Lavender Country

Some artifacts can only be referred to by themselves: A kidney bean is a kidney-shaped bean, and Lavender Country is the best country record by an openly gay person released in 1973. It is an object singular enough in music history that the Country Music Hall of Fame officially recognized it in 1999. Patrick Haggerty, the man who wrote and recorded it, was raised on a dairy farm outside Seattle by a loving and accepting family before the twin shocks of the Stonewall riots and his ejection from the Peace Corps radicalized him. He responded with Lavender Country, pressing about 1,000 copies with the help of a local gay community organization and selling them by word-of-mouth and in the back pages of gay magazines. Once those were gone, that was more or less it—Haggerty remained a staunch advocate of gay rights, and performed Lavender Country songs at pride events and community centers. But his record receded into history, to a rumor perfuming the edges of record collector conversation.

Now that the resourceful and adventurous North Carolina label Paradise of Bachelors is reissuing Lavender Country, the enduring richness of Haggerty's achievement can be appreciated again. Haggerty didn't just write a "gay country album" for the political theatre. There are winking lyrics about tumbling in the hay and a rewrite of "Back in the Saddle Again" as "Back in the Closet Again", but the country signifiers aren't just cheap hay-bale-and-tractor-bed props for a message. From the inexpertly sawed fiddle of Eve Morris to Michael Carr's saloon piano to Haggerty's reedy, searching tenor, it is a country album through and through. The sound is wobbly and amateurish, but in a playful, "come on y'all" sort of way, and you can easily imagine a roomful of enthusiastic participants in folding chairs at a community-center basement, singing along at Haggerty's encouragement.

Like any good culture-clash project, Lavender Country stops to have fun with sly subtext. "There's milk and honey flowin' when you're blowin' Gabriel's horn", Haggerty leers on "Come Out Singing". On the title track, he envisions a utopia where you wear your "frilly blouse" to "The People's Outhouse" and "the folks will hang around and pee for days." "Cryin' These Cocksucking Tears" claimed the FCC license of a DJ brave or foolhardy enough to play it on the air. On it, Haggerty's backup vocalist Morris sings the words "cock-sucking tears" with a clarion earnestness, like Joan Baez working blue. It is a fresh joy to hear every time it comes along.

But Lavender Country is not a really a "funny" album. The songs address life inside the gay-rights struggle, and the specifics hurt. On "Waltzing Will Trilogy", Haggerty rails against the "pack of straight white honky quacks" administering shock treatment to homosexuals—"they call it mental hygiene but I call it psychic rape," he barks. Young men are beaten to death by police and sodomized by prison guards. "Back in the Closet" and "Straight White Patterns" detail the quiet torture of living within a straight white regime. And "I Can't Shake The Stranger Out of You" is a lovelorn take on gay cruising, a pickup song that doubles as a lament. "I reckon you're lookin for some neckin, yes I do," Haggerty sings, inviting the song's subject to "climb right up on into my manger, but let me warn you about one small danger, babe/ I can't shake the stranger out of you." The song's tone is masterful—sexy, sad, and tender all at once.

This is why, despite the references to the struggles of the era, Lavender Country never feels like a footnote, historical or otherwise. Haggerty's songs  are resonant and wonderful, folding pain into jokes and vice versa and exuding heartbreak and anger and wry good humor. You could never switch the gender pronouns on a song like "Georgie Pie", where Haggerty beseeches a would-be lover who remains closeted, and yet the song speaks to anyone who has ever felt the sting of a rebuke. Haggerty's playfully frank "Your body odor lingers in my toes and in my nose and in my head" on "Come Out Singing" will make you grin with recognition if you've ever picked up and smelled someone's t-shirt.

Haggerty kept moving after Lavender Country, running for local office twice and working in anti-police brutality and anti-apartheid movements. He is 70 years old now, and often plays to senior centers (he mostly sticks to Hank Williams and Loretta Lynn). Lavender Country is a piece of his past, one moment in a busy life spent in social justice. But, any way it is viewed, it's a tremendous feat, a remarkable act of bravery and honesty as well as a statement on the universality of love and lust and belonging. Pop songs are limited vessels for social justice, but the good ones do a remarkable job of teaching empathy, a few minutes at a time, and Haggerty's songs build a better world to live in, for forty minutes or so. There aren't many achievements more exalted than that.