The late musician saw overdue appreciation for his bold, pioneering 70s gay country album when he was in his golden years
• Lavender Country’s Patrick Haggerty, pioneering gay country musician, dies aged 78
The last thing Patrick Haggerty expected was fame. In the early 2010s, the Washington native had put the pioneering gay country album he made as Lavender Country in the early 70s to the back of his mind and was contentedly performing covers of Doris Day and Que Sera Sera at local retirement homes. But after an anonymous YouTube user uploaded his groundbreaking music, a flurry of streams and blogs led to 1973’s Lavender Country being unleashed anew. A reissue from North Carolina label Paradise of Bachelors heralded a wave of accolades and interest for the self-declared “screaming Marxist bitch”. In the autumn of his life, Haggerty’s world turned upside down. And no one was more shocked than Haggerty himself. “It catapulted way further than I expected,” he said in 2014, of the album’s overdue embrace. “Lavender Country is going down in fucking history, and I lived to see it.”
The music of Haggerty, who died this week at age 78 after complications from a stroke, is a cornerstone of Gay lib-era creativity, a testament to bootstraps activism and among the smartest country songwriting to come out of the 1970s. Today’s LGBTQ+ country stars such as Trixie Mattel and Jake Blount credit him as a foundational artist; Orville Peck, who performed with Haggerty in 2019, calls him the “grandfather of queer country”. Over see-sawing fiddle and honky-tonk piano on Lavender Country, Haggerty boldly told the story of his own life with eccentric and poetic flair. Cryin’ These Cocksucking Tears is a pride anthem rooted in rage, calling out macho hypocrisy and phallocentric bullshit, while Waltzing Will Trilogy takes on police brutality and the electroshock conversion therapy that was despicably inflicted on gay men. “They call it mental hygiene,” Haggerty sings, as his voice curdles into a snarl. “But I call it psychic rape!”
