Queer Country

Shana Goldin-Perschbacher

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780252053221
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

• A Variety Best Music Book of 2022
• A No Depression Most Memorable Music Book of 2022
• A Library Journal Best Arts and Humanities Book of 2022
• A Pitchfork Best Music Book of 2022
• A Boot Best Music Book of 2022
• A Ticketmaster Best Music Book of 2022
• A Happy Magazine Best Music Book of 2022
• Woody Guthrie First Book Awardwinner
• Awarded a Certificate of Merit in the 2023 ARSC Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research in the category Best Historical Research in Country, Folk, Roots, or World Music.

Though frequently ignored by the music mainstream, queer and transgender country and Americana artists have made essential contributions as musicians, performers, songwriters, and producers. Queer Country blends ethnographic research with analysis and history to provide the first in-depth study of these artists and their work. Shana Goldin-Perschbacher delves into the careers of well-known lesbian artists like k.d. lang and Amy Ray and examines the unlikely success of singer-songwriter Patrick Haggerty, who found fame forty years after releasing the first out gay country album. She also focuses on later figures like nonbinary transgender musician Rae Spoon and renowned drag queen country artist Trixie Mattel; and on recent breakthrough artists like Orville Peck, Amythyst Kiah, and chart-topping Grammy-winning phenomenon Lil Nas X. Many of these musicians place gender and sexuality front and center even as it complicates their careers. But their ongoing efforts have widened the circle of country/Americana by cultivating new audiences eager to connect with the artists' expansive music and personal identities.

Detailed and one-of-a-kind, Queer Country reinterprets country and Americana music through the lives and work of artists forced to the margins of the genre's history.

chapter 1 queer country and sincerity

Nobody ever dreamed of accusing Lavender Country of being invalid.… [I]t was honest information about the topic.¹

The first openly gay country album came about because Patrick Haggerty, the son of white Irish Catholic tenant dairy farmers in rural Washington, put together a band of gay and allied friends in 1972 to get out what he called “honest information” about homosexuality and Marxism.² Despite growing up in what he later realized was an unusually progressive and loving family for a gay child in the 1950s, he had at times experienced confusion and trauma and lacked sources of knowledge and advice from other gay people, and the mainstream media of his youth did not offer happy representations of being a gay person. Haggerty was sent to India with the Peace Corps but was kicked out for falling in love with his roommate. The situation was considered so serious that the head psychiatrist of the army questioned him and blamed his homosexuality on his working-class upbringing. Traumatized by the experience, Haggerty returned home depressed. His family doctor had him institutionalized, until a prescient night nurse told him, a week into his stay, that he was simply gay, and there was no point to him being institutionalized.³

Passing on “honest information” felt like a crucial project to Haggerty. The record Lavender Country was released in 1973 in a pressing of one thousand copies sponsored by Gay Community Social Services in Seattle (figure 1). The band advertised in gay bookstores and underground magazines and sold the record from a post-office box.⁴ When asked, forty years later, to account for the album’s significance, he responded, “I would like to say it’s remarkable because it’s such a fabulous album, but that would not be the truth—even though it may be. What’s truer is how thirsty all of us were for any kind of information at the time. We were coming up with information, out of whole cloth, by ourselves; nobody was telling us anything about what it means to be gay. Any kind of information we could get from anywhere, we were just gobbling it up. That’s what happened with Lavender Country.”⁵ To get a sense of how few out gay people there were in this period and how important their camaraderie was, Haggerty explained that in 1970, “when I met Faygele [ben Miriam],” his activist friend who would become the producer of the album, “there weren’t all that many people out in Seattle—like, maybe 40 or 50. So, the circle was small, and I was in the circle and eager to meet anyone.… Faygele was also a radical. He wasn’t just out. He was a radical. I have a very similar personality.”⁶ What Haggerty notes about Faygele and other collaborators in this protest movement right after the Stonewall riots of 1969 is that they were radical and intersectional in their critique of structural oppression. They did not advocate for tolerance or assimilation—they envisioned a totally restructured society not only in relation to homophobia but also regarding capitalism, racism, and sexism: “Before the gay movement was subsumed by the Democratic Party there were a lot of radicals. [One slogan was] ‘go left, go gay, go pick up the gun!’ It was a little ultra left [laughs], but that’s what we were thinking. I was surrounded by people who were coming from a deeper appreciation for the situation we were in than just the general liberal struggle for acceptance in a capitalist world. A lot of us were after a bigger fish.”⁷ As for the genre he chose, Haggerty said, “I stuck with country because that’s what I knew best.”⁸ “Maybe it was a brazen thing to do, to come out with a gay country album. On the other hand, why not? I think we forget that gay people come from everywhere. And I came from Dry Creek.”⁹

To me, the most striking features of this story are that Haggerty prioritized music as a medium for sharing desperately needed knowledge.¹⁰ His choice of genre was practical and also felt like a way to truthfully deliver “honest information,” and his album was produced not by a record company but by a gay community center, with 60 percent of the proceeds donated “back into community-oriented projects for the sexual minority communities.”¹¹ These priorities are not typical of a band trying to make a career of music. But sharing marginalized people’s stories, working for social justice, and investing in community over profit, fame, and genre norms are common values for many of the queer and transgender musicians playing the country, folk, old-time, bluegrass, and Americana music featured in this book. And, as this chapter will explore, these seemingly unusual priorities and the sense of authenticity they offer to country music are precisely why Lavender Country experienced a renaissance forty years after its initial release. This chapter analyzes the first out gay country album and several since then, considering the importance of sincerity in queer and transgender people’s country music, including how the musicians have navigated tensions that the ideal of sincerity invokes in regard to essentialism and the role of humor and irony, particularly gay camp, in relation to their sincerity.

Haggerty’s voice is both earnest and playful, invitingly singing “You all come out, come out my dears to Lavender Country,” a phrase that served as the name of the band, the song, and the album, as well as suggesting an imagined genre and a physical or metaphorical space. The LP’s back cover reads, “We’d like to tell you about Lavender Country. For many, it means a land of fear, confusion, and loneliness; for the rest of us, it means a life of struggling towards liberation and an affirmation of Gayness.”¹² Offering a mix of love and protest songs, the album intersectionally critiques white supremacist patriarchy, homophobia, and capitalism and calls listeners to rise up against the period’s psychiatric mistreatment of gay people. For Haggerty, the album’s central song has always been “Cryin’ These Cocksucking Tears,” a frank critique of homophobia that stings with the suffering and fury of being relentlessly stigmatized. Haggerty’s nasal, evocative voice expresses sadness and anger in this song. Meanwhile, his lesbian band mate Eve Morris passionately sings, as Pitchfork writer Jayson Greene describes, in the “most earnest Joan Baez voice you’ve ever heard the name of the song over and over again like it’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’”¹³ Both “Cryin’” and “Blowin’” offered political critique important to members of their generation, yet Bob Dylan’s 1963 song was turned into the anthem of its era by folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary, while Haggerty’s 1973 song was banned from the radio and guaranteed the album’s obscurity.¹⁴

Figure 1. Cover, Lavender Country, 1973.

“Cryin’ These Cocksucking Tears” uses a homophobic slur to evoke a real sense of the pain being stigmatized causes gay men and in singing the slur reclaims it to fight both homophobia and misogyny. As gay drag queen country singer Trixie Mattel interpreted in 2020, “It’s almost like he’s using their words, like, ‘Oh don’t worry, don’t feel too much for me, I’m just a cocksucker, right?’ That’s sort of the vibe, like—‘this is real feelings, real hurt, and it’s … your word.’”¹⁵ The title, while evoking a typical country music theme of “cryin’” over a lost lover, is, atypically for country, both explicitly gay and also includes a word that has been debated in terms of “decency” by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, as well as being famously lampooned by comedian George Carlin in his 1972 monologue, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.”¹⁶ (“Blowin,’” incidentally, is also a popular sexual term, although it has another meaning.) Haggerty’s voice and lyrics evoke anger, sadness, wry gay humor, and fright. As he explained, “I was really pissed off at straight men when I wrote this song in 1972,” but he also said that their hatred was “making me cry!”¹⁷ Hag-gerty, who said to me that he can hear the fear in his voice on this record, explained that everyone in his activist circle was terrified in this moment but felt compelled to protest intersectionally and create artwork.¹⁸ And among the ways he and his friends protested, this album came about to give a voice to experiences that weren’t typically explored in music, especially not country. As Greene notes, the record conveys a sense of “humanity” and getting to know Haggerty. Yet Greene also pokes fun at the solemn earnestness with which Morris sings—the classically trained, well-educated, and activist singer originally from Miami sounds deadly serious as her solo voice rings out enthusiastically on the chorus “cryin’ these cocksucking tears,” as though as a song narrator she also identifies as a “cocksucker.” As Haggerty explained over the phone to my students, Morris was a lesbian feminist and at first took offense at this song. But she eventually grew to appreciate this lyric in solidarity with gay men.¹⁹ (One can imagine her finding feminist solidarity, since part of the reason cocksucking is considered horrifying when performed by men is because it is assumed to be “women’s work.”) Morris’s vocal style sounds strident and courageous, reminiscent not only of Baez but also of women’s music pioneers, who were sometimes erroneously depicted as humorless.

Considering this context, Greene’s laughter over Morris’s earnest Joan Baez–style vocal affect is striking. The comparison is reasonable. So why does it seem funny to him to use that sort of vocal style to sing this chorus while it seems solemn in the case of Baez? Or perhaps Baez’s solemnity seems fabricated? What does this question have to do with the histories of folk and country music, women’s music, and queer activism? Joan Baez is an icon of her generation who inspired many people to activism but also crafted a fictionalized biography to enhance her audience’s awe of her difference and authenticity. She even came out as bisexual in 1973, though that identification seems little known in literature and conversation.²⁰ Baez’s Mexican-born physicist father and her mother, who had Scotch English ancestry, raised her in a middle-class household in Palo Alto, California. After dropping out of college she became a folk star by 1959 while still a teenager, developing a riveting stage persona. Her musical performances of folk songs from working-class and racially and regionally othered peoples were consumed with utter seriousness and appreciation for her artistry and commitment. Unlike some of her fellow folk stars, Baez regularly attended protests, even in dangerous situations, such as helping integrate a Birmingham school in 1963. It’s possible that Eve Morris’s passionate seriousness, singing in brave recorded protest of homophobia and patriarchy, was met by a contemporary music journalist’s laughter at the comparison between an unknown out lesbian singer and an iconic folk singer whose songs, though often arguing for social justice and nonviolence, rarely addressed homophobia and patriarchy.²¹ But it also seems possible that Greene found Baez’s earnestness laughable and Morris’s adoption of Baez’s style a welcome comic relief, perhaps even a gay camp send-up of Baez’s famous solemnity. Meanwhile, he appreciated that Haggerty sounded “human” and “sad,” “like a person alive in his own record.”

This book considers the ostensibly “othered” examples of queer and transgender country and folk music since the earliest example I found, from 1939, in relation not only to relevant sexual politics of its time(s) but also to the complicated politics of folk and country music, which privileges some identities and songs and attempts to silence others. Greene’s comparison of Morris and Baez brings up questions about authenticity and the purpose of folk and country music: Whose stories should be told? What sort of activism is expected or surprising in folk and country music? Who is a reliable folk or country narrator? What musical approach best conveys these messages? When are distinctions made between folk and country music, by whom, and why? In considering these questions, one might look back to the ways that early folk song collectors, publishers, archivists, and promoters, nearly all middle-class white people from coastal cities, collected music. Their goals often centered on finding a national music, one from Britain carried to the United States and preserved through presumed isolation, or finding a newly emergent US-centric folk music by those citizens presumed to be living more “primitively” than middle-class coastal city dwellers. The song collectors were often selective about what sorts of songs they wanted to collect from the targeted population. Some collectors omitted verses with language deemed “crude.” Others omitted “popular” music. Many collectors initially ignored Black Americans. Their motivations for excluding different groups depended on the goal of the collection—but the effects on how the country understood working-class and rural people, whether people from Appalachia, southern prisoners, cowboys, and so on, showed evidence of nationalism, regionalism, classism, and racism. Contemporary folk and country music inherited this history, as I discuss further throughout the book.²²

Haggerty’s band sold out of records and could not afford to print more, and so after many performances during the 1970s, the band members moved on to other endeavors. Haggerty ran for office, became a social worker, formed a family, adopting a Black female friend’s baby, and fathering another child with a white lesbian friend. Later he fell in love with and was eventually allowed to legally marry a Black, Philadelphia-born, career navy man. He reissued Lavender Country in 1999 and released a five-song follow-up in 2000, Lavender Country Revisited, which included three rerecorded songs from the first album and two other songs. While then professionally (for example, by Goldenrod, the women’s music distributor), Lavender Country remained largely unknown. He was nearly seventy and performing locally to people in assisted living when he received a totally ...