To the uninitiated, Patrick Haggerty may seem like a man of stark contradictions. He is both fiercely opinionated and exceedingly tender. His story is larger than life, yet he lives humbly. He’s a country singer and he’s gay.
And while these truths about Mr. Haggerty may at first seem incompatible, or maybe even antithetical, the man himself is living proof that these qualities are not mutually exclusive. These C*cksucking Tears, directed by Dan Taberski, is a short film about Haggerty that won the jury prize at SXSW in March of this year. It premieres online today, exclusively on Vimeo. The title of the film (which is also the title of one of the tunes from Haggerty’s cult-classic Lavender Country) is in its own way perfectly emblematic of the dualities Haggerty seems to embody — it is a brash, arguably vulgar title for a song and a film, but it also nods to an underlying sentimentality and vulnerability that can’t be denied. Haggerty too is brash and sentimental.
Taberski’s film is a story about finding oneself and perhaps most importantly, celebrating oneself or as Haggerty puts it, to “sing your truth.” For some of us, this process is easier than it is for others. As the gay son of tenant dairy farmers in rural Washington, Haggerty represents those of us who had to overcome unique obstacles on our path to self-actualization. For him, music was his vehicle toward liberation, culminating with the release of Lavender Country, the first-ever gay country album. And despite the fact that this remains his one and only record, as These C*cksucking Tears will show you, this was only the beginning for Patrick Taggerty. We sat down with Taberski to discuss his film.
Dan Taberski: I read a review in Pitchfork. They gave [it] best new reissue, which was kind of amazing in its own right, so it was interesting just reading the review. But then I went and Googled Patrick Haggerty and I could find nothing on him. And so I just became fascinated with the idea that someone would do something so brave and so bold in 1973 by releasing the first gay country music album — and then never make music again. So that sort of piqued my interest.
Tell me about the process of finding him because, based on the film, it seems that he’s pretty much living off the grid.
[Laughs] Finding him was not hard because I just called the label and they put me in touch with him. It was more about getting to know him beforehand. It was a few very long phone conversations, getting past a little bit of skepticism from him, and then just sort of convincing each other that we had something similar in mind.
Sometimes subjects don’t want to be defined by their past. Was that the case with Patrick? Did he need any convincing to participate in the film?
No, quite the opposite actually in that Patrick was not known for [Lavender Country]. Even his kids didn’t know about this album. You have to remember this was 1973. There were only a thousand copies made. Back then, once [something] was gone, it was gone and you couldn’t just pull up the link. And it didn’t make a dent in the broader popular culture. And so for Patrick, it was just something that he did once and it disappeared and he didn’t really talk about it anymore. Nobody asked him, nobody knew about it.
I think he was really open to “getting the information out,” as he calls it. It was more [about] making sure that we were aligned on social issues and what we wanted to talk about and [whether] we vibed as two people. And I think we did.
You mention that there was some skepticism to get over. What was that specifically in regards to?
I explained to him: “Look, I think it’s great that you did this album, but I don’t want to make a news piece on you where we interview you for half an hour and you say what you want. I want to spend some time with you and talk to you about this. How much are you willing to open up about these things?” And I don’t think it was a question of whether he’d open up or not, I just think it was an issue of whether or not he’d open up to me.
What was the film you sought to make initially? Did it differ from the finished film?
Originally, I wanted to explore the impact the album had had on his life in the 40 years after it was released. Did he pay a price? Was he liberated? If he had the courage to do something like that then, how did that courage manifest itself in the decades after?
Ultimately, it became less about the facts of his life, and more about the spirit of it. We spent a lot of time together, and I got to know his special combination of total defiance, confidence, and a tenderness that broke my heart. Exploring that — the roots of it, and the power of it — quickly became much more interesting.
We shot for nine days, I believe. In terms of research, [I didn’t do] a lot. It was more [about] really letting the album get under my skin and trying to see what the album was saying about Patrick as a person. I didn’t want to do a historical documentary. I really tried to resist spending 15 minutes telling a story that you can tell in a sentence: “1973, Patrick Haggerty released the first gay country music album.” I didn’t want to get into that fact, I was more interested in what happened after the fact. It was more a character study than it was about the history of [Lavender Country].
How much time did you spend with him?
All together we probably spent two weeks together just talking and shooting, but I shot for nine days.
And were you just a one-man crew or did you have other people out there with you?
My cinematographer Damon Hoydysh, who is also a good friend of mine from LA, came out with me for half the shoot. He’s amazing. So he did sound and picture, and for the second half of shooting, we had an audio guy. We weren’t looking to do a big production. It didn’t call for that. I didn’t want anything standing in between me and him, and the last thing you want is like, jibs and tracks and all these big production things.
Yeah, I do very much actually. I think Patrick on some levels is a performer, a performer in the best possible way. But to create a larger production might have brought out those performative qualities, when in fact what we wanted were the real, human, non-performative qualities.
The film discusses Lavender Country, the gay rights movement, Patrick’s career, his present life and his childhood — all in a tight 15 minutes. How did you find that balance?
First of all, it was about not going chronologically. It was not about, “Here are the ten things we need to tell about Patrick Haggerty.” There are fascinating things about Patrick that aren’t in the documentary because they just didn’t fit, or we didn’t get it the right way, or it was just down on the hierarchy of things we wanted to talk about. I did not have an agenda of things I needed to talk about. For me, it was capturing who this man was and is, and who he became after the release of the album. And so all the things about his biography are only in there to serve to create a fuller picture of who he is on the inside, not his résumé.
So I guess it was easier in that sense: all the stuff you need to know is way in the beginning and everything else is just, I hope, more impressionistic. Every little thing gives you a better sense of who this man is on the inside.
Do you have a favorite scene that got left on the cutting room floor?
So many stories. He spent some time in a mental institution in western Washington State for being gay. He was basically convinced to check himself in while he was sort of struggling in the late ‘60s with what it meant to be gay. A nurse talked with him and helped him get out of there, and it’s a fascinating story about the distant level of pain that people like him were feeling and had to navigate.
[But] I couldn’t get it in [the film]. It was less relevant for me because that was something that happened to him. I was trying to talk about the things he was doing. I didn’t want to make him a victim of the time that he was coming of age. He’s a man of agency. He’s taking action, and so the things that happened to him were less relevant if he was a victim I guess. But it’s a fascinating snapshot.
The parallels to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest are striking.
Yeah, it’s amazing. You know, he was in the Peace Corps and he got kicked out because he was gay? And these were just blips for him. Just blips. Because it was just one of a hundred things. So yeah, there’s a lot that’s not in there, but hopefully we told enough.
Did you try to speak with anyone in Nashville about Lavender Country? Any luck?
I didn’t try to reach out for the doc. I wasn’t particularly interested in their perspective. I mean, one can imagine what their perspective was at the time. And I didn’t want to make it an issue thing; I wanted to make it a character study. That being said, I did reach out to some out, gay country stars and some gay-friendly country stars, and the response was nothing. I reached out to them in terms of raising money and attention like, “Hey, would you retweet this?” or “Hey, would you maybe put this on Facebook where your fans can see it?” and I got nothing. The response, by and large, has been 95% from the straight community who share Patrick’s politics rather than the gay community who share his sexuality.
Toward the end of the film, there’s a really poignant moment where Patrick talks about his father and I couldn’t help but notice the choice not to include any music. Considering this is a film that is partially about music, how did you resist the urge to use wall-to-wall sound?
The film has no other music besides the music that Patrick Haggerty wrote. And so anything you hear is Patrick. For me, the music was just another way to hear Patrick speaking. A lot of the time, to put Patrick’s music over Patrick [as he was] making a really emphatic or beautiful point was like layering two Patrick bites over each other. We weren’t really thinking of it as sound design, we were thinking of the music more like just another way to hear Patrick speak.
We cover almost nothing with music unless we’re talking about it directly. I don’t know why that is. I think he’s just so powerful to listen to. Especially that story [about his dad] is so at the core of who he is and the man he turned out to be that to try to soup it up with music … I don’t know. It was powerful when I was standing there and he was telling that story. Maybe it was just trying to recreate that and it was just him talking. It’s all so real and imbued with emotion that to hear the silence was just more powerful than any music would have been.
Except for the first minute and half of the film, which is a lot of exposition, there’s a breaking point where we cut from basic interviews and sit-down stuff, people explaining things, and then we shove cut to a beautiful landscape where Patrick lives. And the rest of the film has no sit-down interviews. Then it’s just intimate, it’s in your face. It’s in his face. We wanted close-up shots and we wanted the experience of hanging out with him in a trailer. So, he’s rolling a joint and we smoke it — we don’t show that obviously — and then he’s making us breakfast and he says these really powerful things, and then we eat the breakfast. We wanted it to feel just like hanging out with him.
In terms of finishing and everything, we have a lot of the shots a smoky, nicotine thing to them. We tried to up the lavender a little bit when he’s wearing his lavender outfit. That’s what we did. Intimate and lavender.
What has the reaction to the film been like?
Like I was saying before, I think the response from the straight community has been spectacular and exciting and I had hoped that gay festivals and the gay community would give it a good reaction, which they have. But just to be getting the response that we have from people who like good stories and people who respond to him as a person and not as a gay icon or a gay activist has been great. It’s been fantastic. More than I ever, ever would have imagined.
Plus on top of all of that, Patrick is performing again. For example, we got into SXSW and won the Jury Prize and at the same time, we had submitted Lavender Country to the music side of SXSW and he got in. So we went down there and he was performing as a band for the first time in a gazillion years, and he was there with the film. So, he’s been performing all over the place now to really sizable crowds. So, it’s been wonderful for him as well on a personal and performative level.
Yeah, it’s so great for him. And he played in Nashville for the first time! We were in the Nashville Film Festival and he went down there and performed for the first time ever. It was spectacular. It was a moment he had been waiting for for decades.
That’s so cool. So, do you have any favorite lyrics from Lavender Country?
There’s a song called “I Can’t Shake The Stranger Out of You,” which I think is particularly beautiful. It has the lyrics, “Dancing with your tight blue jeans on, prancing like a Palomino on the run, I reckon you’re looking for some neckin’, Yes I do.” I just love “reckon” and “neckin,’” that’s so f—ing great. It also typifies what’s so exciting about the album for me. It was one thing to demand your rights as a gay man, and there’s a braveness to that aggression against the way things are, and demanding that people acknowledge you. But what I really love about the album and Patrick is that he also talks about things like in this song. It’s just frank, sweet talk about thinking a guy is cute.
And that song goes on to talk about how he can’t connect with these people, how gay men have trouble connecting with each other, and what they’re relationships are like and the issues they go through on a personal level — and for me that’s almost braver than demanding your rights. To expose yourself like that in 1973 and acknowledge actual feelings for other men in a complicated, nuanced way must have been terrifying. Because I have a hard time doing that now in my relationships. You know what I mean? And to think that he did that in a very public way just gets me every time.
Watch These C*cksucking Tears exclusively on Vimeo.
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