Lavender Cowboys: Andrew Sa And Chicago’s Thriving Queer Country Scene

CHICAGO — Country music is often associated with conservatism and heteronormativity — but Chicago has a thriving subculture of queer country music.

At the center of this scene is queer country artist Andrew Sa, whose debut album, “American Rough,” releases Friday on Bloodshot Records. Sa has sold-out album release shows Friday at the Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia Ave., and Sunday at Evanston SPACE. 

A distillation of years of painstaking work, “American Rough” crystallizes Sa’s work as a queer country artist in Chicago. With songs like “Under You,” “Fighting To Be Fightin’” and “You Turned Me On,” Sa seeks to deconstruct the masculine norms associated with the country artist through soft, sensitive instrumentation and his warm, Patsy Cline-esque warble. 

Sa co-hosts Cosmic Country Showcase alongside Mary Williamson at Judson & Moore Distillery, 3057 N. Rockwell St. Described as “a truly out-of-this-world spectacle that defies categorization,” the showcase, and events like it, reclaim the sound and aesthetics of country music for queer audiences who resonate with stories beyond the straight, cisgender narratives for which the genre is often deployed.

Sa said his obsession with country music started early while he was growing up on the West Coast; his earliest memories are of listening to Patsy Cline cassettes in his grandparents’ Lincoln Town Car. But he was always self-conscious about singing it, he said.

“I remember very vividly my older brother saying to me, ‘You sound great, if you could only get that twang out of your voice.’ It kind of stung and stayed with me for a long time,” he said.

Sa went to school for acting and did theater in the San Francisco Bay area before moving to Chicago, he said. He hovered around the prospect of making music — struggling against his own lack of self-confidence, he said — until his singer-songwriter friend Dylan Wright encouraged him to take songwriting classes at the Old Town School of Folk Music.

At the school, Sa discovered his musical habits, as well as a love for language and poetry, which follows through into the delicately layered structures of his songs, he said. Through classes, Sa said he started falling in love with lyricists like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed and “Joni Mitchell … talk about painting a song.” Sa now teaches classes at the school.

Sa then started a folk band called Andrew Sa and His Organic Sound, which he saw as a direct contrast to the “thumpa-thumpa-thumpa” of the aggressive dance music he often saw associated with gay culture in the city.

Sa’s sound transformed when he developed a deep friendship with Patrick Haggerty, one of the great elders of gay country music. The frontman of the band Lavender Country, Haggerty — who died in 2022 at the age of 78 — sang songs about queer liberation, AIDS advocacy and political radicalism as far back as the late 1970s. And when former Hideout booker Sully Davis hired Sa’s band to open for Haggerty in 2018, the two musicians became fast friends. 

“I like to say he gave me permission to return to country music,” Sa said.

Sa’s new album’s first single, “Lavender Cowboy,” is a tribute to Haggerty.

“I wanted it to be something that wasn’t only understood by queer people,” Sa said. “I wanted it to be something that could touch anyone who missed an elder who paved the way.

“He always used to say, ‘I am your stepping stone. I am here to lift you up.’ He was truly without ego.”

Inspired by those words, Sa dove deep into country music. After years of shows at Cosmic Country Showcase and elsewhere — as well as a 2021 film called “Andrew in Anotherland,” which featured a number of Chicago artists and filmmakers and an appearance on collaborator Liam Kazar’s debut album “Due North” — “American Rough” was born.

What does it mean to be “American rough”? Sa said it boils down to one of the lines in the titular song that opens the album: “Eating the heart out of this room.” It originates from queer Illinoisan poet Thomas James and speaks to the notion of “this thing that I desire, but I also know could potentially destroy me at the same time,” Sa said. 

Most of the songs on the album touch on a kind of delicate, dangerous line between sex, romance and danger, which encapsulates the calculus many queer people face particularly in rural, unwelcoming spaces.

“I call all of these songs ‘devotionals,’ because they are love songs,” Sa said. 

This is certainly true in songs like “You Turned Me On” (“I started looking for guys who looked like you”), and “Fightin To Be Fightin’,” which Sa describes as a song about “the dangerous side of masculinity” and the extremes men get into to express how they’re feeling.

“If ‘American Rough’ is the desire for that kind of domineering masculinity, then ‘Fighting To Be Fightin” is the real destruction that comes with that,” Sa said.

While queer artists have begun to rise in popularity in the country space with acts like Orville Peck and Lil Nas X, places like Cafe Mustache in Logan Square (which hosts Queer Country Fridays), the Hideout’s annual Gay in the Country events during Pride and Queer Two-Stepping at Charlie’s offer LGBTQ+ people a chance to connect over and celebrate country music.

Sa’s work sits at the epicenter of Chicago’s thriving queer country scene, offering inspiration to many other acts who have come up in his stead. 

For “Dead By Dawn” artist Iris Marlowe — whose songs toe the line between country and Gothic horror — queerness and country were fairly irreconcilable in her hometown in downstate Illinois, which featured “two stop signs and a gas station,” she said.

After moving to Chicago, and starting to make music in 2019, a visit to Cosmic Country and seeing Sa perform sent Marlowe down her road to pivoting to country music, she said. 

Watching Sa on stage is “like watching a David Lynch movie in real life,” said Marlowe, whom Sa invited to be part of annual queer country festival Lavender Prairie, which she called “one of the biggest honors I’ve had as a musician.”

“They made me feel like my version of country storytelling meant something to somebody else other than me,” Marlowe said.

For Richelle Gordon, a retired professor from Northwestern University and frontwoman of the queer country group #QueerCountry Bandwagon, Sa was a window into queer country as a bastion of self-expression. 

“Initially, I thought queer country was just an Andrew thing,” Gordon said after seeing “Andrew in Anotherland” play on the big screen at Grant Park, complete with a curated concert Sa put together of local queer country artists. Turns out, “There are actually a lot of queer people in Chicago who grew up around country music and don’t hate how it sounds — even if they hate a lot of the messages that mainstream country conveys.”

Sa is “a very influential person in my life,” she said, “aside from being an absolutely amazing artist.

“He’s been very deliberate, and maybe a little perfectionist, about getting the album exactly what he wants it to be. So it’s great to see that it’s finally getting out.”

You can buy “American Rough” at Andrew Sa’s Bandcamp page here. He will appear in the showcase “Souvenirs: 80 Years of John Prine” Oct. 8 at the Chicago Theater. More info here.