There is a moment on "Cryin' These Cocksucking Tears" where the fiddle turns almost courtly, a sweet little country waltz figure, and Patrick Haggerty sings a title that no radio station in 1973 would touch. That collision is the whole method of Lavender Country. The music is pure Opry songbook, two-steps and weepers; the words are a manifesto.
Haggerty came by both halves honestly. Born in 1944 near Port Angeles, Washington, the sixth of ten children on a tenant dairy farm, he grew up with barn-radio country and, unusually for the era, a father who told him not to sneak about who he was. The Peace Corps was less understanding: it discharged him in 1966 for being gay. He landed in Seattle, came out in 1969, joined the Gay Liberation Front and folded his politics into the only songwriting language he had.
The band that formed around him in 1972 was small and loose: Michael Carr on keyboards, Eve Morris on fiddle and vocals, Robert Hammerstrom on guitar, Haggerty out front with a tenor that cracks in the right places. No label would have gone near it, so the Gay Community Social Services of Seattle paid for the record themselves, with activist Faygele Ben-Miriam helping to get it made. A thousand copies were pressed.
What makes the album more than an artefact is its refusal to pick a mood. "Come Out Singing" opens like a Sunday-morning hymn to liberation; "Back in the Closet Again" is a barroom joke with a knife in it; "Straight White Patterns" takes the songwriter's own class and race to task; and the "Waltzing Will Trilogy" tells of a man committed to a psychiatric ward for loving another man, over nearly six minutes of unhurried three-four time. Haggerty was writing protest music, but he understood that country's habit of grinning through heartbreak was already halfway to camp.
The rediscovery came in stages. Paradise of Bachelors reissued the album in March 2014, complete with a chapbook of Haggerty's oral history, and the Country Music Hall of Fame duly recognised it as the first openly gay country album. A short documentary followed in 2016. Then came something rarer than a reissue: a second act. Haggerty assembled a new touring band that included Mya Byrne and Paisley Fields, players from the generation his record had quietly seeded, recorded a duet with Trixie Mattel in 2020 and released Blackberry Rose, his first album of new songs since 1973, which Don Giovanni Records put out on vinyl in February 2022.
He died that October, at 78, in Bremerton, where he lived with his husband, J.B. Broughton. By then the thousand-copy record had done its slow work. Every queer artist now playing pedal steel in a Brooklyn saloon or a Nashville side room is standing on ten songs that were never supposed to be heard.
