Three years ago, no one had heard of Lavender Country frontman Patrick Haggerty. Now, he's contemplating who might play him in the movie of his life, currently in the early stages of development in Hollywood.
It's the role of somebody's lifetime, the story of a dairy farmer's kid in the 1950s who became the leader of the first and only (at least as far as anybody knows) gay country band, then a radical community organizer, and, now, a newly discovered, late-in-life Americana sensation.
Joaquin Phoenix? Too old. To resemble young Haggerty, the actor must be pale and delicate and thin; perhaps somebody British. "Some little, skinny, scrawny twit who's not a Hollywood hunk is going to have a chance to play a really juicy role," says Haggerty, 73.
Haggerty is calling from St. Louis, in the middle of a tour. Before "Lavender Country," the band's first and only official album, was reissued in 2014, more than four decades after its original release, the idea of a national tour would have been unthinkable. Haggerty was still playing music, singing to elderly people in retirement homes for pocket money, but he figured the chance for any kind of recognition, even the belated kind, was slipping away. "After having been dead so long, and me having had this whole life, it's like, this doesn't happen to anybody," he says. "I can't believe that it's happening to anybody, much less that it's happening to me. My mouth is still agape."
Haggerty grew up in rural Washington state, a farm boy with an affection for women's clothing. His father, who realized Haggerty was gay before he did, taught him to never sneak around, to never be ashamed of who he was. "He was a saint," Haggerty says of his father, who died when he was a teenager. "I didn't see it that way. I just thought he was a dad who was fair and who loved his kid. I didn't understand all the terror that other gay men, especially in the country, were subjected to in the '50s. I thought all dads treated their sissy kid the way my dad treated me."
Haggerty learned how to play guitar when he was a teenager and thought he might become a movie star or a country singer. After Martin Luther King, Jr. marched in Selma, he decided to become an activist instead. Haggerty joined the Peace Corps, and was discharged after it was discovered he was gay. He came out after the Stonewall riots a few years later, moved to Seattle, and formed Lavender Country. Its self-titled debut, released in 1973, was funded by donations from the city's then-nascent gay community.
Haggerty always knew it was going to be a tough sell. The very existence of a gay country album was a radical act destined to alienate just about everybody, including his friends in Seattle, who viewed country as music for hicks. Also not on board, according to Haggerty: country music fans, and the "corporate closet cases of Nashville," who were not then and are not now overly sympathetic to LGBTQ issues.
"Lavender Country" was punk rock in spirit and salacious in theme, but old-school country in sound. Haggerty says he never considered anything else. "Back in '73, there wasn't going to be any genre that was ready to hear what I was going to say, so why not?" He grew up in country music, and adored it. "I chose country because I love it. And honey darlin', I didn't know how to do anything else."
The centerpiece of "Lavender Country" was a song so intentionally provocative, so scandalously titled, that, 40 years on, we still can't name it in a family newspaper. If there was any career momentum for Lavender Country, and there wasn't, "Cryin' These (Really Bad Word) Tears" snuffed it out. "It was completely unacceptable, but it was still the right word," says Haggerty. "I was going to be outside of this thing, anyway. I wasn't trying to impress anybody, because I knew we weren't going anywhere."
"Lavender Country" sold out its 1,000-copy pressing. The band toured, played a lot of gay pride events, and eventually dissolved. "Haggerty fathered a daughter, Robin, with a lesbian friend, and eventually married an African-American man. He worked as a community organizer, ran for Washington state senate (his running mate was a member of the Nation of Islam. They lost), and tried to be philosophical about Lavender Country. It was dead, and worse _ forgotten. "I was heartsick for 40 years, because we knew what Lavender Country was, and it was just laying there and doing nothing," Haggerty says. The album had no place in history, no value even as a kitschy novelty item on eBay, no affection from country purists. "For 40 years, there wasn't a professional, straight white musician anywhere in the country who wanted to sing with me," Haggerty says, "and I knew why."
Then, two things happened: Progressive issues in general, and LGBTQ issues in particular, went mainstream. "Having been an agitator my whole life, outside the mainstream, I'd put out a leaflet, and 10 or 15 people would show up," Haggerty says. "Now, girlfriend, it's exploded a hundredfold."
Also: "Cryin' ... ," the song that had doomed Haggerty's already flimsy career chances, turned up on YouTube, and was eventually brought to the attention of indie label Paradise of Bachelors, which reissued "Lavender Country" in 2014. It found an audience among hipsters, progressive types and Americana fans, groups with a substantial amount of overlap. It has also attracted an unlikely cohort: rowdy punk kids drawn to its defiant, still subversive subject matter. "They're lowdown and dirty and disrespectful," Haggerty says affectionately. "They love it. They don't care that it's country."
For Haggerty, who intended "Lavender Country" to be an instrument of consciousness-raising and a really good record, something his father would have been proud of, the late-career vindication has had unexpected benefits. "I don't believe in these spiritualist things, but I talk to my dad every day, and I have had a couple of (indications) from him about this," Haggerty says. "He's busting his buttons. He's so proud of me. Because I didn't sneak."
