The Grammys bumped this drag queen’s album from the Christian category. She’s got a lot to say.

This summer, Christian singer-songwriter and drag queen Flamy Grant made history. After an anti-LGBTQ+ activist and preacher targeted her on social media in July, they decided to channel that negative attention into something positive, mobilizing their 80,000-plus followers on TikTok in a campaign to get their single Good Day to chart iTunes.

Within 24 hours, the song reached number 1 on iTunes’ Christian Songs chart and Grant’s October 2022 debut album, Bible Belt Baby, hit number one on iTunes’ Christian Albums chart, where it remained for nine days, making her the first drag artist ever to make it onto the Apple music services Christian charts. Then, in early August, Good Day debuted at number 20 on Billboard’s Christian Digital Song Sales chart.

Related:

An anti-LGBTQ+ activist helped a drag queen become America’s #1 Christian musician

“If you’re gonna come for a drag queen, you better be ready for how she comes back.”

Hot off of those successes, Grant set their sights on the Grammys. Earlier this week, they chatted with LGBTQ Nation to explain what happened next.

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LGBTQ Nation: You submitted your debut album, Bible Belt Baby, for consideration in the Grammys Contemporary Christian category. Walk me through what happened next.

FLAMY GRANT: We submitted and then nothing, basically. We didn’t hear anything until the day before the end of round 1 voting. A Grammy voter — an apparent fan of mine – sent me a screenshot of their ballot and had my album in there and was like, “I’m so honored to vote for you.” And the category was Best Pop Vocal Album. That was the only reason that I found out that [the album] had been moved [to a different category]. Otherwise, we would not have known.

Erin Anderson — she’s not my artist manager but I consulted with her – she helped me submit, and she was like, “Normally I would have gotten an email or some sort of notification that an artist is being moved to a different category.” She didn’t get that this time.

LGBTQ Nation: And you had not submitted the album for consideration in the Best Pop Vocal Album category?

FG: No, we had not.

LGBTQ Nation: Did you reach out to find out why the album had been recategorized?

FG: I pulled together a few friends. Erin was one of them — Erin’s a member of the Recording Academy, but she’s not a voting member, which is why she didn’t have access to log in to look at ballots and see where I ultimately landed. So, we roped in another friend who is a voting member and just a couple other friends who are musicians in the industry.

We had a text thread that I called “Drag-vengers,” and we were just like, “Let’s figure this out.” We kind of all did a bunch of research, digging into the Recording Academy’s website, looking for rules around the categories. And all we could find was that piece that was like, “The Contemporary Christian category exists to highlight achievement in pop, Latin…” I can’t remember what all the categories were.

LGBTQ Nation: The official screening criteria for the Best Contemporary Christian Music Album category in the Grammy Awards’ Rules and Guidelines states that “This Category recognizes excellence in a solo, duo, group, or collaborative performance of Contemporary Christian Music, including pop, rap/hip-hop, Latin, and rock. Recordings of sermons are eligible in Best Audio Book, Narration And Storytelling Recording.”

FG: Other than that, there’s no other…conditions for being in that category. So, we had our suspicions, obviously, that a drag queen in the category was probably too much. But we had no official reason.

LGBTQ Nation: And you weren’t able to get in touch with anyone from the Recording Academy?

FG: We didn’t try reaching out to the Recording Academy directly. Erin spoke with friends that she knows, including…some executive, and that person didn’t know what could have happened. We didn’t have any answers.

LGBTQ Nation: A Recording Academy representative told Paste magazine recently that “Re-categorizing recordings with explicit language/content has been a standard practice for the Gospel & CCM genre committee, given that the Gospel & CCM Field consists of lyrics-based categories that reflect a Christian worldview.” And that was the first sort of indication you’ve gotten as to why the album was recategorized as pop?

FG: Yes. That was the first answer I got, when that Paste article went live.

LGBTQ Nation: That seems to suggest that your album contains “explicit” language.

FG: Yeah, which even I would agree, it does.

LGBTQ Nation: So, if that’s the reason it was excluded from the category, how do you respond to that?

FG: I mean, I can’t say that that thinking is surprising to me. I don’t know who makes up the Grammys screening committees. I don’t think anybody does. But I would assume that the Contemporary Christian category’s committee is made up of people who work in the Contemporary Christian music industry, and knowing that industry, I’m not surprised that they would be shy about some salty language. But, it being the Grammys, I just assumed that it was my best shot at having representation in the world of Christian music, because the Grammys are… more progressive than other music bodies.

It just honestly never crossed my mind that the explicit language would come into play with the Recording Academy. Especially because I don’t think of the Grammys as being a gatekeeping organization for religious ideology. There are all kinds of Christians. There are Christians who curse. Most of my Christian friends curse. That’s the world I live in. Also, that song, the lyrics were really intentional. It’s provocative with a point. I chose the language I chose for a reason, and the reason is to speak back to the church.

LGBTQ Nation: And it is just the one song on the album with “explicit” lyrics?

FG: Yeah. The song’s Esther, Ruth, and Rahab, and it’s my personal story of growing up in an evangelical subculture where women were diminished and men were elevated, where queer people were not acknowledged at all really. It’s a song about women in the Bible and their stories and how they impacted me growing up. So, I use some salty language and that’s very intentional, because that’s what I’m talking about in the song.

LGBTQ Nation: So, having what I guess amounts to an explanation, is there any part of you that’s relieved that the album wasn’t excluded because you perform in drag?

FG: Well…I mean… I think that the explicit language reason provides the screening committee with an easy out. I wonder what would have happened if I had submitted a “clean” album, but still did it in drag. I wonder what would have happened. And we may find out one day, because maybe I’ll do that next year.

LGBTQ Nation: Well, that’s interesting, because in a sense, wouldn’t that mean that this screening criteria is dictating how you make your art?

FG: Yeah, truly. I mean, there are ways to get around that. I’m not going to censor myself, but I might release a “clean” version. But that’s obviously all speculation on my part, and we won’t know ’til we know.

I don’t know, even the explicit language reason is disappointing from the Grammys in particular. I would expect it from the Doves, I would expect it in other places. But from the Grammys that’s really disappointing because, like I said, I know plenty of very strong believers, very strong Christians who understand the value of incisive, pointed language to get a point across.

This song is a protest song. It is a song about liberation for women and queer people, and I’m trying to make a point, and I wanted it to get noticed. That’s why it’s got some of the language it does. To me that fits what the Grammys are about. The Grammys have a whole social change song category. That’s a whole mission, at least one of the pillars of what the Grammys are about, so it’s just wild to me that this small screening committee has the power to just completely sideline a record like mine based on a handful of words in one song.

LGBTQ Nation: What do you want people, including members of the Recording Academy, to know about Bible Belt Baby?

FG: The album is, to me, the kind of record that I grew up listening to when I was young and was only allowed to listen to Christian music. So, it’s the kind of record that I would have found very attractive: a singer-songwriter, storytelling record that happens to be telling of a journey of faith.

Stories of faith and experiences with God and other people in the church, all of that is included in this record. It just so happens that my story is a queer one. And there’s a good bit of critique. A lot of it is calling out the church and the Christian music industry for its treatment of queer folks — and what they’re missing out on by oppressing and suppressing and ignoring queer Christians and what we have to offer.

There is a wisdom that we, and only we, can offer the church because straight people do not have to navigate the church in the way that we do. So, we learn things that they never have an opportunity to learn, but that we can teach them and we can bring back to Christianity and back to the churches if they would let us.

LGBTQ Nation: You developed your drag persona during the COVID lockdowns?

FG: I went out in drag for the first time in October of 2019 — so Halloween — and kind of got hooked and excited. But I didn’t have time. Then when the pandemic started, I had time. I started playing around in early 2020 when we were all sheltering in place, and it just snowballed from there.

LGBTQ Nation: How would you describe “Flamy Grant”?

FG: It’s an extension of me. Yes, there is character work in it. It’s an exaggeration; that’s what drag is. But friends call me Flamy now, and I love that. It very much has been part of my own gender identity journey and all of that too.

My tagline is: I’m “a shame-slaying, hip-swaying, singing-songwriting drag queen.” So, I am here for the eradication of shame in any and every form, especially as it relates to queerness in the church. Flamy is your gay aunty who is there to make sure you know that you are ok, you are worthy, you are loved just as you are. God loves you, the divine loves you, whatever name you need to put on your spirituality. I want to stand in defense of the queer kids who are coming up in really oppressive, high-demand religious spaces.

LGBTQ Nation: The spiritual element was always part of developing this persona?

FG: No. This started for me as just for me. I never planned to have a career, like quit my day job and do this full-time. I was reconnecting with the baby version of myself who had all these instincts to go play with my mom’s makeup and put on her clothes, and it got shamed out of me. It was not okay in the world I grew up in, so I stopped for 35 years. I just didn’t explore those impulses. I shoved them down deep. So, for me it was just this liberating, freeing thing that really was just for me.

Eventually, a couple of my videos on TikTok just started to go viral where I was talking about [spirituality], and about worthiness and pursuing happiness here and now and not waiting for heaven, which is the thing I was always taught: We sacrifice now so that we can have a happy life in heaven. And what I’ve learned through drag is, absolutely not! We don’t know what’s coming next. Maybe there’s a heaven, maybe there isn’t. But what we do know is we have this life. Why do we sacrifice and squander in this life? That was a big part of my early messaging, and it resonated with people. That’s when I realized, “There’s something to this.” That’s when I started to blend my music and songwriting, which I’ve done my whole life.

LGBTQ Nation: Has your music always been Christian-oriented?

FG: Not always. It started out that way. I worked for churches as a worship leader for 22 years, starting in conservative evangelical churches and then moving to really progressive, LGBTQ-affirming churches in the past decade. But I’ve been in other bands, and I’ve done lots of different types of songwriting.

LGBTQ Nation: I’d like to ask about your Christian faith if that’s okay. What has your relationship with the church been like over the course of your life, and how has it evolved?

FG: When I first started working in churches in 2004 after college, I felt an obligation to let the senior leadership know that I quote-unquote “struggled with same-sex attraction.” That’s how I talked about it at the time; that’s how I viewed it. That was the very first part of my coming out process: admitting to people that I “struggled” with this thing. I had been so heavily indoctrinated that my queerness was an abomination that I wanted to be rid of it, genuinely. I enrolled myself in conversion therapy for five years. I tried to be straight. I tried real hard.

Obviously, it didn’t work, and over the course of my 20s I was exploring a lot of the passages in the Bible where the queerphobia comes from. I learned how badly translated they are and eventually came to the conclusion that so many queer Christians do, that we’re not condemned for this. It’s who we are and how God made us and we can have a thriving spiritual life and not have to change that part of who we are.

LGBTQ Nation: How do you now reconcile what prominent religious leaders and mainstream Christianity say about homosexuality and LGBTQ+ people with your own identity and faith?

FG: I don’t know that I fully have. Ask me on any given day, and I might give you a different answer. I might just want to chuck the whole religion. But for sure chuck evangelicalism. That’s kind of the distinction I’ve had to make in my mind and when I talk about it. When I’m coming for Christianity, I’m really coming for evangelicalism. That is the bit that I think is absolutely toxic and absolutely wrong and absolutely needs to go. Period. No qualifications. Evangelicalism should be done.

But Christianity is a much older faith than evangelicalism. It’s not connected to so many of the ancient traditions of Christianity. It’s wholly consumed with political power now, and that’s been the past four or five decades. I would say even the evangelicalism I grew up in wasn’t obsessed with political power. We weren’t talking about that in my church, and homosexuality wasn’t preached against from the pulpit. It may not have been okay, but it wasn’t such a hot-button talking point.

And now, thanks to so many things — and I would say largely Trump and his connection to evangelicalism — it’s just…The floodgates have opened, we have seen the true colors of this sect of Christianity. So, that is what I will always be pushing back against and trying to remind folks that many Christian traditions have been welcoming and open to and accepting of queer people forever. And the Bible itself is a welcoming and open and accepting religious sacred text for queer people.

LGBTQ Nation: So what’s the next step for you with the Grammys?

FG: This is the next step. Having the opportunity to tell this story so that maybe next year things will be a little more transparent for other people who want to follow this path in Christian music — not necessarily drag queens, but Christians who want to make music for audiences that believe God redeems all of creation and not just the heteronormative parts of it, and Christians who might want to use their own versions of salty language — to know what the rules are, because they were never stated.

And I’d love to see the conversation go further because I don’t believe the Recording Academy should be in the business of gatekeeping Christianity, which is how this feels to me. And I don’t think that the Recording Academy wants to be in that business either. I think there’s probably a handful of people who are on this screening committee for Contemporary Christian music, and the Contemporary Christian Music industry has been highly unwelcoming to queer people and to their queer fans.

There’s a whole untapped market for Christian music, and I think there’s a mutually beneficial relationship to be had. Queer people have something to say to the industry, and I think the industry can serve us too by giving us representation and a place to share our stories.