“My music covers a lot of different genres,” says drag queen Flamy Grant. “As an independent artist, that’s one thing I get to do, and I did choose to put my record in the Christian genre.” In late July, Grant’s first studio album rose to the No. 1 spot on the iTunes Christian charts.

“The thing that’s unique and weird about the Christian genre is it’s not actually a style of music — it can be any style,” says Grant, who requested their real name not be published due to the recent backlash against drag performers in the United States.

“Most Christian music nowadays is praise and worship, like what people sing on Sunday mornings at church. When I was growing up, it was so much more diverse. You could find rock music, rap, hip-hop folk, singer-songwriter, pop, contemporary, traditional, gospel — all under this umbrella term of ‘CCM,’ or contemporary Christian music.

“At the end of the day, singer-songwriter is the genre I love the most,” she adds. “Just a human being on a stage with a guitar or a piano, just a person and their instrument singing the songs that they wrote.”

Although Grant’s first album, Bible Belt Baby, was released last October, it didn’t gain as much exposure until Sean Feucht, a Christian nationalist preacher with ties to former President Donald Trump, criticized her and fellow Christian musician, Derek Webb, for working together on the song “Good Day.”

Feucht also criticized Grant for performing in drag, calling her collaboration with Webb a sign of “the last days,” and claiming that she’d never carve out a spot within the Christian music genre.

Feucht’s comments, which came amid an ongoing right-wing campaign against drag and the visibility of transgender people — as evidenced by the introduction of more than 500 bills specifically targeting public expressions of gender-nonconformity in 49 states — only served to boost Grant’s profile.

Not long after people learned of Feucht’s feud with Grant, Bible Belt Baby shot to the top of the iTunes Christian music charts, remaining there for nine straight days, while “Good Day” reached as high as No. 2 on the individual song charts.

While the expectation for Christian music stars has generally been to embrace the right-wing ideology that so often accompanies evangelical religious beliefs, Grant’s success on the charts was indicative that there might be some space — even among the genre’s most fervent fans — for artists that don’t adhere to expectations or conform to a certain mold. Grant feels Bible Belt Baby is very much a product of the Christian music world.

“When I pulled back and looked at the record as a whole after it was finished, I was like, ‘This feels very much like the telling of a spiritual journey,'” she says. “I grew up Christian, and I’ve had to reckon with Christianity and how it impacts me as a queer person, how it impacts my friends and the work I’ve done in the church.”

Raised in Western North Carolina as the oldest of three children — all of whom now identify as queer in some capacity — in a conservative Christian household, Grant began writing music at the age of nine, beginning with songs expressing love for Jesus. She continued pursuing music into adulthood, with stints as a solo artist under her given name, and as a member of two different bands. She also served as a worship leader in church, which gave her yet another opportunity to perform for audiences.

For a brief time, Grant struggled with identifying as Chrisitan, simply because she couldn’t reconcile her fit into a right-wing “box” with certain expectations. She went through a process of “deconstruction,” a term used by former evangelicals to describe the process of unpacking the political, cultural, and theological beliefs, rhetoric, and influences in their lives and discarding what no longer fits.

“I grew up believing the core tenets of evangelicalism, which include things like Jesus is the only way to heaven, Jesus is the only way to God, Jesus died for our sins, and that’s the only path, the only access we have to a happy hereafter,” she says.

Grant grew up believing homosexuality to be sinful, and as she recognized her own struggles with same-sex attraction, she spent “years” seeking out help, even self-enrolling in conversion therapy due to the fear of being rejected by God and her fellow Christians. After unsuccessful attempts to “fix” those feelings, Grant temporarily stopped identifying as a Christian, only to later re-embrace the label. These days, she primarily serves as a worship leader in more progressive-leaning churches and appears in LGBTQ-affirming spaces.

“One of the few reasons that I am even engaging in the Christian world anymore is because I know that there are still kids growing up who are being told that they are sinful, they are unworthy, they are unloved by God, and those are insidious lies,” she says. “Those are terrible things to teach a child. And I want to offer a counterpoint. I want to say that you are worthy, you are loved, you are whole just as you are, and you are as the divine intended you to be.

“So my faith has undergone a massive shift — I don’t even believe the basic tenets of evangelicalism anymore. If anything, I’m a universalist at this point. Everybody’s in. If there is a God who is going to judge us all one day, I believe that everybody gets in, so that’s kind of where my faith journey has gone.”

Grant, who was based in San Diego for 17 years, recently moved back to North Carolina with her husband, Chris, and their dog, Merlin. The move not only puts her closer to her family members, who still live in the state’s western part, but places her on the front lines of the culture war, where she feels her visibility is needed.

“There’s more opportunity in the Southeast for me to make an impact as a ‘Christian drag queen’ than there is in California,” says Grant. “It’s a whole new chapter, a whole new journey. I reserve the right to decide, at a later point, this isn’t working and go somewhere that is more welcoming to queer folks. But for right now, [Chris and I] feel it’s important for us to put our money where our mouth is, to walk the talk and be on the front lines of where all this [anti-LGBTQ] legislation is happening, and where our queer siblings are under attack.

“I’m a 6’5″ drag queen, maybe 6’6″ or 6’7″ when I’ve got my heels and my hair on,” she says. “So it’s like, ‘Let me be as big a presence as I possibly can in the places that need it the most,’ so that, at the very least, queer kids growing up out here, where I grew up, can see themselves represented.”

METRO WEEKLY: Tell us a little bit about your personal background, where you grew up, what your family was like.

FLAMY GRANT: I was born in Western North Carolina, in the Asheville area. I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s. My family is super-fundamentalist, super-evangelical — different from today’s evangelicals in that my upbringing wasn’t hyper-political. Evangelicalism today, I feel, is very much defined by its political power and the efforts they make legislatively, and that did not feel like a big part of my upbringing. It felt more personal and more intimate.

I went to a really small church and, for the most part, we were concerned with ourselves. I don’t remember us being very much tuned in to what was going on in the world. It was pretty insular, but I did love music from the youngest of ages. My mom was a singer and played piano for our church, and we were just always a singing family. I wrote my first song when I was nine years old — it was a love song to Jesus, because that is what I grew up singing. I didn’t really know much music beyond that, nursery rhymes, and songs to Jesus.

In high school, I taught myself to play guitar, and, from there, in college, started playing coffee houses and things like that and learning about the singer-songwriter world, which I was part of under my given name. I was also in a couple of bands over the years, but for the most part, what I was doing was leading worship at churches. I started in really conservative churches and, as I grew and developed and changed my own beliefs, moved towards progressive Christianity and progressive churches and LGBTQ-affirming churches.

Up until last year, I was a worship leader at churches, so that was a 22-year part of my life, and then the pandemic came around. I started drag at the beginning of the pandemic because I finally had the time to explore that and, from there, Flamy was born. I never fully expected or anticipated that I would have a whole drag-musician career, but that’s where we have found ourselves now.

MW: Being raised in this evangelical household, were there any restrictions on what you could listen to or watch? How did your faith play a role in your secular life outside of church?

GRANT: I didn’t really have a secular life. Everything was spiritual. I went to a Christian school from grades K through twelve. My mom was a teacher there, so I had her very close eyes on me at all times, at home, church, and school. I was never really very far from her watchful eye and from the world that we were immersed in. My upbringing was very strict, especially early on. I was the oldest child, so I think I got the strictest part of my parents’ restrictions.

I wasn’t allowed to listen to any music that I couldn’t find at our local Christian bookstore. That’s where I bought my music, and that was the music I listened to, and that’s why Amy Grant was my number one. She was my diva. It was the same with TV and movies. I remember we had a subscription to this service that Focus On the Family used to offer. If you know Focus On the Family, they’re a massive, horrifyingly oppressive organization out of Colorado Springs that provides resources to Christian families who are raising kids. They had a subscription service to movies — like VHS tapes that you would get in the mail. Every month, you’d get a new movie, but they were like these heavily edited versions of TV movies with anything remotely offensive edited out.

I loved TV as a teenager and would have to sneak around and watch a lot of my favorite shows, record them surreptitiously and set the VCR to record. I remember I did that with Ellen‘s “Puppy Episode,” which was when Ellen’s character came out on her sitcom. We went to a prayer meeting, I set the VCR and, when I came back, I had to hurry and hide that tape to make sure that no one knew I was going to watch it. Then I watched it when I was home alone.

So, yeah, my upbringing was pretty restrictive. I didn’t really start listening to any “secular” music until later in high school, probably 10th or 11th grade. I really got into Lilith Fair and female singer-songwriters and things like that, but for the most part, it was Christian music all the time, all day, every day.

MW: When did you first realize that you felt different about your sexual orientation?

GRANT: I knew probably by the third grade. I remember having an awareness. I didn’t know the word queer, I didn’t know the word gay in the third grade, I was that sheltered, but I knew I was different from other boys in my class by third grade. And by fourth and fifth grade I knew that I was attracted to men or other boys. I just didn’t ever tell anybody until college. I kept it very much as my own private secret.

As I learned what homosexuality was, and the shame came with it, I just became enveloped in shame, because this felt like this terrible secret that was going to cause me to lose everything I cared about if it were to ever get out. I became very aware of the consequences of being out and gay and proud because I saw that that was not accepted in my world.

MW: When did you decide to come out?

GRANT: The first time I came out to someone was my best friend in college, and I couldn’t even say the words “I’m gay” or “I struggle with same sex attraction,” I couldn’t even say it. It was late at night and we were in the common room in our dorm and I was just shaking on the edge of the couch trying to get this out. And I finally had to pull out a Bible and point to Romans 1 and say, “This is the thing that I struggle with.” I shoved the Bible in my friend’s arms and went across the room to the other side of the room and just huddled into a fetal position and waited for what I thought was probably going to end up being a terrible judgment and condemnation from my friend. It wasn’t, fortunately. My friend just came over and hugged me.

From there, I would say for a good five to eight years, anytime I came out to someone, and I didn’t do it lightly, my motivation behind it was to make sure that the person knew I believed that this was the sin and I’m not acting on it. It was always very important for me to make sure people knew I wasn’t at the gay clubs, I wasn’t having sex with men, I was being celibate, I was doing the right thing, and I was trying to change. I was trying to be what I thought God wanted me to be. That was a really long time.

By the end of my twenties, I had gone through the journey that a lot of queer people who grew up in religious spaces go through, it just took me longer than some, but reckoning with the Bible and reckoning with the idea that this book actually doesn’t have all the answers for modern life. It doesn’t.

It doesn’t have anything to say about same-sex relationships as we understand them today. There are bad misinterpretations of scripture that have made it into the versions that we call canon today. So that journey helped with my own coming out process, and by the end of my twenties, I was finally like, “Okay, I’m here, I’m queer, that’s not going to change. I’m going to stop trying to change my orientation and I’m going to see about the possibility of dating men.”

MW: At what age did you enroll in conversion therapy?

GRANT: I think I was 20 or 21, and I was on the Internet. It was early Internet days, but there was still enough happening to where I could find information about people like me, people who said they struggled with same-sex attraction, and then there were a lot of people who said that they had managed to heal themselves from same-sex attraction.

So I found Exodus International, which was the premier organization that churches around the world would use to basically send their gay problem children to [for treatment]. And so I went to a group therapy in Asheville, North Carolina for years, and even went to their national conference one year. I was all in. I really wanted to make it work. I was very sincere in my efforts to try and change my orientation because I was sincere about my faith and I was sincere about trying to please God. It’s what I thought God wanted.

MW: When did you realize it wasn’t working for you?

GRANT: It was actually at the national conference one year that someone asked, “Hey, how long does this process take?” It was a panel session, we were all just sitting there listening to the speakers and we got to have a Q&A. And someone said, “How long is this going to take? I’m committed, I want to make it work, but I need to know where the light at the end of the tunnel is.”

And this panelist said, “Well, it’s different for every person, but for most people, if you stick to this program, you will see your orientation change in five years.” And that’s honestly why I did conversion therapy for five years. I all but marked the date down in my calendar and said, “Okay, great. I’ll be straight in whatever year.” I think it was 2007. And obviously, I wasn’t. It did not work.

That was when I started asking the harder questions and saying, “Someone’s lying.” Either God is lying, or people are lying about God, or the people who are saying that I can change my orientation are lying. Somebody’s lying because it’s not working and these things aren’t adding up. I don’t know anybody who is as sincere as I am. There’s not a false bone in my body about this. I am trying my damnedest. So that was when I asked the hard questions, and that led me down that path of deconstruction and apostasy and coming out and becoming a drag queen and finally finding happiness.

MW: I know you’ve said you developed the persona of Flamy during the pandemic. How long had you been considering delving into drag?
GRANT: I had thought about it prior to the pandemic. My first time in drag was Halloween of 2019, and I went out to the clubs dressed as a witch. It’s easy to go out in drag on Halloween. It’s safe. You’re not going to be laughed at or mocked. And I loved it. I had the time of my life that night, and I just was flipping my hair back, and just being sassy, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, this unlocks something in me.”

But I was a very busy person. I was in a band, I had a full-time job, I didn’t have time to really consider doing drag, and I never really did consider doing drag as a career, until the pandemic, when I finally had time, extra hours in the day. And I spent my pandemic just watching every YouTube makeup tutorial I could find, and drag tutorial, learning how to style wigs and all of it.

MW: When was the first time you performed as Flamy?

GRANT: So, Flamy started online during the pandemic. I lived with a couple of other musicians, and we started a weekly livestream concert, just like so many other musicians did. And I started showing up to those concerts every week in drag, and we would have a different theme, and so I would match my drag to the theme. So where I first started performing was virtually.

My first live performance in front of an audience as Flamy was at a club in San Diego called Gossip Grill. It’s a women’s bar, actually — the lesbian bar in San Diego — and it was for a Sunday drag brunch. The theme was show tunes. So my first number ever was Mama Morton, from Chicago, “When You’re Good to Mama.” I sang it live, and it was a thrill. It was everything. I loved it.

From there, I really got into San Diego’s local drag scene, which is where I was living at the time, and really connected there, and just did a lot of drag shows. I didn’t really start playing my own music out as Flamy until a little bit later. It all unfolded for me. I never saw the full picture. I didn’t see today, three years ago. I had no idea that I would be a drag singer-songwriter who’s doing this work in spiritual spaces and all of that. I just kind of followed my gut a step at a time. And there was finally a point where I was like, “Oh, I’m a singer-songwriter. I’ve always been a singer-songwriter. And now I’m doing drag. Let’s marry those things. Let’s record an album.”

I went to a friend and said, “Let’s just do a little acoustic five-song EP. Let’s just record something, and let’s see what happens.” And I ended up running a Kickstarter for that, and it just went berserk. I raised a lot more than I expected, and we ended up making a full record — ten songs — and that’s what people are listening to now, Bible Belt Baby.

I realized that my drag, which started as work for me to heal my inner child, is helpful and can help other people do the same thing. It heals other people, and it heals spiritual trauma, and it heals religious trauma. My music does that, too. And there are places that want to book a musician or singer-songwriter who is a drag queen. I just never in my life would have thought that I would have a whole second act in the second half of my life, where I’d be doing this. It’s just been a crazy experience to watch unfold.

MW: Let’s take a moment to talk about Amy Grant, whom your name is derived from. Amy Grant’s career started out in what we’d call “praise” music and then she crossed over to more mainstream music in the early ’90s. How did her music or her career influence your own musical development?

GRANT: My earliest memories of Amy Grant’s music was the stuff we would sing in church. We would sing some of her songs like “Thy Word” and “El Shaddai” in church. I remember also getting a bunch of cassette tapes from my auntie. She had the Amy Grant Unguarded cassette tape in there, and I found it, and it was this ’80s kind of pop rock, but still Christian. It was so different from anything I had listened to, and I was like, “Oh, I want to move to this.”

I was just very into her music and, when she had her sort of scandalous time –- which is obviously very tame compared to a lot of scandals that pop stars since have been through — but for our little world, for the Christian evangelical world, it was very scandalous that Amy Grant ended up getting a divorce and marrying country star Vince Gill and all that. There was a lot of gossip around that.

I know lots of people [in the evangelical community] whose parents said they couldn’t listen to Amy Grant anymore. Fortunately, for me, I was still allowed to listen to her, but the restriction became, ‘We can’t listen to her if we’re on our way to church, or if it’s a Sunday, because that’s the Lord’s Day. I remember one time my mom took out her cassette tape when we were on the way to church and she was like, “No. We need worship music,” or “We need music about Jesus because we’re headed to church.”

Amy Grant was the first victim of cancel culture from evangelicals, just their tendency to boycott anything. Now they’re like, “Oh, this organization went ‘woke.’ We’ve got to boycott them,” that kind of thing. “Don’t shop at Target anymore. They’ve got rainbows on boys’ clothes,” that kind of stuff. It feels like it started with Amy Grant crossing over into pop music and subsequently getting divorced and all of that. Even before the divorce, there were lots of people who were like, “We can’t support Amy Grant anymore because she’s now a pop star and her music videos have her acting with a man who’s not her husband,” like that was a big deal. In the “Baby, Baby” music video, there’s a really handsome guy that she’s kind of flirting with the whole music video, and they’re like, “Scandal! Clutch my pearls! Someone’s acting!”

MW: Is she still viewed controversially by the evangelical community today or has that subsided?

GRANT: I would say people have gone one of two ways. They’ve either gone really hard into still being very scandalized by her, and those would be the people I think who are the ones voting for Trump, the really hardcore evangelicals. There are also a lot of Christians who have come around and been like, “Oh, well, it’s really not that big of a deal. Fifty percent of marriages ended in divorce. Why are we singling out Amy Grant as the scapegoat for all of this?”

MW: Does paying homage to her with your name, before they even hear that you’re a drag artist or before they even hear your music, set the world on fire among some audiences that you might perform before?

GRANT: No. The drag does that first. A lot of people don’t even get the reference right away. Sometimes, it takes a little explaining for folks, but it has come up in my social media comments, where people will say things like, “Well, Amy Grant already sold her soul to the devil, so, of course, now a drag queen is going to take her name.” It does come up. It’s never the first thing. Drag in and of itself is enough to just make most conservatives freak out.

It does come up in her fan groups online and stuff. There’s a pretty sizable Facebook fan group called “Friends of Amy,” and people have dropped some of the links about me in there or dropped some of my music in there, and then there have been ensuing conversations that have gone on for pages and pages of comments where some people are very upset that I would use Amy Grant’s name or make fun of Amy Grant in this way. Some folks are like, “Amy should send a cease-and-desist to this queen.” It does come up among her fans a lot. They either love it or hate it.

MW: Have you heard from her personally?

GRANT: I have not yet, no.

MW: No cease-and-desist orders?

GRANT: No cease-and-desist. What I do know from people in her circle and things like that, I know she’s aware of me. I can’t speak for her, but we’ve seen Amy make very public statements in the press in recent years about being supportive of the LGBTQ community. A lot of her fans who are gay say that she has been supportive for years, just maybe not as vocally as some people would prefer. Just from speaking to people who know her and know her situation, I’m not afraid of a cease-and-desist letter coming. I don’t believe that that’s ever going to come. I think that her team knows about me, and I think they’re pretty darn okay with me.

I do hope I get to meet her one day. Obviously, that would be a fabulous dream come true. I’ve loved Amy for my whole life. What a lot of people don’t understand is that you don’t make a drag persona out of someone that you want to mock. That’s not what you do with drag. Drag — at least for a cis-man doing female drag — that’s an amplification of that woman’s impact and her legacy.

MW: Your album Bible Belt Baby went number one on the iTunes Christian music charts. What specifically about the album do you think appealed to listeners and contemporary Christian music fans?

GRANT: I mean, I would love to say that it was just that the music was that good, but I’m no fool. I know that what’s appealing is the story of a drag queen taking up space in a world that is hostile to drag queens. In Christianity, and evangelicalism, drag and trans folks have become the target of the day. They’ve tested it and they’ve focus-grouped it, and they decided, “This is the issue we are going to focus on as conservative leaders and legislators and church leaders.” So, I know that it’s just a very punchy, attention-grabbing headline to say “Here’s a drag queen who just succeeded at doing a thing in Christian music,” where all [most non-Christians] know about Christians is that they hate drag.

But I’m also very proud of the record, and I think it’s very good, and I think that that’s what has given it some staying power. I think anything could be a flash in the pan. A catchy headline can only go so far. But the fact that the album stayed at the top for nine days, and then also cracked the Billboard charts — that was a wild moment. And people are now coming to my shows, and they want to hear more from me.

MW: Obviously, drag has gotten in the headlines for various reasons. Tennessee is one of the states that has banned “adult-oriented performances,” which is the new term of art, with an eye towards banning drag shows in particular. As a drag performer, where do you think that opposition, that discomfort with drag, or just gender-nonconformity more broadly, comes from?

GRANT: I think it comes from people’s own internalized misunderstandings of gender and the patriarchy that we all suffer under. Like I said, everybody has to conform under patriarchy. I don’t care if you are the “girliest girl” or the “manliest man” — on some level, you are performing and behaving in a way that you know will be accepted by your peers on a social level. And drag just says, “Fuck that.” Drag is a big middle finger to all of the gender performance that we all do in our daily lives.

Drag is a gender performance of an entirely different kind. It’s the kind that says, “Fuck your notions of gender. Fuck your idea of what I should look like or how I should talk or even carry my body, what my posture should look like. Fuck all of that. I am going to create the fantasy that I feel inside, and I’m going to bring it to the outside.”

I think that freedom is scary for people to see in others, because they don’t feel free enough to do it themselves. They don’t feel liberated. Their own gender feels like such a performance that seeing drag is a threat to the status quo, to the things that they do to maintain their norms.

A generic Joe, white man, American knows that if he were to show up in a skirt, he would get ridiculed and made fun of, and he knows there are consequences for that. So to see drag queens and drag kings and all of us just living out here, saying, “Fuck all of that,” I think it just shows that the whole system that we’ve all subscribed to is bullshit. It takes the power out of it, and if it takes the power out of it, it means it takes the power away from the people who are in charge of it.

MW: There’s often an argument put forth, in which mere proximity to either drag or homosexuality is somehow “grooming” children or compels others to identify as X, Y, or Z. The argument is effectively if you see a drag queen perform, you’re immediately going to run out and buy a wig and heels. But your life, and your upbringing, would seem to expose that theory of “social contagion” as a lie or inherently flawed.

GRANT: To me, it is projection, pure and simple. The practice of evangelicals is to groom and indoctrinate their kids to believe and behave the way they want them to. So that’s what they know — and that’s what they say that we are doing. If there was any truth to the fact that proximity to a belief or a lifestyle would ensure the perpetuation of that belief or lifestyle, I would be a straight, evangelical music minister. I was indoctrinated so hard that I enrolled myself in conversion therapy. It didn’t work. I’m gay because I’m gay. I’m not gay because I was exposed to queerness growing up — I wasn’t! I didn’t know what queerness was until high school. It’s an obvious projection and red herring and just a nonsense argument in my mind. But it’s one, obviously, that we still have to combat because it keeps rearing its stupid head. And so the accusation that we’re out here indoctrinating and grooming — they’re just telling on themselves. They’re just confessing to their own sins.

That’s not what drag is and drag story time is about. Now, we’ve got drag Bible hour. I’ve performed at a couple of those now at churches. It affirms the whole body of believers, not just the ones who are straight, not just the ones who are cis or male or white. The church’s job is to give representation, give voice to the whole body of believers, and that includes the queer kids growing up. That includes the women and the girls and the kids who are non-binary. We are those things because we are those things, not because anyone influenced us to be that way. I mean, I live to see a drag Bible story hour. That’s a thing that would have changed the trajectory for me as a kid, and I’m very happy to see those things happening.

MW: How would you like to see your career as Flamy go?

GRANT: I’m so excited about making music, continuing to make music as Flamy. I know I have a few more good records in me as Flamy. And I love touring and I love performing, so I see several years of more music that I continue to make, record, and release. I also have long-term dreams. I want to write a Broadway show one day, like the evangelical version of The Book of Mormon. I want to write a drag musical. That’s a big dream of mine. I want to work in the music industry in a way that makes space for more voices that have a hard time being heard. Trixie Mattel says, “If you want to be the best at something, find something that no one else is doing and then do that, and then by default, you’re the best.”

I think I’ve been very lucky in that there aren’t a lot of “Christian drag queens” working in the Christian music genre. I can’t actually name anybody else who’s specifically released a [contemporary Christian music] record as a drag performer. So of course, I got the attention and then the notoriety for that because it’s just not a thing that’s been done yet. But I’d love to — I don’t know whether it would be by launching my own record label or what — amplify other voices who are doing really powerful work with their music in genres that are not friendly to queer folks.

MW: What’s the source of inspiration for the music and lyrics you write?

GRANT: One thing about my music, especially Bible Belt Baby, contains songs that were partially written already. They were songs I had started writing as long ago as 2014, but I never finished them or knew where to go with them. It wasn’t until I had Flamy’s voice that I realized, “There’s this huge part of me that has never been expressed and has never been free to talk about itself.” Flamy gives me the freedom to finally do that. So a lot of those songs just kind of coalesced and gelled and came together once I had Flamy’s voice to do them in.

I have two ways I tend to write a song. And the first way is just a spark of inspiration that usually comes from something someone else says, like a book I’m reading or a podcast I’m listening to. This past week, I was at a conference called “Nevertheless She Preached,” in Austin, Texas, and it’s a women and femmes forward conference. And Reverend Naomi Washington-Leapheart gave a talk that just left me so inspired. She gave me enough to write a whole record with, but there was one line in particular, where she talked about how God’s love is wasteful, how God is a wasteful lover. And I just thought that was such a great song in that concept. So I’m going to go write a song about it. That’s one way I write songs.

The second way is, I do actually go out and say, “I need this kind of song. I need a protest song.” That’s what happened with “Esther, Ruth, and Rahab” on my record. I was like, I need a song that connects my drag to my very religious biblical upbringing. I labored over that song. “Esther, Ruth and Rahab” is probably the hardest song I’ve ever written, but it’s also the most gratifying.

I love that song so much. I feel like it just tells my story in a really specific way that ends up being so universal. So many people connect to that song. I’m sitting there singing about my experience growing up in my teeny-tiny evangelical church that was kind of a crazy experience. It’s not a typical evangelical experience. But that ends up being so universal and being the one that so many people connect to, due to the power of storytelling and music and just being authentic, and I love how that works.

Bible Belt Baby is available for streaming and purchase on most major music services, including Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music.

For more information on Flamy Grant, including a list of upcoming performances, visit www.flamygrant.com.

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Follow her on Twitter at @flamygrant.