A sissy haunts country music, a boy whose father named him Sue. Queer country singers Patrick Haggerty and Andrew Sa are “Sue’s” of a fashion, as they make clear in their albums, Lavender Country (1973) and American Rough (2026).
In the 1969 song, “A Boy Named Sue”, the character Sue’s only feminine attribute is his name. Though Sue may be shamed and targeted as sissy-adjacent (“life ain’t easy for a boy named Sue”), he grew up toughened (“some guy would laugh, I’d have to bust his head”). This masculinization, so the song claims, was father’s intention all along:
“He says, ‘Boy,’ he says, ‘this world is rough / If a man’s gonna make it, he’s gotta be tough / And I knew I wouldn’t be there to help you along / …and it’s that name that helped to make you strong.”
Written by Giving Tree author Shel Silverstein, it’s an ambiguous song whose meaning was likely determined by the audience. So who became “A Boy Named Sue”’s first audience? Johnny Cash adopted it for his most famous live album from 1969; the answer is male inmates at San Quentin. On the record, their reaction sounds enthusiastic, if troubling for real-life feminine boys hearing it in their rural hometowns. As a single, “A Boy Named Sue” became Cash’s only top-ten hit on Billboard’s Hot 100, at #2 for three weeks.
I wasn’t born until the 1970s, but my dad’s referring to me as “Sue”—heh heh—did not foster camaraderie or praise earned toughness. Dad may have never heard Shel Silverstein’s follow-up song, a decade later, but its lyrics go farther than confirming Sue’s gayness; these lyrics are “gay” to a stereotypical extreme.
“Father of a Boy Named Sue” shifts the song’s point of view from son to dad, telling what really happened. The father admits his three-year-old son “kept screamin’ and throwin’ up and pissin’ in his pants til I had enough—so just for revenge I went and named him Sue,” thereafter abandoning the whole family.
In the follow-up song, recorded for Silverstein’s 1978 albumSongs and Stories, Sue tracks down his father for revenge. The song recalls the beating in detail. Referring to Sue as a “queen”, he mentions how Sue scratched his face with fingernails, kicked him with high-heeled shoes, threw perfume, screamed about Sigmund Freud, and more. The song’s ending turns the joke dehumanizingly on Sue, with a disturbing incest punchline:
“So I thought fast and I told him some stuff / how I named him Sue just to make him tough / I guess he bought it ‘cause now I’m livin’ with him / Yeah he cooks and sews and cleans up the place / he cuts my hair and shaves my face / and irons my shirts better than a daughter could do / And on the nights that I can’t score / well, I can’t tell you anymore / of that! Sure is a joy to have a boy named Sue”.
I feel traumatized just typing those words. Such twisted and twisting kinds of gay representation were expected from straight male writers of the day, and Silverstein died having bedded many women—numerous of which were Playboy bunnies at Hugh Hefner’s mansion. No wonder the country music genre’s only openly gay songwriter and performer during the 1970s, Patrick Haggerty of the obscure band Lavender Country, sang in “Cryin’ These Cocksucking Tears” how he’s:
“fighting for when there won’t be no straight men / ‘cause you all have a common disease / Can’t give very much for loving and such / but you take it wherever you please”.
Patrick Haggerty and Andrew Sa’s Femme Cowboy Kinship
If a boy named Sue, as a specter of queerness, haunts country music, Patrick Haggerty (1944–2022) is country’s queer saint, and a feminist anti-racist Marxist to boot. This summer of 2026 brought a reincarnation of Haggerty’s band, Lavender Country, in the form of Andrew Sa’s debut albumAmerican Rough,which features the single “Lavender Cowboy”. Comparing the lyrics of Haggerty and Sa, as “out” country performers, we see how two feminine gay men represent themselves in country music in the 1970s versus the 2020s.
Released a year prior to The American Psychiatric Association and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders no longer classifying homosexuality as a mental illness, Lavender Country’s self-titled album had to be distributed via post like most gay materials. For $3 each, all 1,000 copies were shipped across the country and, somehow, that was that.
Doors to Nashville were shut to West-coast homosexual Patrick Haggerty, though—raised on a dairy farm if not in the Deep South—he insists he’s as country as it gets: “And if you challenge my credentials on my country-ness, you will do so at your peril.” He makes this comment in Dan Taberski’s 2016 short documentary, These C*cksucking Tears, which raised online awareness of Lavender Country, prompting a fast-growing following and then leading to a second album in 2019, Blackberry Rose and Other Songs & Sorrows from Lavender Country.
What distinguishes Haggerty’s gay-positive and pro-sissy lyrics is an anger specific to the era. It’s a far cry from country music, yet I think of Andy Warhol star Mary Woronov’s reflection on the Silver Factory scene: “I liked transvestites. I liked gay people. Because they were just nuts. They satisfied something in me that was insanely rebellious. They were not like gay people now, you know, kinda fat ‘n’ happy. They were angry. And so was I.”
Their anger at patriarchy verges on heterophobia, a phobia they believe is justified by the abuse and injustice they’ve suffered at the hands of heterosexuals. In the song “Waltzing Willie Trilogy”, Haggerty’s lyrics attack the institutionalization of homosexuals like Willie. “And if they hear any gay talk / a sizzle of electro-shock keeps his fantasies in fascist shape”, Haggerty sings, concluding: “They call it mental hygiene / but I call it psychic rape”. Who are the “they” Haggerty indicts? They are “a pack of straight white-honky quacks.”
Yet an angry tone does not dominate the Lavender Country album. Haggerty is more focused on lifting up the closeted and scattered culture of openly queer people. The first song is a jaunty call to “Come Out Singing”, its humor built on explicit language without forsaking gay culture’s beloved double entendre.
Five years later, for a London gay pride event, the Tom Robinson Band wrote and recorded the rock song “(Sing If You’re) Glad to Be Gay” that echoes Haggerty’s call even if unaware of it. Speaking against anti-gay police, frontman Tom Robinson damns the violent raiding of gay pubs, singing why it’s more important than ever to “Sing if you’re glad to be gay / sing if you’re happy that way”. In Lavender Country’s “Come Out Singing”, the rewards of coming out lead back to the bedroom, not its closet:
“The dancing rays are prancing / and a-glancing orange and red / Drips of dawn are trickling on / the corners of our bed / that’s full of your flirtin’ fingers / your body odor lingers / in my toes and in my nose and in my head”.
Such intimate knowing serves as counterpoint to same-sex encounters that deny intimacy, as in Haggerty’s song “I Can’t Shake the Stranger Out of You”. Even in these formative years of out gay culture, lifting it up required critique, and Haggerty’s is clear: Don’t be like straight men. Don’t get “trapped in straight white patterns”, as the song “Straight White Patterns” advises, where the price is to “surrender to our gender one more time”—banished:
“to the roles that mold these mannish / modes of distance / We never seem to comprehend / that love is not some dividend / a plot to get more than we spend”.
Forthrightly, Patrick Haggerty’s lyrics insist on intersectionality, even if 15 years before scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term. bell hooks throughout her career repeated the mouthful “imperialist white‑supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe interlocking systems of oppression, systems Haggerty war-cries against: “Rise up and rip this goddamn system down”, he sings in “Waltzing Willie”, “There ain’t no hope ‘til it tumbles to the ground”. Respectability politics be damned for sending queers “Back in the Closet Again”:
“The Revolution started out right / Black Panthers were leading the fight / The Lords were in the left flank / The women drove a Sherman tank / And the workers were a hunk of dynamite / A battalion of gay men brought up the rear, / packing two grenades in each brassiere […] But the liberation forces got uptight / They screamed, ‘You fags ain’t got no human rights / We think you guys are sick ‘cause all you want’s a prick’ / And while we scrapped, pigs stole the whole damn fight / That was the end of the revolution, my friend / ‘cause all of us are going to the pen / They’re rounding up the blacks / Then they’re after gay folks next / So I’m back in the closet again”.
Women are present not only in lyrical content but also in voice. Lavender Country’s fiddler and supporting vocalist Eve Morris chimes in with significance, as in the band’s most famous song “Cryin’ These Cocksucking Tears”. A song that resents the power dynamics between feminine gay men and masculine straight men gets an echoing we call “me too” in current parlance, as Eve Morris sings response lines like: “You may need a wife, sir, but I won’t spend my life, sir, cryin’ these cocksucking tears”.
Oral sex, glorified as blowing Gabriel’s horn in another song about gay intimacy, becomes degrading service when the recipient is straight men, and women recognize this dynamic in their own experiences. Eve Morris also sings lead vocals on lesbian-themed “To a Woman”.
Many gay men of the 1970s were first targeted not for same-sex desire but the greater sin of “acting like a girl”, indicating the inherent misogyny that underlies homophobia. Most small-town and rural gay males learn that “gay” and “lesbian” cannot be country, as if these things—at essence, in their values—are mutually exclusive. Indeed, Haggerty’s sissy-positivity would’ve been tantamount to communism, no matter how downhome his sissiness may be. So a major objective in his lyrics is to liberate the rural sissy, much like the longstanding Radical Faeries movement (minus its spirituality) started by activist Harry Hay in 1979.
Gender fluidity is democratic for Radical Faeries, anti-bourgeois and trendless. In the mid-1990s, living in Nashville, home to a Radical Faeries commune, my friends and I spotted Radical Faeries at the dance club, their ensembles never cohering beyond choose-from-the-dress-barn spontaneity. As Haggerty sings in Lavender Country’s title song: “You all come out, come out, my dears, to Lavender Country—don’t you bother ‘bout your sissy ways”, with Eve Morris echoing the last line:
“Sashay out and give our way a try / Whether you tuck in or dangle / when you hear that glad gay tango / you’ll just spread your spangled wings and fly”.
Returning to “A Boy Named Sue”, Sue’s father admires the fight his son puts up—whether he’s a hetero he-man or “Nellie gay”. Haggerty’s father admires something more vital for survival. In a central coming-of-age anecdote, Haggerty tells his documentarian how his dying father made him, whatever he was, vow never to sneak, explaining to his son:
“Because if you sneak, it means you think you’re doing the wrong thing. And if you spend your whole life sneaking, you’ll spend your whole life thinking you’re doing the wrong thing. And if you do, you’ll ruin your immortal soul. So don’t sneak.”
Until the under-the-radar release ofLavender Countryin 1973, and beyond the band’s 1976 dissolution, gay visibility in country meant invisibility. Laughable novelties like “I Love My Fruit” by the Depression-era Sweet Violet Boys seem not so relevant, while a closeted “Don’t Touch Me” by Wilma Burgess in 1966 is revelatory. Burgess, by the way, opened Nashville’s first lesbian bar —a/k/a “women only” bar. Sneaking was a way of life for, in current parlance, LGBT people at the time, but not for Patrick Haggerty and band Lavender Country.
During recent decades, the various margins of “corporate country” host many talentedsongwriters in indie rock (Stephin Merrit, e.g., “Papa Was a Rodeo”), roots rock and folk blues(Lucinda Williams, Carolina Chocolate Drops), “alternative” country (Neko Case, Murder By Death), Tex-Mex fusions with Americana or R&B (Alejandro Escovedo, Pokey Lafarge), as well as queer songs of note from homoerotic Lil Nas to pretentiously masked Orville Peck to bisexual wunderkind Sarah Shook.
The year 2019 brought Patrick Haggerty’s newly reformed band into the studio to record Blackberry Rose and Other Songs & Sorrows From Lavender Country. Effectively corresponding to the first album’s hoedown arrangements and nasal-twangy lyrics, Blackberry Rose does more looking back than bringing forward. That’s an observation, not a judgment. Lavender Country’s reemergence during the Trump era is meaningful even if they don’t directly comment on MAGA politics. The history contained in Haggerty’s lyrics—attuned to social justice, intersectionality, gender-queerness—is a relevant “comment” in its own right.
Lavender Country’s Changing Hues in the 1970s and the 2020s
The release of Andrew Sa’s album American Rough has been much anticipated, especially by Chicagoans where Sa is based and known as host of the Hideout’s “Cosmic Country Showcase”. An anarchic spin on the standard white country stage, queer and inclusive, it featured Lavender Country before Patrick Haggerty died in 2022.
Sa will surely be the new face of queer country, a face so easy to fall in love with that it’s surprising how readily his voice matters most once he begins to sing. His singing is a “signature, siren-like croon”, as the Bloodshot Records press release describes. Patrick Haggerty talk-sings, like activist-songwriter Malvina Reynolds, allowing for wordier lyrics. Andrew Sa warbles his range-scaling notes with control, more like Roy Orbison, Jeff Buckley, or k.d. lang as produced by Owen Bradley, focused on intimacy over commentary.
Inspired by Lavender Country enough to cloak his debut with allusion to it, Sa’s lyrics donot serve the same immediate needs that Patrick Haggerty couldn’t see beyond in 1973. Sawasn’t born until 1986, in California, though his mother gave birth to him in the cab of his dad’s truck with Reba McIntire singing on the radio. His is an authenticity-signaling origin story required by country music, especially for those beyond the legit South, and for those like Haggerty and Sa who studied theater. Nevertheless, as with Haggerty, doubt Sa’s authenticity at your own peril.
“Lavender Cowboy”, American Rough’s first single, originated in the aftershock of Patrick Haggerty’s death and “celebration of life” in 2022. Sa told me in my August 2026 interview with him: “At one point I could’ve sworn I heard him yelling from behind the closed sanctuary doors. And I cried my eyes out watching his widower JB dance to the house band playing Lavender Country’s ‘Waltzing Will Trilogy’.” The next day, Sa wrote the song’s first verse in his Seattle hotel room:
“Thought I heard you calling from the door / hollering like the queen that you were / Saw your baby burning up the dance floor / I was bawling”.
Some time later, working on a pre-chorus for “Lavender Cowboy” in his Chicago living room, Sa told me he looked up in the silence “to see a beautiful patch of sun coming in through the bay window—a bright rectangle of light on the opposite wall. And I felt Patrick there with me.” Channeling this visitation, and reminding me of Lavender Country’s “dancing rays…prancing and a-glancing orange and red”, Sa’s lines sing like grief-inspired:
“Sometimes you’re the sunshine / just leaning on my wall / Sometimes you’re my radio / honkytonking all night long”.
Next, Sa intertextually laces his chorus with allusions to Lavender Country lyrics “for those of us who know,” Sa acknowledged, “and those who dig deeper to find.” He told me, “I wanted to sprinkle as much of [Patrick Haggerty] as I possibly could into my song.”
“Lavender cowboy, stranger in your hand / Wander the highways with your ragged angel band / And come out singing when you can”.
Allusions to Haggerty’s obscure Lavender Country get a universal counterpoint with the next verse lifted from “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” Not only “a song concerning the death and mourning of an elder,” Sa explains, but he also uses this hymnal classic as an “anchor in the middle of the song—a reference that can be immediately understood by generations of people, especially country music fans.”
Sa sings the way a steel guitarist sounds: rhapsodic, both sweepingly and subtly expressive, each note leaving a vibratory hum in the air. It’s like I can feel a warm sweet breath on the back of my neck—a singing whisper: “Your whisper reaching for the ceiling just like the tulips do / See ‘em crane, see ‘em ache”.
Andrew Sa is not out to recreate Lavender Country. He is his own artist. He’s an heir to Lavender Country, it’s fair to say, a credible beneficiary of queer country’s sneak-free legacy.
There’s plenty to be angry about in 2026, too much that echoes Patrick Haggerty’ssociopolitical reality in the early 1970s, yet Sa brandishes only daisies. He’s not actively exiled on a drastic margin, of course. And if “Cosmic Country Showcase” is a margin, what a safe margin for self-expression and discovery, a margin on which gayness can mean both same-sex passion and the kinds of gender nonconformity often judged “too gay” in parts of the US.
What Sa offers listeners, and what we need now as much as calls to action, is a space in which to let go and feel—“never mind ‘bout your sissy ways”, as Haggerty avows. In “feeling”, I mean the listener’s engagement with the music’s lush intimacy and the lyrics’ poetics. Saexplains, in a 2026 interview for The Big Takeover, how he allows his listeners “moments to enter inand create for themselves, as opposed to dictating what they should be thinking or feeling. A lotof pop country—and this is obviously intentional—is very straightforward and simple. And that’s not what I was going for.”
Andrew Sa’s songs on American Rough, co-written with folk musician H.C. McEntire, echo the values inherent in Lavender Country songs. “Love is not some dividend, a plot to get more than we spend,” as Haggerty sings, a sentiment I hear in this excerpt and the chorus from Sa’s love song “Follow”:
“Sunset in the area rug / round the crook in the hallway / Clouds on the tabletop / Two-step to the balcony / Hear the helicopter roar / Walk the diamond dotted blue / Follow me, babe […] / There’s nobody but us babe / Leave your boots by the door / Fall into me like hard rain / relentless and sure / of a love like this / a love where your kisses can cure / a love that can give”.
I can now tell you that Sue in “A Boy Named Sue” is not the first sissy to haunt country music. Andrew Sa informed me, owning up to his initial apprehension, of pulp publisher Harold Hersey’s “humorous 1935 poem turned song” titled “Lavender Cowboy” thattells the story of an unmanly cowboy “with only two hairs on his chest”. Early versions of the poem were considered “blue” and banned from the radio for “suggesting homosexuality”, and in some later versions the lyrics approach homophobia, with the title character ending up killed/murdered.
“It took me some time to realize that I could reclaim the ‘Lavender Cowboy’ character and rewrite his legend,” says Sa. “I could give him the dignity that he deserves with a hero’s sendoff.”