Flamy Grant Pushes the Boundaries of Christian Music — and Drag

This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.

Flamy Grant called in to her morning interview after participating in a day-long silent retreat. Well, not a silent retreat exactly — it was a vocal rest.

After spending the last year touring the U.S. off the success of her album, Grant, who prefers to use her stage name in interviews, needed to rest her voice. Since her rise to Christian music stardom — or infamy, depending on how one feels about a drag queen topping the Christian charts — she has performed in bars, clubs, and churches spreading the good news in glitter.

Since then, Grant has collaborated with artists like Semler, Derek Webb, and Jennifer Knapp. And she has spoken out for LGBTQ+ rights, joining a lawsuit against the state of Tennessee in 2023.

A few weeks before the release of her second album, CHURCH, Grant and I spoke about her time touring the country, writing songs in drag, leaving the church but still going to churches weekly, and more.

Coincidentally, as the interview ended, Amy Grant’s “Lucky One” began playing over the hotel lobby’s speakers.

[Editor’s note: This interview was performed before Hurricane Helene devastated many regions in the South, including Flamy Grant’s hometown of Asheville, N.C. Grant and her team canceled shows in North Carolina, but continue touring in Georgia and Nashville this week before touring the West Coast.]

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mitchell Atencio: How is touring? What have you heard from folks while on the road?

Flamy Grant: I feel like I’ve been on tour pretty much nonstop for the past year. A year ago I quit my day job and moved back to Asheville, N.C., where I was born and raised. And honestly, this is not even an exaggeration, I’ve spent more time on the road than I have in my bedroom at home.

This [tour], though, is very different. I’m on a tour with two other acts and a full band. Mostly, I’ve just been solo on the road, which I love in a lot of ways because I’m actually very much an introvert.

We’re only in our second week right now of the “No More Trauma” tour, and the response has been amazing so far. Now that I’m a year in, there have been people who’ve come up to me to say hello afterwards, and [they say], “This is our third or fourth time seeing you!” And I’m like, I’ve really only been doing this full-time for a year. What do you mean the third or fourth time? It is really cool to know that there’s this community and fan loyalty.

My favorite moment on tour so far was in St. Louis. We were getting ready, there was no green room at the venue, so I was literally just painting my face in front of the windows, right outside where the line was forming to get in. There was this family — a mother and a little girl, around 7-9 years old. She had a sign, painted in full rainbow lettering, that said, “This is my first concert!” And she was just holding it up to the window. So I popped out to say hello, and they had driven two hours to St. Louis to come to this show. Her name was Claire, and I’m her favorite artist, and I’m her first concert.

That was wild because it just threw me back to when I was that age and excited about music and wanting to go to concerts for the first time. Everybody always asks that question, “What was your first concert?” throughout your entire life. And now Claire is always going to say, “I saw a drag queen in St. Louis.” 

Now I’m curious what your first concert was.

Clay Crosse. He had quite a big hit with that song “I Surrender All” in the ’90s. I just loved him. I probably had a crush on him, if we’re being honest. He had that classic jawline, that beautiful blonde hair, and yeah, I was obsessed with him. My parents couldn’t take me, so I roped one of my friends from church and got his dad to drive us down to this show. What I remember most about it was that Jaci Velasquez opened and she was so good. She was phenomenal.

Mine, for fairness, was the Newsboys back when Peter Furler was still leading them. Speaking of touring, I noticed you have a different booking process for churches and for “traditional venues” like bars and clubs. Why is that?

That’s been interesting to navigate. I feel like I’m definitely straddling two worlds. I very much want to be taken seriously as a musician and songwriter. The drag can sometimes be a little bit of a barrier to that, because people tend to see drag and think it’s a gimmick or, they just immediately associate it with Sunday drag brunch or weekend clubs.

I have done a fair bit of that, especially early on, but I’m a singer-songwriter and I write my own original music, and I happen to perform in drag. It’s been a challenge to convey that as we’re booking and marketing shows. My booking agent is fantastic, and she’s been really good at helping people understand that they’re booking a singer-songwriter who needs an extra hour in the green room to get ready.

What happened last year, with “Good Day” hitting number one, so many churches reached out and the first question was, “Can we do ‘Good Day’ in Sunday worship?” And I’m like, of course you can, just make sure they know it’s written by a drag queen. The next question was, “How do we get you to come?” Either on a Sunday morning or to do a special concert on an evening.

Because I know the church world and was a worship leader for 22 years, it just makes more sense for me to book those myself. I don’t generally go out seeking church bookings, those really do come to me, and that’s a gift in so many ways.

I’ve played in over 50 churches in the last year. Some want to integrate me into their Sunday morning service, I’ll be part of the service planning, and we’ll have a song during communion or the offertory. Others want to bring me in on a Saturday night and have me come sing to their congregation and community.

I have officially left the church myself. The last church I was involved in was in San Diego, I was a worship leader there for 8-and-a-half years and it closed down after the pandemic. I have not sought out a new church home since then, but I’m still in churches a lot.

You’re in churches about once a week — that’s more than many church members. What makes writing music as Flamy Grant feel different? How does one write songs in drag?

In some ways, there’s no difference at all. At the end of the day, I’m just writing about my experiences. Derek Webb says the artist’s role is just to look at the world and speak about it. That’s so much of what I’ve done since I was 9 years old when I wrote my first song. That process of songwriting doesn’t necessarily feel all that different.

And yet, there is this shift in the tone and subject matter of what I write about, because my life has changed so dramatically. And drag is a huge part of that change.

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It’s been really fun to feel like I’m excavating parts of myself that have been dormant or suppressed for so long. [Drag] definitely changes the subject matter of what I’m writing about.

And it’s been there all along, I just haven’t allowed myself the pleasure and joy of exploring the range of my own gender identity, even the range of my physical voice. Being able to play with how I sing a song or a lyric, it’s opened up a world of songwriting to me. There are times now, when I’m writing, where I do think about what this is going to look and feel like on stage, in drag, in a big wig with sequins and glitter on my face and all of this.

I still love to write a gut-punch ballad; that’s one of my specialties. And I love doing that because that’s not really a thing you tend to associate with drag too much. That tends to be a more surprising moment for people in my concerts, when I get serious. People expect the fierceness and sass and qualities of drag that they’re used to.

Mostly it’s just a lot of fun. I really enjoy the opportunity to play with music in new ways.

It sounds like part of what you’re saying is that it offers an added element of creativity to a songwriting process, even in the “constraint” of writing as Flamy Grant.

That’s absolutely right, there is a constraining piece to it. Whatever music I put out, it’s going to be out under that name, Flamy Grant, and I know it’s going to be associated with drag.

In some ways it’s obviously pushing the boundaries of Christian music, but it’s also pushing the boundaries of what people might consider drag to be.

What has the response been like from the drag community?

I just got a message from a drag queen back in San Diego. Her drag name is Nadya Symone. I love this queen. She’s just one of the people I look up to. She’s a Southern queen who lives in San Diego now. She was there at my very first drag show; I was nervous, and she could tell. And she just said, “Baby, whatever happens, the show goes on. You make a mistake, you forget a lyric, you forget a line, your wig falls off, whatever — the show goes on.”

I just felt so taken in, included, and welcomed. And that’s never changed. The people who get [Flamy] the quickest are other drag performers. I don’t have to explain much to them. They’re like, “Oh you’re just bringing yourself to drag, which is what we all do.”

Anyway, the message that Symone sent me just yesterday was just, “I’m so proud of you, baby.” I don’t know what she had seen, but she’s still there and cheering me on. I had a lot of anxiety coming into this and a lot of imposter syndrome. Am I a real drag queen? Do I really belong in this community if what I want to do is write my own folk songs and sing them? And that has all been laid to rest by interacting with other performers.

Is there anything that you wanted to do differently between your first album, Bible Belt Baby, and your second album, CHURCH?

I’m so proud of Bible Belt Baby, but it did come together circumstantially and without a lot of intention. My initial conversation with my producer, Ben, who was my housemate in San Diego at the time, was, I think I want to sing in drag. And we were going to put together a five-song EP. I ran a Kickstarter, and we raised more than I expected. And it just continued to blossom and grow until it was a full album.

And in order to make it a full album, I was pulling from songs that predated Flamy. What was really cool about that was discovering that Flamy has been there all along, right?

But with CHURCH, I had the opportunity to really, for the first time, think about crafting a complete narrative. Thinking about themes that would all be contained on one record and writing, for the first time, a full album in Flamy’s voice intentionally.

The second thing was having the resources to go to Nashville and make a Nashville record with Nashville players. That was a really exciting prospect for me.

We sent them all the demos in advance. I, [pauses] I don’t know that they listened to them, but they didn’t need to. They heard the song one time, took a couple notes, went to their instruments, and five, six, seven takes later we had what we needed. It was wild to watch how, at the skill level of those musicians, they brought the songs to life in ways I could have only hoped for.

I really wanted a sound that was in this Nashville vein, but we also talked about how to make it still a drag record. How do we pull in some of this country disco feel? How do we make sure it stands on par with anything coming out of Nashville, but also uniquely Flamy. They did a phenomenal job.

[Lastly], with Bible Belt Baby, I didn’t know, up until a couple months before releasing it, whether I would even put it out as a Christian record. It wasn’t until we finished it that I was like, yeah, this absolutely belongs in the Christian genre. 

Now, Christian music is largely worship music, which I personally don’t care for. I like music that tells someone’s story. I want to hear what an individual person has gone through in their life and how they got to where they are.

And that’s why I loved artists like Margaret Becker, or Jennifer Knapp, Caedmon’s Call, and folks famous for writing really personal. What’s that thing people say? We find the universal in the specific — that’s what I love about singer songwriters. I don’t know if I’ll continue to make Christian music forever or what the next album will look like yet, but for this album, I [wanted] to be really intentional with the messaging. I think the tagline for the Kickstarter was “Flamy Grant’s Big Gay Christian Record.”