Widely recognized as the first openly gay country music album—and cited as such even by Nashville institutions like the Country Music Hall of Fame and CMT—the landmark self-titled 1973 LP by Lavender Country stands as nothing less than an artifact of courage, a sonic political protest document of enormous power, clarity, and grace.

At once a scathing indictment of the injustices perpetrated on the homosexual community, a proud proclamation of gay identity, and a love letter of bracing intimacy and eroticism, the album radically appropriates the signifiers of the conservative country genre, queering its heteronormative vocabulary into a deeply personal language. Songwriter, singer, and guitarist Patrick Haggerty, a fearless first-generation gay liberation activist and artist, seasons his songs with Yippie deviousness; in the manner of <a href="spotify:track:6xN7kuUAydDqKslRIZSaYy" data-name="The Cockettes">The Cockettes</a>, the laughs both sharpen and sweeten the impact. To our ears the inimitable aesthetics and glimpses of cockeyed humor recall some ethereal psych-folk nexus of <a href="spotify:artist:12be6Vj2WgNyx4x6vuGvhy" data-name="The Flatlanders">The Flatlanders</a> and <a href="spotify:artist:5ZjKW4JhcFuOXLpuJrr8wJ" data-name="The Holy Modal Rounders">The Holy Modal Rounders</a> as much as any standard country and western forebears, rendering the biting poetry in an even more otherworldly and timeless light.

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Lavender Country

Lavender Country

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