The night was perfect: balmy enough for my strapless black dress with splotches of animal print, breezy enough for the denim overshirt I shrugged on after sunset. Flamy Grant performed on a small outdoor stage at the Gold Hill Inn, a log-cabin-style outpost in the mountains above Boulder, Colorado. The show wrapped up around dusk, and my partner and I grabbed seats inside to finish our drinks and chat with whoever hung around.
Flamy Grant is an exvangelical drag queen whose music revolves around their conservative Christian upbringing and the freedom they find in queerness. After the show, Flamy exchanged their towering magenta wig and pink denim overalls for an oversized yellow sweatshirt and gym shorts, and they pulled up a chair near me.
How did our conversation go? I’m trying to reconstruct the scene in my mind: lacey curtains wafting over the open windows, Flamy gentle and warm, and all my religious trauma pinging through my limbs, both activated and validated by the night’s show. I wanted to crawl into Flamy’s arms, to be cradled by this unexpectedly maternal figure who would tell me that it’s okay to have been wounded by religion.
