There’s no shortage of drag shows or performers in Eastern Iowa, and with Pride Month on the horizon, they’ll no doubt be busy as can be. But North Carolina’s Flamy Grant isn’t like the rest. For one thing, her June 4 performance will be at St. Andrew Presbyterian Church.
Jeff Charis-Carlson, director of communication and media ministries at St. Andrew and a lead organizer of this event, first encountered Grant at Theology Beer Camp, a conference arranged by Homebrewed Christianity.
“It was a three-day conference that included a lot of heady, intellectual/nerdy theological discussion, interspersed with various musicians to speak to the heart as well as the head,” Charis-Carlson said in an email. “Not all the musicians were my cup of tea, and when I saw that the schedule included an afternoon show by a Christian drag queen, I didn’t really know how to set my expectations.”
It was not his first time experiencing drag — he’s seen many performances over the years, mostly outdoors during Pride Month festivities. Charis-Carlson associated drag with “a lot of lip-syncing, various performers and wardrobe changes.” This was not that.
“[W]hen Flamy came up to the mic with an acoustic guitar and proceeded to belt out a powerful, poignant song of her own writing, I was blown away,” he said. “When she effortlessly moved among genres and took the audience on an emotional journey from raucous laughter to tears, I knew this was much more than just a performance, it was a musical ministry.”
Grant recently made waves in the Christian music world when her debut record, Bible Belt Baby, reached number one on the iTunes Christian Charts — giving her bragging rights as the first drag performer to make that claim. But she has been performing much of her life, and often in ministerial settings.
“I’ve been writing songs since I was 9 years old, and performing in school and church even before that,” Grant wrote in an email. “Songwriting will always be my first love, and I’ve always had a music project on the side while I was working a day job for the past 20 years, whether that was a solo thing, a band, or just leading worship in church.”
Her path to drag was far more meandering. Grant’s first awareness of it was the ads she saw for the film To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar back in 1995. She hoped to bypass her parents’ expected refusal to let her see it by going with some youth group friends, and claiming they planned to see something else. But it didn’t quite work out.
“[W]hen I told my friend I wanted to see To Wong Foo, she said, ‘Oh my gosh, we can’t watch that! Don’t you know what it’s about?’ And obviously I didn’t know what it was about, but when even my peers were reacting with shameful finger-wagging, it was enough to scare me off for many years.”
Her next encounter would come in her late 20s, when Grant’s younger brother took her to a drag show in their hometown of Asheville, North Carolina. And while living in San Diego in her 30s, she made a habit of checking out shows.
“I became obsessed with the art form and fell all the way down that slippery slope into my first pair of heels,” she said.
She later moved back to North Carolina, having spent 20 years on the San Diego scene. Then, when COVID-19 hit in 2020, everything began to fall into place.
“In the early days of pandemic I started to fill the sheltering-in-place days with drag, live-streaming concerts with my fellow musician housemates, and it wasn’t long until I realized what a gift it was to put all of my favorite things into this art form of drag: performing, writing, singing, recording, makeup, exploring gender, and just generally being fabulous!”
It’s a far cry from her earliest church experiences.
“Most won’t have heard of it,” she says of Plymouth Brethren, the church she grew up in. “And that’s a good thing because while I grew up with many well-intentioned people of sincere faith, it’s a type of fundamentalist evangelicalism that is deeply, profoundly immersed in a culture of shame and fear while also being simultaneously arrogant and self-righteous about being the only ‘correct’ approach to God. It’s nauseatingly patriarchal, astonishingly restrictive, and only ever served to disconnect me from the divine with ritual reminders that there’s only one hope, as the old hymn goes, for ‘a wretch like me.’”
“And it’s why my entire mission in drag is to slay shame,” she continues. “There’s no good use for shame: it isolates us, makes us hate ourselves, and prevents us from accessing the divine gift of life and vitality and creativity that we all have.”
Charis-Carlson likened his experience of seeing Grant perform to seeing the 2001 film Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
“I can remember sitting in the movie theater … wondering why those songs of questioning and transgression felt so more authentic and powerful than many of the songs of certainty and faith that I heard on Sunday mornings,” he wrote. “It took a full 22 years, but Flamy … managed to offer a ‘worship’ experience even more authentic and powerful than that musical.”
Of course, it isn’t quite the kind of drag show you’d catch at Studio 13.
“It will be her, with her acoustic guitar, telling of her own experiences of how the broader church has failed her yet also remains a source of community and connection for her,” Charis-Carlson said. “She knows how to read an audience, and everyone who attends will find themselves laughing, cheering and crying at various points during the show.”
“I’ve grown pretty used to being a lot of people’s first encounter with drag, because a good third or more of my shows take place in churches,” Grant says. “The audiences can be very generationally diverse: families with young kids, older folks who’ve been going to the church for years. So I do make sure to provide an experience in those settings that introduces people to drag without being too incendiary. It still has an edge, because that’s just the nature of an art form that upends social norms around gender expression, but it’s definitely family friendly.”
At the end of the day, all Grant wants is the same as any Christian musician wants: to share the joy that she’s found with as many people as possible.
“The older I get, the more convinced I am that the point of all this is joy. That’s why we’re here: to experience joy and to share it with others. I read somewhere that joy is happiness that has found a purpose, a meaning. That’s what drag does for me: makes me happy and gives me a purpose in the world,” she says. “If that’s not holy and divine, I don’t know what is.”
Grant will perform at St. Andrew on Tuesday, June 4 starting at 7:30 p.m. Attendance is free, but tickets may be reserved online.
Genevieve Trainor aspires to be a high priest of genderfuckery. This article was originally published in Little Village’s May 2024 issue.
