicly came out last year, so when Andy first contacted him about it, he told a man he’d never met that, in a bizarre moment of kismet, he had just finished writing a song about his life.

Mitch says that Can’t Wait became the song that mentally became the soundtrack to his first year living openly as a proud bisexual man.

Being in a relationship with a woman, Mitch has consistently faced biphobic demands to prove himself as queer – something that many bisexuals face, but dialled up to 11 with Mitch being the first in his sporting code. So this video, he explains, would be the first time many people saw him express this part of who he is on screen.

“It shouldn’t be important, right? It shouldn’t, but it is,” he said. Yes — with the way the world still is; in sporting cultures where any mention of queerness is either about slurs or scandals, Mitch being seen on screen in the loving embrace of a man does indeed matter.

Andy laughs as he tells me about broaching the intimate nature of the shoot with him: “The first time Mitch and I actually met, I was so nervous to like tell him what I was going to put him through. I was like, “Hey, do you feel like like spitting Gatorade into my mouth today?'” Mitch grins as he tells me he was emphatically and immediately in. “I love being gay,” laughs Andy gleefully.

But Mitch admits he was a little nervous arriving on the day of the shoot — it was a big moment. But then he spotted Ian Roberts — who he describes as his “gay dad” and protector over the past year — and immediately felt comfortable.

Despite this being the first acting he’s ever done, Andy says he was a natural. In fact, in one romantic sequence, Mitch kisses another player with such intense tenderness that the set actually fell silent.

“Being involved in this moment, the song and the video, really means something to me,” says Mitch earnestly. “It meant something being able to show that, so that comes across hopefully.”

Mitch explains that when he played, he was known as a tough player – but says that when he was shooting this video, he had never felt tougher.

“It’s about being able to bring your best self. And I think that’s the story, right? [After shooting the video], I felt like if I put my real boots on and played an AFL game right then and there. I would have been the best player on the field.”

That may be the clearest answer to the stale panic that queer visibility somehow threatens sport. In reality, the threat has always run in the other direction: players are forced to split themselves apart between their sexuality and their career, to monitor every glance and sentence, then expected to somehow perform at their peak while lugging secrecy around like another body in a tackle.

Can’t Wait imagines the opposite: a field where queer joy is noisy, muscular, romantic and allowed to get a little filthy. A kiss after a try. A scrum that stops pretending. Ian Roberts screaming after a win in the rain, water spraying everywhere.

Mitch says he hopes young queer athletes will see happiness rather than shame, the protest roaring beneath the playfulness and attraction.

“Yeah – lean into how you’re feeling and kiss each other and find out,” agrees Andy, beaming. “There is no one definition of masculinity.”

Toward the end of our interview, he summarises the song and video in a beautifully blunt manner: “A big fuck you.”

Quite right — five stars, chef’s kiss, no notes. Let 👏 the 👏 hot 👏 men 👏 kiss 👏 on 👏 the 👏 field.

Watch ANDY’s Can’t Wait music video here: