Lavender Country is a timeless ambassador for LGBTQ rights and social change

The year is 1973.

Artists who would go on to become immortalized as some of the greatest musical acts of all time are releasing tunes that will ingrain their melodies into the memories of thousands of listeners. The Rolling Stones’ “Angie,” Sweet’s “Ballroom Blitz,” and Elton John’s “Crocodile Rock” are all time capsules that have withstood the test of time, still receiving attention over 40 years later.

And then there’s Lavender Country’s “Cryin’ These C**k Sucking Tears.”

There are lines in Lavender Country’s 1973 single that separate the song and its respective self-titled album from the norm of the Country music genre at the time.

“I’m fighting for when there won’t be no straight men, ‘cause you all have a common disease,” would have likely struck a nerve in the straight-white-male majority that made up a majority of the country music scene had it received mainstream attention.

In fact, radio DJ Shan Ottey was fired from his job at the Seattle radio station Krab for playing “Cryin’ These C**k Sucking Tears” on the air.

Lavender Country is a deeply personal project from singer-songwriter and LGBTQ activist Patrick Haggerty. Its first and only album, Lavender Country, was the first openly-gay country album to ever be released. Unfortunately, with many forces working against it, such as a small budget and the prevalent homophobia of the time, Lavender Country never got a proper chance at rattling the cages of the conservative-right-wing majority ruled country music scene. After selling all of the original copies of its debut album, the band disbanded.

For 40 years, Lavender Country would remain widely unheard and unknown until “Cryin’ These C**k Sucking Tears” was uploaded to Youtube and discovered by the independent North Carolina record label Paradise of Bachelors. The label signed Lavender Country and rereleased the debut album in 2014, giving Haggerty another chance to share the Lavender Country story with a new generation and a more accepting crowd. Now, Haggerty is touring the country in support of an album that is over 40 years old, but that carries a timeless message.

Young, gay and angry

Haggerty was raised on a dairy farm in rural Washington near Port Angeles, near the Canadian border. He was surrounded by a rather large family of nine siblings and his mother and father.

Haggerty describes himself in his elementary years as “scrawny” and “a sissy,” while his father was “stern” and “forthright.” As a sophomore in High School, Haggerty ran for the position of Pep Leader. One day, to prepare for the role, he wore lipstick and glitter to school. After spotting his father walking his way down the hallway, Haggerty ducked out to the side and hid for fear of what his father would say about his feminine appearance. Later that day, his father confronted him. Rather than criticize Haggerty for the lipstick and the glitter, he instead gave Haggerty a piece of advice that would stick with him for the rest of his life.

“If you sneak, it means you think you’re doing the wrong thing. If you spend your whole life sneaking, then you’ll spend your whole life thinking you’re doing the wrong thing, and if you do that you’ll ruin your immortal soul, so don’t sneak,” Haggerty recalls his father saying in the documentary These C**k Sucking Tears.

Perhaps it was his father’s advice that helped Haggerty openly embrace his sexuality and go on to be a prominent advocate for LGBTQ rights. After college, Haggerty joined the Peace Corps, but was discharged in 1966 due to his openness with his sexuality. He then moved to Seattle to pursue graduate studies at the University of Washington. It was there that he became involved with the Gay Liberation Front and began to become more involved as an activist. Shortly after the Stonewall riots in 1969, Haggerty formed Lavender Country.

“I was having to make a serious life decision about whether to try and do something with a music career, or to be a loud-mouthed, gay-Marxist radical,” Haggerty says.

Haggerty decided to pursue the latter, fully aware that writing an LGBTQ country album would bring him neither fame nor fortune, as well as ostracize him from the mostly conservative, right-wing country music scene.

“Just the fact that its gay country means we can’t sell it,” Haggerty says. “So, if that’s the truth, then we might as well say what we really want to say. We didn’t have to water down anything because we couldn’t sell it and we knew it.”

According to Haggerty, Lavender Country’s first and only album was written for “people who are out of the closet or trying to come out of the closet” and was released in April of 1973. Ads were run in the underground LGBTQ press, stating that if you sent $3 to PO Box 228 Seattle, Washington, you would receive a copy of the Lavender Country album in return.

“(The LGBTQ community) didn’t have a mechanism in the community to distribute our art and music, so, we couldn’t, and we wouldn’t,” Haggerty says. “We didn’t have a way, never mind all of the homophobia.”

One thousand copies of the album were produced, with funding coming from the Gay Community Social Services of Seattle with assistance from LGBTQ-rights activist Faygele Ben-Miriam. Over the course of three years, Haggerty would gradually sell every copy. In 1976, the group disbanded. Rather than print more copies of the record, Haggerty decided to focus his energy and money into other areas of the LGBTQ movement.

“We had more important things to do with that money in the movement than reissue Lavender Country,” Haggerty says.

Unbeknownst to Haggerty at the time of its release, Lavender Country defined the rest of Haggerty’s life. It was a deeply person record that explored the struggles of a gay man trying to build a relationship with a partner in a time when relationships between two men often resulted in guilt and alienation. It’s a record full of sadness, but it’s also full of pride, opening with the lines “Waking up to say, ‘hip, hip, hooray, I’m glad I’m gay,’ I can’t repress my happiness ever since I tried your way.”

The album became a stepping stone for Haggerty’s activism, as he began to branch out into other social issues, such as socialism and African-American rights, all the while never looking back at the bridges he burned in the music industry speaking his voice.

Stepping outside of identity politics

Haggerty admits that while advocating for LGBTQ rights will always be important to him, he no longer considers himself shoehorned into just one category of activism.

“We all have to jump out of our communities to unite as a class adhering to a basic Marxist premise,” Haggerty says. “It was great to have identity politics, but identity politics are keeping us divided as people who are struggling and rediscovering our working-class identity.”

Haggerty is no stranger to politics. He ran for office twice: Once for Seattle City Council and once as an independent candidate for a seat in the Washington House of Representatives. After coming into contact with members of the Nation of Islam, and they ran a joint political campaign in 1988 and 1989. They received around 18 percent of the votes.

“We weren’t stupid, we knew there was practically no chance of winning the election, but we were getting our political message out and making a statement,” Haggerty says. “Those are really, really rich years for me in terms of my learning about the struggle against racism.

Haggerty married a black man from Philadelphia, a marriage that has lasted over 30 years. They adopted a black son together, and Haggerty has a daughter with a lesbian. His daughter went on to marry someone from the Caribbean’s and they also had a kid together.

“On the inside of a black family for 30 years, you get to learn a lot, honey!” Haggerty says. “It’s made my life immeasurably richer. It would’ve been a vapid and shallow life without this experience.”

Haggerty’s life seemed to be quieting down a bit. He took up playing songs to elderly Alzheimer’s patients at a nursing home. The pay was a meager $30 every performance, but Haggerty did it out of pure enjoyment. It was around this time that interest in Lavender Country took off.

“I haven’t even thought of doing anything with Lavender Country for years,” Haggerty says. “It fell upon me in my dotage.”

The unexpected return of Lavender Country

In 2014, Lavender Country was redistributed through Paradise of Bachelors.

“The most heartening thing about the Lavender Country story for me is that people are ready to hear it and I wrote it as an organizing tool for social change in the first place,” Haggerty says.

The first community to rally around Lavender Country’s return were young members of the DIY punk scene, what Haggerty refers to as the pink-haired, screaming anarchic kids.

“The kids are on the frontline of the politics and they get it,” Haggerty says, a statement that rings especially true in today’s gun violence debate. “They understood what it was. They were the first ones to love Lavender Country.”

Lavender Country has become a timeless vehicle for advocating for social change, which was Haggerty’s intention during the inception of the group.

“The material is falling on new ears that are much more educated than they were 50 years ago,” Haggerty says. “It’s also falling at a time when capitalism is under real stress, and that’s what this movement towards fascism is about. When capitalism reaches a certain stage and gets stressed out, it has to choose between fascism and socialism.”

A driving point of Haggerty’s current tour is to unite the working class in order to overthrow the establishment. He argues that the immigration debate, as well as the Black Lives Matter debate, are just tools used to divide the working class.

“The people who are being forced to swim the river in order to make a meager living are part of the international working class,” Haggerty says. “They’re not the problem, they are our comrades in the struggle.”

The LGBTQ community, the Black Lives Matter activists and immigrants are all a part of the working class that needs to come together, he adds.

“The class is really struggling with a lot of white people who are confused about the Black Lives Matter movement,” Haggerty says. “They have all kinds of weird, frightening and utterly baseless misconceptions about what the movement is and what it represents.”

Haggerty has seen mainstream country artists gravitate towards touring with him in order to latch onto his movement. St. Louis singer-songwriter Ryan Koenig is one such musician. According to Haggerty, Koenig wanted everyone to know that he wasn’t a “redneck right-ringer” and didn’t care what effect his association with Haggerty had on his career.

“They want to put their name on it because they want the world to know what side they’re on,” Haggerty says. “(Country musicians) know that they’re caught in an artistic trap that’s keeping them from freedom of expression. And we don’t like it.”

It’s such an unlikely phenomenon that a project left untouched for 40 years could return with only the same material and have such a heavy impact, inspiring listeners and artists to break out of the mold and stand up for their beliefs.

Haggerty is a fearless advocate for LGBTQ rights, anti-racism and social change, embodying that iconic Johnny Cash middle-finger in the air attitude, but from the frontline of the marginalized people that he’s committed his entire life to fighting for, and will continue to do so.

“It’s a fun adventure in this point in my life,” Haggerty says. “It makes for a fun story, right?”

Lavender Country performs at the Riverwest Public House on May 1 with Shle Berry, Sugar Ransom and Lauryl Sulfate and her Ladies of Leisure. The show starts at 8 p.m. and admission is $7.