Interview with Musician and Drag Artist Flamy Grant

In this episode of Screen Door Queers, we sit down with Asheville musician, songwriter, drag artist, and spiritual storyteller Flamy Grant. It explores Flamy’s journey from a conservative evangelical upbringing in Western North Carolina to becoming a nationally recognized drag performer and recording artist. 

The conversation touches on music as a tool for self-discovery and the role of drag in exploring gender identity and so much more.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Hey folks, welcome to today's episode of Screendoor Queers. This podcast is a production of the Media and Communications Queer Migrations course at Warren Wilson College, nestled in the mountains of Swannanoa and Western North Carolina. This anthology series explores the stories of queer people living in Appalachia by queer people in Appalachia.

SPEAKER_02 0:20

Hi there, welcome to another episode of Screen Door Queers. My name is Seif Bay, and today I'm interviewing Flamey Grant. Flamey is an Asheville-based singer, songwriter, performer, and drag queen. Flamey, would you like to introduce yourself?

SPEAKER_00 0:31

I'm Flamey Grant. I my tagline that I have coined for myself is the Shane Slaying, Hip Swaying, Singing, Songwriting, Drag Queen. I was born and raised here in Asheville, North Carolina. And I um have kind of always been a musician into music, you know, taught myself guitar in high school, wrote my first song when I was like nine years old. So music's just kind of always been the backdrop for my life. And um uh although I worked, you know, a day job up until just two and a half years ago, um, I always had my hands in making music on one way or another, mostly through church. I was raised in evangelical, you know, very conservative fundamentalist church here in Asheville. You know, over the course of 22 years, I like led worship or did music ministry or whatever you want to call it um in uh in a whole bunch of different churches. While I had a sense as a high schooler that like, oh, like there's parts of Asheville that we just don't go to because they're like sinful or you know, whatever. Like um, I had a sense that Asheville was like different, but I didn't, that wasn't my lived experience. My lived experience here was the same lived experience you could get anywhere that's that's you know, you know, a Baptist or not for me it was Plymouth Brethren um upbringing. And a lot of the music because of my background and where I come from and and the you know what we like to call religious trauma, uh, has to do with that. It has to do with like, you know, my own spiritual journey, um, out of shame and fear and high-demand religion and everything that kind of comes with fundamentalist evangelicalism into whatever I am now, which is not necessarily an easy thing to define.

SPEAKER_02 2:21

Has music always played a big part in your life?

SPEAKER_00 2:23

Music has always been a place where I've been able to go to be my most authentic self. Because when you're just writing a song in your bedroom, you don't have to have the ambition of like releasing that song and putting it out into the world, you know, like it can just be for you. I have a whole like Jan Sport backpack from the 90s that is just chock full of my journals and you know, song, hundreds of songs I I wrote all through. I was really prolific in high school and college. And so much of that, you know, we'll just never see the light of day. But it was for me, it was how I figured myself out. It's how I tapped into emotions or feelings or questions that I wasn't allowed to ask anywhere else. And then come pandemic, I found myself with a whole lot of extra time on my hands, as a lot of us did, because we were sheltering in place at home, and I uh had you know loved drag for a long time, um, but had never really, really like gotten into it very much. I'd gone out like for Halloween and that kind of stuff, and um so you know, we all needed a pandemic project, and mine was just watching a gazillion hours of makeup tutorials on YouTube, and that is how I got into you know painting my face, and I started you know doing stuff online during pandemic, and it just kind of slowly snowballed into what I do now, which is I'm a full-time singer-songwriter, drag queen, performer, recording artist, entertainer thing.

SPEAKER_02 3:58

What was your introduction to drag like? Where did that lead you?

SPEAKER_00 4:02

My real introduction to drag was uh film and specifically seeing um like Leslie Jordan play a character in a movie called um Sorted Lives. And so that was like really probably the first time I was like, what is this? Like, what what what is this whole act? What's this art form? What is why is this person compelled to do this? And from there, you know, started going to drag. I lived in San Diego for about 20 years, and so started going to drag shows out there in San Diego. The more I went and enjoyed it and appreciated it, the more I started to see, like, wow, this is this art form is so cool because you get to bring whatever you want to bring. And so that's what I started doing. I was like, well, why couldn't I be a singer-songwriter in drag? You know, as soon as I started framing my questions around like, what could I do instead of what should I do? That's when it all kind of opened up and was like, oh, just just do it, just go do the thing you want to do. Incidentally, drag, my my journey with drag also ended up being my journey into my own my own gender identity uh discovery. Um, because you know, I was I up until that point, I really had only ever considered myself to be cis male because that's how I was raised, and that was what I was expected, how how people expected me to show up in the world. And it's it's wild now looking back at it to realize how much of my time and energy and focus, all through, especially in my 20s, like high school and then into all of my 20s, was was I had this strong focus on I have to be perceived as male. I have to be like one of the guys. I have to be accepted in that world. I have there can't be any question around it, you know. And so all of my energy went into this really performative gender thing that had that wasn't who I was. And looking back, it's like, oh my gosh, it's because I just wasn't letting, I wasn't letting the real me out. Drag gave me the gift of like getting in touch with my own, my own self, which you know, now it's just it's just as simple as identifying as non-binary for me and saying, no, like I just reject. I reject that there are only two options, and I'm gonna be fluid and I might look a certain way one day and another way a different day, but uh along the way, like it it just lets me be who I really am at all times, as opposed to walking around and just doing a constant mental checklist of am I am I dude enough? Am I butch enough? Like, are they buying it?

SPEAKER_02 6:38

Do you think Asheville or anywhere is an inherently queer place?

SPEAKER_00 6:42

My version of Asheville growing up was not like what most people think of when they think of Asheville. Like, I I just my my world was so isolated and so confined to church, school, which I went to Asheville Christian, and then and then home. Like that was it. That was the little triangle in which I existed. And those places were all very structured and rigid and defined around our faith. But especially moving back here, it was really intentional, like coming back. We my husband and I realized that San Diego is just not tenable for us. It's one of the most expensive cities in the country. We were never going to be able to like buy a house or a condo, which we just did here. Uh, so we we were looking at the country and we were like, where do we go? A whole bunch of places on our list, but we ultimately ended up picking here because of my ties to family, the roots I have here. Um, and because the drag that I was like embarking on uh and the music I was writing, it all felt like of a place. It felt like it was of the mountains here. You know, there were practical reasons to move back here, but there was also this just like a more existential reason of I would like to reclaim a little bit of what I had to bury in these hills. Um, so it's been really fun. It's been um cool to be back here and you know drive around places I used to hang out at as a teenager and uh bring all of me back at this time. It's like okay, like I actually probably always was meant to be here. I just got a little bit unlucky in terms of the culture that I was born into. There is something, you know, I think unique about our little corner here in North Carolina, because like I said, even as a teenager, I was aware, like I knew that in the language of my youth and the language of the people who raised me, like there was a lot of sin in Asheville. And I was always like, What are you guys talking about? What's the sin? And I've I you know I caught on eventually. I was like, oh, like there's a lot of gay people is what they're saying, um here in Asheville. And uh and so we're you know, we're always praying for the city in in vague terms, but really that's what a a lot of it was. It was like we have to like save our city from the the gay agenda, and uh the best ironically, the best places I've found to perform where I get to reach people who maybe aren't 100% like you know just like supportive of the LGBTQ plus community and uh you know just fully on board, it's it's in churches. And I've played over a hundred churches since I started doing this full time. And you know, every church that invites me is more or less an affirming church, but because they're a church, they still have you know a congregation or a reach into the community with people who have never been to a drag show, um, whose opinions about drag and trans folks or whatever, like are informed maybe not by an actual drag queen or a drag king or a drag artist or a trans person, but they're informed by what they hear about drag performers and trans people. And um I mean it's it's not uncommon for somebody to come up to me after the show and be like, hey, I didn't know what I was coming to. This is my first drag show. Um, I had no idea. You like you opened my eyes, like all like I have those conversations pretty regularly, and they almost always happen in a church because that's where somebody's gonna come, where it's kind of bridging these worlds a little bit, right? Um, I mean, when I I love playing shows in folk listening rooms and in the gay bars and drag clubs and things like that. But when I'm in those spaces, I'm very rarely having conversations with people about like, oh, I didn't know, or this is my first time, you know, it's it's when I'm in churches that I get to have those conversations with people. And that's pretty, I mean, I have other reasons why I still play churches, but uh that's a pretty compelling one for me to to keep going into those spaces. Uh, if I can be somebody's like first encounter with drag and I can leave a really, if not a positive impression, at least an impression of like, oh, maybe I don't know everything I thought I knew about what it is to be a queer person or what it is to be a drag artist and like help people feel a little more open to it, then I think that's a really great outcome.

SPEAKER_02 11:45

You've been doing this for a long time now and you've been really successful. Uh before we end, do you want to talk about your like big like long-term end goals?

SPEAKER_00 11:54

I mean, I at the end of the day, like my goal in all of this is to you know make good art, entertain people, make them feel hopeful, but at the same time, like the real goal is and why I do the work in general is because I'm doing this from for my own inner child, right? Like, this is all all of it. It's just healing my own trauma and making space for new generations of pure kids who are still coming up in spaces like what I do. Um, because there will always be evangelical churches, there will always be, I mean, I wish I would love to think that we might one day live in a world without evangelicalism. Not without Christianity, like that's I my my beef is not with you know big world religions or anything like that, but specifically that like brand of Christianity, evangelicalism, that's what I would love to see go, gone fully, completely. But as long as it's there, there will be kids born into that. You know, at the very least, if I can just like be out there as uh a light post, a little you know, lighthouse or whatever, and say, like, hey, there's another way. Because that's what I did not have. Anybody telling me uh a story about a healthy, happy, hopeful, and whole adult queer life. I only got the story that it was gonna be misery, isolation, sickness, death, you know, all the bad stuff. And so that's why it took me so long to come to terms with who I am, because of fear and and and lack of uh information and examples and models. And so that's why that's why that's why I'm trying to get rid of everything.

SPEAKER_02 13:35

Thanks so much for tuning in to another episode of Screen Dor Clearers. Once again, my name is Steve Bate. Thank you so much to Flame Grant for being on the show. Be sure to check her out.