I wonder what kind of reception this video would have these days. Wikipedia has a good writeup of how the video was made, and the contemporary reaction:

Despite its major success, the song is sometimes associated with the end of his career as a singles musician due to the music video… Squier’s concert ticket sales immediately declined and he later fired his managers. He has accused Ortega of deceiving him and altering his original concept, which Ortega denies. While Squier remains steadfast that the video was solely responsible for the initial decline in his popularity, other commentators are less certain.

…

Squier himself and other observers, believe its homoeroticism alienated a significant portion of his fan base (primarily teenage boys at the time) and ruined his career. “I liked Billy Squier very much,” says Rudolf Schenker of Scorpions “but then I saw him doing this video in a very terrible way. I couldn’t take the music serious anymore.”[2]

…Def Leppard singer Joe Elliott recalled his initial impressions of the video: “We were watching it through our fingers. I remember saying at the time, ‘Mick Jagger can get away with that … Billy Squier can’t.’ Sadly, I was right. It’s just one of those things, where it’s like, ‘Oh man, no, please, don’t do that!’ We all loved the Don’t Say No album—things like ‘The Stroke’ are fucking great. But then he goes and does that, and it’s like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me’.”[3]

Ratt guitarist Warren DeMartini, whose band was on tour with Squier in 1984 at the time the video was released, recalled to Prato: “We almost never sound-checked, so we were laying around the hotel room, just passing our time watching TV. I was seeing [Squier] on local TV channels complaining that he used the wrong director, he was really talked into doing that. The thing that I could never understand was why it wasn’t changed or stopped—because it was clearly something that was detrimental. I remember thinking, ‘Why is this being allowed to continue’?”

… [about the making of the video] …

Ortega suggested to Squier that he do some of the same moves he did during his shows, without his guitar. Squier’s idea was that the resulting footage should be grainy and in darker, subdued colors, evoking the 1980 film American Gigolo. He rejected a suggestion by Ortega that it look instead like Tom Cruise’s air guitar scene near the beginning of the 1983 film Risky Business.[2]

The video shoot was held in Los Angeles within two weeks of the world premiere date. Squier showed up on the soundstage and saw the decorated set. It was not what he had envisioned, and he expressed his misgivings. Ortega reassured him that the finished version would look like he wanted it to. “I didn’t like the sheets but I trusted the guy.” Tom Mohler, one of Squier’s managers, asked Ortega to make sure there was footage of the band performing the entire song to use as coverage; he says Ortega promised to do so but did not.[2]

Mohler pleaded with Capitol president Jim Mazza to just cancel the video but the label stood firm. “I wish I had had the balls to say to the label, ‘We’re not putting it out,’” Mohler laments.[2]

Squier was aghast when he watched the video. Capitol told him not to worry since the single was so successful but his girlfriend told him it would ruin him. He was touring at the time and recalls that as soon as the video came out, he stopped selling out shows, in some cases performing to half-empty arenas. “I couldn’t figure out why Capitol didn’t pull that video and make another one,” said Warren DeMartini of Ratt, who were opening for Squier at the time. Squier learned later that he could have done so himself, as Bruce Springsteen had been able to do with a video he disliked. “Everything I’d worked for my whole life was crumbling and I couldn’t stop it.”[2] -wikipedia.