Small Town, Big Pride

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Inside a grand old home on Waynesville’s Walnut Street, a transformation is occurring.

Flamy Grant has been painting her face, starting with her eyebrows, since 7:30 a.m. She has a ring light balanced atop an Amazon box, and two cups packed with makeup brushes, multiple brightly colored eyeshadow palettes, NYX Buttermelt blushes, a Tarte Shape Tape Concealer, a powder, and sweat-proof primer are strewn across the vanity.  

Grant arrived here at nearly midnight, after a 15-hour drive back from Wichita, Kansas. What the 44-year-old drag queen really needed was a Monster Zero-Sugar Energy Drink. “That’s what I use on the road to stay awake,” she explains. 

It was going to be a long day—and Grant’s first time celebrating Pride in Western North Carolina. Her agenda included singing an original song on the steps of the county courthouse, grand marshaling Haywood Pride on Main, reading a book for drag story hour, and hosting a show that night. 

So, yes, that primer needs to be sweat-proof.   

Haywood Pride on Main is now in its third year. Printer McIntosh, a 44-year-old university professor from nearby Clyde, started hosting local events in 2023, after a man and a woman complained that an allegedly transgender woman had used a changing room at the local recreation center. The first event was “Pups and Pride” at McIntosh’s animal rescue. They held another event at the rescue the following year, then expanded it to include a parade in downtown Waynesville, the county seat. 

Haywood County’s Pride is modest, by big-city standards. There’s really only one main float—the grand marshal on a truck trailer—and the parade is finished in under 10 minutes. But in a county of 57,000 residents, which went 62% to Donald Trump in 2024, rainbow flags streaming underneath Waynesville’s “Gateway to the Smokies” arch is nothing short of groundbreaking.  

Bible Belt Baby

Grant rose to national prominence in 2023 when her debut album Bible Belt Baby hit number one on the iTunes Christian charts. (A boost came from another Christian singer calling her “sick, twisted and yes demonic” on X.) 

Now Grant, who lives in South Asheville with her husband, spends two-thirds of her year touring the United States (and soon, the United Kingdom). For 15 years, she worked in nonprofit fundraising; now she earns a living through ticket sales, album downloads, and official merch. 

Grant has been writing songs since she was nine. Yet her current life—performing original music in drag—is one she couldn’t have imagined growing up in Leicester, a small, rural town in nearby Buncombe County, in the 1990s. She attended Asheville Christian Academy and spent multiple days a week at the evangelical Asheville Gospel Chapel. Her parents restricted her Internet use, and the only movies she was allowed to watch were made by either Disney or James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. 

“We just had those blinders on to only see church, only see school,” she recalls. “It was really just such a narrow upbringing.” As “a kid who was in my mom’s closet,” playing with her clothes, she had no idea that Asheville and its queer scene were so near.

Grant doesn’t remember hearing the word “homosexuality” at church. She only heard the word “gay” late in middle school, where she was also called derogatory slurs “all the time.”  

“For the longest time, I thought I was this, like, crazy aberration,” Grant recalls. “I was the only one going through what I was going through.” 

One solace was music. She began writing hymns and praise choruses at age 9, and in high school performed at church and school, as well as in musical theater. “I always just loved [how] it’s a place to creatively explore your interior world,” she says of music. “You can say things through music that are harder to say in conversation.”  

After two years at a Christian college in Tennessee, where she struggled to find her footing, Grant returned to Asheville. She was now aware there were other gay people in the world, in part thanks to Ellen DeGeneres’ public coming out. But “I never connected any of that to myself, other than, like, that’s the stuff I have to steer clear of,” Grant says. She wholeheartedly believed homosexuality was a sin and held a lot of fear about that part of her.  

That’s when Grant began to attend weekly meetings of Exodus International, a now-shuttered ministry that claimed to “convert” gay people into being straight. A husband and wife who had lost a son to AIDS hosted the meetings. In retrospect, Grant says, “I’m certain no one was a licensed practitioner of any sort.”

Grant attended Exodus meetings weekly for years with a small group of mostly men. (She effectively came out to her mother by sharing that she was attending the meetings.) At an Exodus International conference, Grant learned it should take five years to complete gay-to-straight conversion. 

“For the longest time, I thought I was this, like, crazy aberration. I was the only one going through what I was going through.” 

Flamy Grant, drag queen and musician

“I have a date in my future calendar: ‘Countdown to being straight,’” Grant recalls. “I believed it was possible. I thought that’s what God wanted from me, and so that’s why I pursued [it] earnestly, sincerely with my whole being.” Grant always found that other queer folks who grew up in the church were the most committed. “We were the ones who took this shit seriously,” she says. “We believed it because we needed to.” 

After five years, Grant was celibate but still gay. And now she was having a crisis of faith. 

Around 2009, her brother took her to a drag show at O. Henry’s, Asheville’s oldest gay bar, where a friend was performing. Drag was “new for me,” Grant says. What little she knew was from Mrs. Doubtfire and Tootsie, but the drag show cracked open the door. Around 2015, she began attending shows in San Diego, where she had moved, helping with the lighting and picking up tips. She wore a couple of Halloween costumes—a sexy witch, a ‘20s flapper—that made it feel safe to dress in drag. 

Grant also joined a progressive church. As she began to distance herself from evangelicalism, she was drawn to podcasts showing a different side of faith. In 2017, she started producing the Heathen podcast, which was one of only a few at the time about deconstructing religious evangelism. And in 2019, she married her husband. 

“My mom did walk me down the aisle at our wedding,” she says. “She still believes what she believes. It’s just I think she’s shifted her priorities around. Her relationships to her kids matter more than the dogma, which is not how it used to be. So that’s progress.”

It was the pandemic that birthed Flamy Grant. “It was a real slow dawning realization that this was a thing that had always been in my bones,” she recalls. Stay-at-home orders meant there was plenty of free time to watch makeup videos on YouTube; she also learned to style wigs. “My drag name ultimately became Flamy Grant because Amy Grant was my diva—loved her music growing up, still do,” she says. (Amy Grant also underwent something of a transition, from primarily Christian music to a more pop sound.)

Grant’s podcast pivoted to YouTube during the pandemic with Heathen Happy Hour, in which she dressed in drag and performed cover songs with friends. In 2021, Grant posted a TikTok of herself putting on makeup as she “gave a little 60-second sermon.” The next day she woke up to half a million hits. 

“That was the moment when … like a switch flipped—‘Oh, other people are really responsive to this!” she says.

After that, “I started writing songs in this new way, with this new voice,” she says. “Being Flamy just opened up a whole new world of songwriting.”

Thanks to Kickstarter, she debuted her first Flamy Grant album, Bible Belt Baby, in 2022, which includes powerhouse ballads like “I Am Not Ashamed” and sensitive country numbers like “Good Day.” CHURCH, her second album, hit number eight on the iTunes country charts in 2024, and Glorybound is coming out this fall.    

“It’s just been a snowball rolling downhill. There’s never been a plan. I didn’t imagine that there would be a career in it.”    

Pride on Main

With her neon Lisa Frank-patterned bodysuit zipped up and a neon blue wig affixed atop her head, it’s time to head to the county courthouse for Haywood Pride on Main.

Even McIntosh, the organizer, is surprised at how large the celebrations have grown. During the first year of the parade, the effort brought out 40 street vendors, cobbled together $100 donations from LGBTQ-owned businesses in town, and drew 2,000 guests. This year, there are 90 vendors, a marketing team, and donors include a mental health facility, a dental office and a realty office. Initial estimates, McIntosh said Monday morning, put the number of attendees at more than 5,000. 

Still, there have been some scary moments. In a Facebook post the night before the parade, a man posted a picture of a car with the words “beep, beep”; someone else posted about plans for a “demolition derby.” (In response, the Waynesville police department let McIntosh know they would increase the uniformed officers on the ground.)

There have also been thefts of rainbow flags from people’s homes. Now volunteers like Julia Buckner, a former high school teacher from Hayesville, put up 90 flags throughout Waynesville every morning and take them down every night during the week before pride. Haywood Pride on Main also has its own security team, McIntosh told The Assembly, and enlists the help of plainclothes police officers.   

‘Mom, There’s Other People!’

By 10 a.m. on Saturday, approximately 500 people had gathered in front of the Haywood County Courthouse, many wearing rainbow sashes and boas. Three protesters holding signs like “We are all sinners” and “What does it mean to be born again? We should talk” stood across the street. There were also at least a dozen women wearing “Free Mom Hugs” shirts, including Vera Connor of Waynesville. 

“I am a safe space for whoever needs a hug,” Connor says. “You’re supposed to love your children unconditionally, and that’s what I do.”

Michelle Mcquaig, also from Waynesville, scoured the web until she found the perfect shirt: “Someone I Love Is Transgender – Get Over It.” 

For Mcquaig and her 23-year-old son, Corey Worley, Haywood Pride is about visibility. Worley came out as genderfluid in middle school, and transgender in high school. “When I came to the first [Pride], I think I actually cried, ‘Mom, there’s other people!’” Worley recalls, getting emotional. “It made me realize I wasn’t as alone as I thought.”

“You have a big community,” McQuaig adds.  

The festivities began with McIntosh introducing the history of Haywood Pride, followed by remarks from Waynesville Town Councilmember Anthony Sutton, the first openly gay elected official west of Asheville. 

“Let me tell you about a kid who used to walk this very street, walked with their head down, sure they were the only one in the whole world,” Sutton shared. “People called that kid names.”

He continued, “Those are not the names I answer to anymore. Today they call me councilmember,” he said to cheers and applause. “At the planning table, they call me Mr. Chair. And the one that scared kid never let himself imagine—they call me husband,” Sutton said, his voice choking up.

Soon, it was time for Grant to take the stage, singing her song “S.P.R.K.L.,” inspired by a question about how she deals with Internet trolls.  

“If those haters got you stressin’, let a queen give you a lesson, since you’re askin’, stay proud, radiate, keep laughing,” she sang. “I know they want you to hide it, they knock it cuz they ain’t tried it, you’ve got passion, feeling good is never going out of fashion.” 

From there it was a full day of activities. A long line of fans wanted to stop for a photo with Grant. She then read The Rainbow Parade, about a family’s first Pride, to six kids under a tent outside Wall Street Books. That evening, she hosted a drag show at Wayneville’s Folkmoot Center for the Arts and performed Jo Dee Messina’s “Don’t Let Them Hide Your Beautiful” there. 

At the end of the weekend, Grant was exhausted and reflective. 

“Growing up here, I was fearful, lonely, and soaked in shame. I almost didn’t make it,” she said. “And now I can walk the streets in my full glory and reflect back the love this community gives me. What a beautiful turnaround.”