Suddenly Haggerty’s dream of being a country star that he thought was dead had been revived. The rerelease was reviewed in national publications and named a best new reissue by Pitchfork. The label reissued “Lavender Country” in 2014 to a much wider audience, and the album that was now four decades old still felt timely as the legal battle for same-sex marriage was unfolding. That YouTube link made its way to a music collector, who brought the album to the attention of a record label called Paradise of Bachelors, which reached out to Haggerty by surprise one day. A few years later, even though the original album had been out of print for decades, someone uploaded a copy of one of the original songs to YouTube. For a while he and his friends would travel around to senior living homes and sing classics for residents.Īround 1999, an editor at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum discovered Lavender Country and reached out to Haggerty to include the album in a roundup of gay-themed country music. Haggerty moved on with his life, marrying his boyfriend, raising a family and continuing to be politically active. “There was a little wound in my heart about the fact that Lavender Country was dead and wasn’t ever going to go anywhere and nobody was ever going to listen to it,” Haggerty said. But after a few years, the album and the group were mostly forgotten. It sold about 1,000 copies, Haggerty estimates, mostly by running ads in underground magazines, and he and his friends spent a couple of years doing Lavender Country shows in the area. The self-titled album “Lavender Country” had little initial impact outside of the Seattle gay community.
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“So we didn’t have any choice except to make it ourselves and the community of folks who were doing Stonewall rebellion stuff in Seattle.” But it was really too outlandish for any genre,” said Haggerty. “ ‘Lavender Country’ had no commercial value when we made it because it was too outlandish. The idea for a record was a collective one, with Haggerty joining up with his friends to write lyrics, play the instruments and collect money to book studio time. As a young man in the 1970s, Haggerty was heavily involved in radical gay rights activism, spurred by the Stonewall rebellion in New York City. Haggerty, now 78, grew up on a tenant dairy farm about 100 miles west of Seattle on the Olympic Peninsula, one of 10 children.
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Nearly 50 years later, Lavender Country is back with a sophomore record that connects today’s LGBTQ country musicians to historical roots in activism and social change. Led by singer-songwriter Patrick Haggerty, the self-titled album was created by a collective of activists, singers and musicians with ribald songs focused on LGBTQ people, like “Back in the Closet Again” and “Come Out Singing,” as well as an explicit song bashing straight men that has since become a cult favorite. In 1973, amid the growing gay rights movement, a band called Lavender Country recorded a country music album that unabashedly explored LGBTQ themes, becoming a landmark that would nonetheless disappear for decades.