Interview: Flamy Grant

Born and raised in Asheville, singer/songwriter and drag performer Flamy Grant (who uses they/them pronouns) moved out west in 2004, spending most of that time in San Diego. But last September, they returned to Asheville and is still getting settled in.

“My husband's actually probably better acclimated than I am because he's physically here all the time and is working in town and everything,” Grant says. “I've mostly been on the road the past 10 months, so I still feel like I don't fully live back here yet.”

Prior to their Thursday, July 11, full-band show at Grace Covenant Presbyterian with fellow queer musician Spencer LaJoye — “It's Spencer's backing band and I'm stealing them,” Grant says with a laugh — the multi-faceted artist spoke with Asheville Stages about their “wake up call” as a Southern drag performer, engaging with protesters, and letting trans youth know that they have a powerful ally.

Edwin Arnaudin: What were the factors that brought you back to Asheville?

Flamy Grant: Lots of things. The most obvious/biggest is cost of living. I think San Diego is now the most expensive city in the nation with housing costs. So we were just like, “Well, we’ve got to do something. Something's got to give.” So we were looking all over the country, really. We love the Pacific Northwest. We were really close to going up to Oregon, but we ultimately pulled the trigger to come back home because there's a bit of a support network here.

My family's here, but the clincher was the Southeast is ground zero for all of this legislation against drag performance, but now it's really legislation that's mostly targeting trans youth. I feel like what I do — my specific art, my songwriting, all of it — it comes back here to the South. So, it just made sense for us to be down here. Also, our votes will matter a little more in North Carolina than they do in California. [laughs] A part of it was like, “Let’s go do the work where the work needs to be done.”

EA: I like that: be right in the thick of it and in the battleground. I grew up in Brevard and my parents are still there, so I'm very familiar with the area. It's nice to be in the thick of Asheville and be able to fight for the place that I want to be, too.

We've got this reputation of Asheville as this very welcoming place. Was that your experience growing up?

FG: Yeah, not at all. And that's only because I could have grown up anywhere. My world was so small and so isolated because of the community I grew up in. I grew up super fundamental/ evangelical, so we had our church here in town that we went to. I graduated from Asheville Christian Academy, and then home. So it was really kind of this triangle that was all very centered on our faith. That was all of what life was.

That's what I mean by I could have grown up anywhere. That would have been my triangle no matter where we were. So, I don't feel like I actually experienced Asheville the way it is growing up here. I experienced a very isolated bubble within Asheville. So, it’s cool to be back here now as an adult, even though I am on the road a lot — when we are here, I try to get around town and do stuff and see things. And it's fun to bring back my spouse and get to know the city kind of for the first time.

EA: That’s a good point.

So, I did an article about a year and a half ago where there was that huge rise in protests and threats of violence against the drag community. I felt like we really needed to give voice to that community and see what's really going on — boots on the ground. Have you been faced with a similar level of threats and whatnot that the Asheville drag community has been faced with?

FG: Yeah. So, literally on our cross-country drive moving here, we were in the U-Haul but I had a stopover in East Tennessee for Blount Pride. I was headlining last year, and so we've literally planned our cross-country drive to where we would be stopping in Tennessee for that Pride event.

And that week, a district attorney there in East Tennessee decided he was going to enforce Tennessee's drag ban, even though it had already been ruled unconstitutional in, Memphis. He was like, “Well, whatever — we’re East Tennessee. We're going to enforce it.” So he sent them a threatening letter and was like, “If you have drag performers, if you have anything that violates this” — they don't call it the drag ban. Whatever it was, the adult entertainment act or whatever — “If you have anything that violates this, I will be enforcing it and we will make arrests. We'll do whatever needs to be done.”

So, of course, Blount Pride connected with the ACLU, and the ACLU came in and sued for a temporary restraining order against that district attorney — which they got, but they asked me to be on the lawsuit as the headliner and as a drag performer who was being directly affected by this legislation. So, that was kind of…I mean, like I said, we came back here to be in the fight and I didn't expect it to happen, like, literally before we even got to the state. [laughs]

That was my first real wake-up call because, prior to that, I had been doing drag in San Diego, which is mostly pretty cool and safe for queer folks and drag. The drag scene there is huge. It's great. But I had been kind of protected in that bubble. I had been watching what was going on nationally, and I was of course aware, but that was the first time it came to my doorstep. And I was like, “Oh, wow!”

And since then, I've had protesters show up at a handful of shows — not a lot, just a handful in Virginia and one in New Jersey. They haven't been big, massive protests or anything like that. Just a handful of people, but it's interesting to see. A lot of the venues, when I come, will hire extra security, which is just wild. Like, that's an expense they have to incur because of bigotry. It's crazy! So, yeah, I'm definitely experiencing it and getting a wake up call for what it's been like for Southern drag performers for a long time. It's crazy.

Photo courtesy of the artist

EA: As someone who's very in tune with humanity, just very conscious and wanting peace, wanting good things, do you try to engage the protesters or is it not worth the effort?

FG: So, my experience started on social media. That's where I would first encounter people who were mad about my existence. And so what I learned from social media I've tried to take into real life as well, which is just that I never engage with the intent of actually trying to debate or change the minds of these people. That's just not going to happen. That's not a realistic goal or realistic expectation,

But I do engage and my goal in doing so is to take the wind out of their sails — just take the piss out of it; show how small-minded and just small in general they are. And really, my purpose for engaging is so that anybody else watching, especially queer youth, get to see someone's standing up to these assholes and just call it what it is, which is just a bunch of bluster and bullshit.

There’s no legitimate concern that anyone has raised about the drag community or about trans folks or about trans youth getting best practice medical care. It's all just these fear-mongering talking points. At the risk of spotlighting them, because I don't want to do that either, I want to just pull back the curtain and show the man, like, spinning the machine behind the curtain. Because that's all it is. It's just spin and it's just fear-mongering talking points that they're regurgitating and there's no truth to any of it.

We have actual data that shows how much more likely a kid is to be harmed/molested in a church setting than they are in a drag show or by a drag performer or by a trans person. We have those hard numbers and yet there's no outrage about what's going on in churches across America. Every week, there is a new story about some pastor or youth pastor with an inappropriate relationship or who has child porn on his computer. And we don't see the kind of response from people about that. So, yeah, it's this weird dance of not actually trying to engage with them directly. It's more to let the community, let the kids — especially who have to deal with this stuff — see someone in their corner, standing up for them, taking the piss out of it.

EA: Nice! I like that.

And as you were saying, being back in Asheville, you still haven't felt like, “Oh, I'm really here. I'm really part of this community.” But there is a very strong drag community, and there's a very strong music community. I'm curious of the inroads that you've been able to make, even in less than a year, with both communities.

FG: I wish they were deeper inroads, and it's my fault. When I'm home for these three-day stretches, like I am right now, I'm exhausted and recovering. Sadly, I haven't been to a drag show in Asheville yet since we moved back. I've been to drag shows in Asheville on previous visits and things like that, but not since we've moved back.

And then as far as like playing locally or connecting with other local musicians, I've connected with White Horse Black Mountain up here. I love that venue. I've gotten to know some of the people who run it and board members and things like that. I haven't had a chance to play it yet, although we've tried a couple times to work something out.

But I know the Open Folk community. I really want to get out there and hang out with those folks. I haven't yet. I know that there's so much going on here, and I've played shows — I've played the Diana Wortham Theatre as part of a larger holiday tour last year, and then mostly like house show and church stuff here in town. But I want to play the rooms. I want get into the actual clubs and the listening rooms as well.

We'll get there. My husband and I keep talking about this year our year of building something — trying to make sure that this career is sustainable for me. And it just means I've been on the road pretty much non-stop.

Photo by Emily Tingley

EA: Well, it’s been wonderful listening to your 2022 album [Bible Belt Baby]. There's strong storytelling in your lyrics and it just pulls me in and you can tell there's a lot of thought put into it. I was curious about some turning points in your artistic journey that have really helped you  have such a clear voice and tell such vivid stories through your lyrics.

FG: For sure. big turning point was coming out at the age of…I was like 28 when I fully, fully came out, which is later than many, not as late as some. And that was so long delayed because of the evangelical culture I grew up in and believing that what I “struggled with” was sin, and believing that there was an actual judgment from a God for me for all that.

So, there was a lot of fear. I was very afraid growing up, all the time. And so, by the age of 28, I had done a lot of…well, I had done things like I had self-enrolled in conversion therapy in my early 20s. I went through five years of that “therapy,” trying to turn straight and sincerely trying my damnedest, trying my best to be what I thought God and my community and everybody wanted and needed me to be.  And that included performative masculinity for most of my life because that's just not what I am, either. I’m nonbinary, I use they/them [pronouns], but I didn't know that about myself until I was finally able to come out at the age of 28, start dating, and then, slowly, my world would open up bit by bit and I started enjoying drag.

That was probably the other big turning point: drag itself, which happened for me at the start of the [COVID-19] pandemic. I had gone out a couple of times in drag, at Halloween and stuff like that. But I had a full time job; I was a worship leader — a volunteer for our church in San Diego; I was in another band. So, I didn't have time. I never imagined that drag would be a career for me, just because I have a very full life. I have a lot going on.

But then the pandemic happened and I didn't have a full life all of a sudden. And so that's when I started playing with makeup, sheltering in place in those early days. And then, like a lot of artists and musicians, I started doing a livestream. We house-shared with another couple who were both musicians, so we would all just livestream together on Thursday nights. We called it Heathen Happy Hour and sang cover songs. And I started showing up to that in drag online. Those are really my first drag performances where we're singing cover songs online during the pandemic.

And then, as the world opened up, I got connected to the San Diego drag scene and started performing in the clubs there and just fell in love with it. And I realized at some point along the way that I can marry all my passions and all my great loves in this one thing. That's the beauty of drag — it’s theater, right? It can hold anything. So, music and comedy and storytelling and obviously the performance and the makeup and the costume.

So, what started as just me hanging out in my bedroom, kind of doing inner child work — that's what it was for me: it was helping the younger version of myself realize that all of the shame I had carried for years and years around gender stuff and how I was drawn to and kind of compelled by makeup and beautiful clothes and glitter. All of that stuff that I had suppressed for so long was actually just fine and actually just as much part of me as anything else. And so that's kind of been my journey with drag — recognizing that it's healing me and kind of saving me, and at the same time it has the power to do that for other people.

There was a moment when that kind of clicked for me during the pandemic when I had a TikTok video go viral and people were just commenting, “Oh my gosh! This makes me feel so seen and so safe.” And that was when I was like, “Oh, like I feel. I have felt seen and safe doing this. And now it's a gift that I can give to people.” That was when I was like, “OK, let's do this. Let's see what's really here.” I don't think I was even thinking about a career at that point, but I was just like, “Let's make some music in drag. Let’s do it. Let’s put an album out.” And it just kind of snowballed down the hill at that point until we got here.

EA: And I know you've got a sophomore album coming out in September. What do you feel like divulging about that at this point? I know you probably want to keep some things under wraps.

FG: Well, I've shared the name of it on my socials now, so I can say that it's called Church. We're staying firmly in the “speaking back to religious institution” space — talking about the queer experience coming up in church; talking about what the queer experience is like now in an America that is so…I don't want to sound like I'm defending evangelicalism from the ’90s., because I'm not. It was bad then, too, but we're in a different level here in 2024. The evangelicalism I was raised in wasn't obsessed with political power in the way that it is today. It was on the way there and, for sure, the Religious Right was happening in the ’80s and all of that, but now we have this movement that I can't even call spiritual — I can't even call religious at all. It's just a movement of people who've coalesced around, who've co-opted and taken the name of God and Jesus.

There's a really funny comedian — a trans comedian — her name is Robin Tran. And she has a whole bit where she's like, “Republicans don't like Jesus. They like God — the vengeful, wrathful God of the Old Testament. Jesus was a liberal hippie and brown-skinned. They don't like Jesus at all.” And I was like, “That's kind of it.”  We're in this strange place where we are teetering on becoming this very Christian nationalist country. And it's all because of the power that has been co-opted from religion and people's long-held, deeply, deeply held convictions around their faith. And without anybody challenging that and asking people to think critically and realistically about what their faith tradition is about.

I'm scared. I'm scared for where we're headed. And so, at least for this record and this next round of touring and promotion and all of it, I'm still speaking back into the church. I'm still taking up space in the church and doing what I can, doing my part.

I have no delusion about ever being warmly welcomed or warmly received by those established power structures within the church. For instance, the Gospel Music Association, the Dove Awards — any of that. I don't even want to be involved in those things, but I do want to give an opportunity for queer Christians — because we do exist — to see themselves represented in the art that gets made.

And it's very much protest art at this point. Not by design; not because that's what I feel I'm necessarily even good at, but just because existing as a queer person right now, you’re an activist. You have to be. So it's all of that. And hopefully it's really artistically wonderful and good and moves people and helps give people space to feel their feelings and experience their own stories — see themselves reflected. All the things that art can do. I hope it is a really good cathartic experience for folks as well. It was for me, for sure, making the record.

IF YOU GO

Who: Flamy Grant + Spencer LaJoye
When: Thursday, July 11, 8 p.m.
Where: Grace Covenant Presbyterian, 789 Merrimon Ave., tinyurl.com/bd9693fr
Tickets: $20

(Photo by Sydney Valiente)