Patrick Haggerty has been ready a very long time for the remainder of the world to meet up with him. Fifty years in the past, he assembled a bunch of queer buddies from round Seattle to make a scrappy nation album that broke from the heterosexual strictures of the style. With songs like “Cryin’ These Cocksucking Tears” and “Come Out Singing,” the gleefully homosexual Lavender Nation landed in 1973. However with none business or crucial recognition—to not point out the period’s conservative politics—the self-released file remained a footnote in Haggerty’s life till 2014, when the label Paradise of Bachelors reissued it to a extra progressive era. He lastly hit the highway at age 70, an extended overdue victory lap that secured him his laurels whereas he’s round to take pleasure in them.
Talking from his present residence in Bremerton, Washington, Haggerty is keen to share tales from the years he spent doing every part however Lavender Nation. He’s lived a busy, rewarding life as an activist, organizer, and social employee, campaigning towards homophobia, apartheid, and capitalism at giant. He was significantly busy working with the AIDS advocacy group ACT UP, constructing solidarity throughout the homosexual group whereas stitching anti-fascist, anti-racist, and pro-labor messaging into his outreach efforts. “It’s actually fairly astonishing, to have come full circle and notice that my anti-fascist work and my artwork get to be mixed into the identical me,” Haggerty tells me. “I get to exit on stage and be a screaming Marxist bitch, use all of my artistry and hambonedness to do my life’s work. I get to be precisely who I’m.”
Although Haggerty grew up on a dairy farm in rural Washington, amid a big Catholic household, he had a uniquely supportive residence atmosphere. His father constantly inspired his son to be his absolutely exuberant self, even when that meant heaps of glitter and tulle. “My dad stated I might put on a ballerina outfit at 4-H camp and make blonde wigs out of twine to play like I had lengthy hair with my sisters—being actually brazen and sissy within the Fifties in a really rural setting, all as a result of my dad stated I might,” says Haggerty. “I prefer to say the explanation that I made Lavender Nation after I made it was as a result of my dad stated I might.”
As a substitute of taking a band on the highway to tout the Lavender Nation reissue, Haggerty recruited native musicians in pick-up bands for dates across the nation—assembly the most recent era of younger individuals wanting to be taught from a unprecedented originator. Ever since, he’s discovered himself answering to public consideration he’d by no means anticipated. The lasting energy behind the Lavender Nation resurgence set Haggerty on the highway to a second album, Blackberry Rose, the place he expands from themes of homosexual liberation to incorporate extra narrative songs about love and justice. The crowdfunded effort that first arrived in 2019 has now gotten a proper launch by way of the DIY stalwarts at Don Giovanni, together with a brand new documentary quick.
