69: Lavender Country // Lavender Country
Lavender Country
Lavender Country
1973, Gay Community Social Services of Seattle Inc.
There’s an anecdote Patrick Haggerty tells in the little zine that comes with the 2014 Paradise of Bachelors reissue of Lavender Country that always makes me tear up. Haggerty was raised one of ten children on a tenant dairy farm in northern Washington in the 1950s. It was obvious to Haggerty’s father from a young age that his boy was gay and, perhaps surprisingly given the times, he was quietly accepting of it. By the time Haggerty was in high school, he enjoyed cross-dressing, and he decided to try out for the head cheerleader position at his school.
Dolled up for his tryout in glitter and “a big lipstick smile” the future singer, in a perfectly teenage moment, dodges his father (who’d come by the school to pick him up)—not because it occurred to Haggerty that his father would be embarrassed by him, but because he was embarrassed to be seen with a dad “with cow crap all over his jeans, his snaggle tooth, his four-day beard and his beat up old fedora hat.” After the tryout, they talked in his father’s car:
He said, ‘Listen to me. I don’t have time to change my clothes just to run up to the high school to go and pick you up. I’m a dairy farmer—these are the clothes that I wear. I’m proud of what I do. I don’t have to change my clothes; I don’t have a reason to change my clothes. Now, were you proud of yourself up on that stage with all that glitter and lipstick?’
I said, ‘Well, I think I’m gonna win.’
He said, ‘Yeah, I think you’re gonna win too, but that’s not what I asked you. I asked you if you were proud of yourself.’
I said, ‘Uh… er… well… um.’
He said, ‘Listen, when you leave this valley and go to the University of Washington Drama School, like you say you’re gonna do, who are you gonna run around with at night?’
And I said, ‘I don’t know.’
He said, ‘I think you do know. And it’s not gonna be that McLaughlin girl I’ve been trying to get you to date.’
At this point I am slinking to the bottom of my seat. I know full well exactly what he’s talking about—pretending like I don’t. My father says to me—my father is ill; he’s like a year and a half away from the grave, and he knows it, and so do I—and he says, ‘You know, I’m not gonna be here when you’re a full grown man.’
I said, ‘Yeah, Dad, I know that.’
He said, ‘Well, I’m gonna tell you something right now, and I want you to remember it.’
I said, ‘Okay, Dad, what?’
And he said, ‘Whoever you run around with at the University of Washington Drama School when I’m gone, don’t sneak. Because if you spend your life sneaking, it means you think you’re doing the wrong thing. And if you think you’re doing the wrong thing, you’ll ruin your immortal soul. So whoever you run around with, don’t sneak, and be proud of it. Do you hear me?’
And I said, ‘… Yes, Dad.’
Haggerty, who passed away in 2022 just one year shy of the 50th anniversary of his Lavender Country’s self-titled debut, grew up to be a skinny little guy, but one who didn’t sneak around anybody. Like a lot of lefty artists of the ‘60s and ‘70s, he believed sincerely that absurdity, surrealism, and satire were forces that could reveal the contradictions of systems of oppression, and thereby cause them to collapse. But he also believed shared appreciation for weirdo art was as important to the unity of a movement as a shared politics or philosophy. Lavender Country’s songs are intended to be sung at protests, a pink answer to oddball folkie anthems like Country Joe’s “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” and Phil Ochs’ “Love Me I’m a Liberal.” In 1973, a group of people singing a song like “Cryin’ These Cocksucking Tears” was a message to the singers and the straight world alike: there are more people who can relate to this out there than you ever thought. I don’t think that message would be lost at a protest in 2023 either.
Lavender Country was a feeling listeners could take home with their copy of the record, even if that home was a place where it didn’t seem like there were any gays or long-hairs for miles. It was originally pressed in an edition of 1000, and the copies were moved hand to hand and via ads in alternative weeklies and the like over the next few years. It was eventually rediscovered in the late ‘90s, and CMT has even highlighted its historical significance as “the first openly gay country record”—though I imagine its gleeful vulgarity would present a tougher pill for the network to swallow than its queerness.
Taken purely on its musical merits, I’d recommend Lavender Country to anyone with a fondness for folk or country. By his mid-20s Haggerty already had the reedy but relaxing voice of a sentient rocking chair, and he leads his homespun band through a collection of fetching songs, like sweetly horny opener “Come Out Singing” and high-lonesome gender protest duet “Straight White Patterns.” It’s “I Can’t Shake the Stranger Out of You” that rises above the rest, a should-be country standard reminiscent of The Flatlanders. Haggerty weaves a braid of cocksure boasts and compliments (“I can hit the sack like an aristocrat / If you’ll let me be your tricky box of Cracker Jack’s”; “You’re hotter than the popcorn dancing in the pan”), but it’s all raging against the closing of a door—the same old fiddle dance with a lover who won’t ever truly open up.
