Flamy Grant

INTERVIEW: Flamy Grant and Friends Make the Yuletide Gay

Christian drag queen Flamy Grant cozies up to the fire to tell us about her holiday tour Make the Yuletide Gay

Flamy Grant is taking some of her best queer pals on tour this month – and she took a minute out of her tour prep to tell us all about it. Flamy spoke with us on the podcast at length about her relationship with Christianity and the ways she's put herself on the line to fight for our rights. Here, we take a step back and cozy up to the fire to chat about the tour.

Why do you feel it's important, as a queer artist, to put together a Christmas tour?

I just love Christmas. It’s a weird mixed bag of celebration and melancholy, calm and frenzy, family and friends, but it’s always been one of my favorite times of year. Getting to mark the occasion as our fully queer selves is a big deal for a lot of folks who grew up celebrating the season but doing so while in the closet, or code switching or masking in some way. With Make the Yuletide Gay, we can all come together and reinvent some traditions that might have been hard or painful growing up, reclaim the parts that are meaningful to us, and just throw a good old gay party!

How did you choose your tour mates?

Crys Matthews and I did a version of this tour last year for the first time with our friend Rebecca Loebe. Rebecca is on a tour hiatus right now, and I had initially planned to stay home in December as well. But Crys approached me about doing another round of the winter tour together, and it was too good an opportunity to pass up. We initially had the idea of asking Jennifer Knapp to join us, but Jen could only make one week work. So we started pulling in other friends (and in Crys’s case, family!) - Spencer LaJoye and Heather Mae - and before we knew it, we had a who’s who roster of queer folk songwriters in the mix. I floated the idea of “Make the Yuletide Gay” as a tour title, Crys liked it, and here we are!

All of you delve into Christian music in some form or other. What have you found in common about your songwriting approach? How does it feel to build up this little community?

Christian music is and always will be such a strange genre… a genre that’s not defined by style, as almost every other genre of music is, but by creed and content. But for better or worse, it exists, and many of us grew up with it and are still somewhat attached to or defined by it. I can’t speak directly for my tour mates, but I do know that we all have hearts for seeing queer representation in all spaces, and for me that includes the Christian music industry that has, at best, ignored us, and at worst, done a lot to suppress and harm us. We’re changing that narrative by making a space where queer people who identify with Christianity (or not!) can simply exist. I’d also argue the music we all make is better than anything coming out of the mainstream CCM genre these days, but that’s another interview…

What are you most excited for with this tour?

I’m most excited to just be with my friends on stage and be with a bunch of queer and ally music lovers celebrating the end of a year that has been marked by all kinds of hardship - Hurricane Helene and the election both come immediately to mind. But the places I’ve always found hope are in music and community, so my expectations for a hopeful, wonderful night of music all throughout December is very high.

Do you think you're on the "naughty" or "nice" list this year? ;)

As the so-called “Christian drag queen,” I’m very used to being on both lists! It depends who you ask, so I guess we’ll just have to leave it up to Santa.

MAKE THE YULETIDE GAY WITH CRYS MATTHEWS

Featuring Spencer LaJoye:

12/11: Vienna, VA - Jammin Java

12/12: Roanoke, VA - Spot on Kirk

12/13: Maryville, TN - The Bird and the Book

12/14: Memphis, TN - Folk All Y’all

12/15: Nashville, TN - City Winery

Featuring Heather Mae:

12/19: Austin, TX - 04 Center

12/20: Galveston, TX - The Old Quarter Acoustic Cafe

12/21: Ft. Worth, TX - Southside Preservation Hall

CHRISTMAS EVE SERVICE