![]() ![]() He was the all-too-rare example of a queer elder who lived to see the world catch up to his boundary-breaking music, and receive the flowers that had long been his due.Īnd Haggerty refused to be a footnote or curio. In the liner notes to Strong Love, a 2012 compilation of early gay artists that included Lavender Country, the musician Richard Dworkin notes: “One could argue that Patrick Haggerty … was as in-your-face shocking and transgressive as anything the would produce – up to and including the Sex Pistols and Dead Kennedys.” Haggerty set the stage for LGBTQ+ country artists to follow, from kd lang and TJ Osborne to Brandi Carlile. “It’s not a surprise with a father like that, and in a country setting like that, that I was the first person to record a gay country album!” “In a hay-field in redneck Washington … he went to the bottom of his soul,” Haggerty said. But his father hadn’t shown up to admonish him, and, that day, reminded Haggerty to be proud of who he was. When Haggerty’s father showed up at the school, still in his cow dung-smeared work clothes, the 15-year-old hid from him. By 15, he was auditioning for head cheerleader at his local high school in a costume involving glitter, lipstick and pom-poms. Growing up slinging hay bales on a dairy farm in Dry Creek, Washington, Haggerty’s older brothers called him a sissy, but he still managed to corral them into recreating scenes from Cleopatra at the local lake, featuring the young singer as the Queen of the Nile. Haggerty was always a canary in a coal mine. It’s impossible not to smile at his wordplay, whether or not that sweaty brew is one for you. His songwriting is imbued with the joy of gay sex in all its unsanitized, fragrant glory, singing, in Georgie Pie, of goblins promising “musty lust in the closets of seclusion”, or, in Come Out Singing, the flirting fingers and body odors that linger “in my toes and in my nose and in my head”. Part of what makes Lavender Country’s 70s music so enduring is Haggerty’s refusal to couch his queerness in allusions or metaphor in a decade when even flamboyant gay stars such as Sylvester declined to put a public label on their sexuality. The album was promoted by word of mouth and in the back pages of gay magazines, with advertisements nestled among more illicit advertisements. With the help of his community, Haggerty recruited musicians for a band, recorded Lavender Country, and pressed 1,000 copies with the help of a grant from the Gay Community Services of Seattle. When the meeting place of the community group became unusable, Haggerty offered up his home as an informal headquarters. After being kicked out of the Peace Corps in the late 60s for being gay, he settled in Seattle and became a foundational member in the local chapter of the Gay Liberation Front (he later co-founded Act Up in the city). ![]() Haggerty knew about institutional prejudice first hand. Lavender country: Cryin’ These Cocksucking Tears – video ![]()
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