So here's the story: a Seattle man named Patrick Haggerty wrote and recorded an openly gay country album as Lavender Country in 1973. This is because he is a steelier person than you or I. He included a waltz called "Cryin' These Cocksucking Tears" because he's funnier than you or I. And he loaded the song, and the album, with exquisitely personal and painful lyrics that raged against the hypocrisies, large and small that defined his life.

It is a document of protest, but not a strident one: "I'm fighting for when there won't be no straight men, cuz you all have a common disease/ Can't give very much for lovin' and such, but you take it wherever you please," Haggerty sings in the opening lyrics. For years, this album was a rumor, a piece of cocktail conversation amongst hardcore record nerds. It is reentering the cultural conversation, deservedly, now that Paradise of Bachelors are reissuing the record on March 25.