Drag Queen Flamy Grant Removed from “Contemporary Christian” Grammy Category

By Josh Jackson  |  October 30, 2023 | 9:00am
Photo by Emily Tingley
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Drag Queen Flamy Grant Removed from “Contemporary Christian” Grammy Category

Singer/songwriter Flamy Grant released her debut album Bible Belt Baby last year addressing her own trauma growing up in conservative evangelical churches with the goal to show that a Christian album could be welcoming to everyone. But the Christian music industry hasn’t always been welcoming to her. The first drag queen to top the Christian music chart on iTunes, she’s been attacked on social media by prominent Christian preachers and her fellow Christian musicians alike. Now, after submitting the album to the Grammys in the Best Contemporary Christian Album, she finds that Bible Belt Baby has been moved out of the category to Best Pop Album instead.

“I know next to nothing about the Grammy nomination process, so when we saw you couldn’t vote for it in Best Contemporary Christian Album, I just assumed that was the end of the road,” says Grant. “It was a total shock when an Academy member sent me a message several days later to say she was excited to vote for me in Best Pop Vocal Album.”

The Grammy website states, “Screening Reviewing sessions by more than 350 experts in various fields are held to ensure that entered recordings meet specific qualifications and have been placed in appropriate fields… The purpose of screenings is not to make artistic or technical judgments about the recordings, but rather to make sure each entry is eligible and placed in its proper category.” The published screening criteria for the Contemporary Christian category simply states, “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.”

“Pop music is included in the Contemporary Christian category,” says Grant. “The only logical conclusion I can come to is that someone in the Academy decided my album qualifies as pop, but not as Christian.”

When reached for comment, a representative from the Recording Academy stated, “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.”

The one song on the album with explicit language is “Esther, Ruth, and Rahab,” a celebration of women in the Bible and a critique of churches that have suppressed women’s voices:

In the church where I was raised, all the women hid their hair
With what can only be called doilies made of lace
They sat beside their husbands and they never spoke a word
Cause public prayer was not a woman’s place
But literally any man was welcome to stand up
And for an hour we would listen to them talk
So I guess the lesson there was God would only hear a prayer
If it came from a person with a cock

Later, Grant, who served as a worship leader for more than two decades before becoming a drag artist, sings, “Every Sunday I would find a brand-new story with a girl/ Who made some patriarch meet his match/ They were painted as conniving but it wasn’t hard to see/ That secretly most men just fear the snatch.” And later, “Of course Eve said, Fuck this system, I am chasing after wisdom.”

“There were no instructions about explicit material for that category,” Grant said. “I’m very used to gatekeepers in the worlds of church and Christian music—that’s a big part of why I’ve dedicated myself to this work. But I never expected to encounter religious gatekeeping at the Grammys.”

“My faith journey has been long and difficult,” she adds, “but I’m still here, still taking up space in Christianity, still advocating for the inclusion of queer kids like me who grow up in these churches that ignore and oppress them.”

“Esther, Ruth, and Rahab” ends with the following refrain:

Every woman in the Scriptures smashed the norms to smithereens
So it’s a good thing when a girl learns how to fly
And that’s one truth from the Bible I’ll hold onto ’til I die

 
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