Drag Queens and Church

When I was the LGBTQIA2S+ Advocacy Coordinator for the OR-ID United Methodist Church Conference, I spent a glorious night in Twin Falls, ID, at a cafe called “Golden Brick Road Cafe,” with a group of drag queens and a wonderful audience. The theme? Drag Queen Theology. Another minister in the area set this up, and asked me, along with another United Methodist minister to be on a panel, along with a drag queen, in which we would spend time enjoying a drag performance by one queen after another, with question-and-answer period, with questions from the audience written on 3" by 5” cards. What a blast!

Kathryn Post of religiounnews.com reported on drag queens and church. Post wrote this in her report: Clad in heels, lace and a billowy white hairpiece, the guest preacher at Boise Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Idaho approached the pulpit last August with markedly more sparkle than the usual cleric. Bonnie Violet Quintana, a drag artist and queer chaplain, had been invited to organize a drag-centric service, and chose to conclude the liturgy — which had featured a drag queen singing songs from “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” testimony from a drag king who survived cancer and a drag performance to Florence and the Machine’s “Big God” — with a sermon about sanctuary.  “I think there is a push happening,” Quintana, who hosts the “Drag & Spirituality” podcast, told Religion News Service. “I think there are a lot more people who are willing, and a lot more spiritual spaces and spiritual communities better suited to create space for drag artists.”

Drag is no longer just happening in gay and lesbian bars, but is happening in city parks, libraries, schools, other public venues, and, of course, communities of faith. Is a drag performance necessarily worship? Jeff Charis-Carlson of Iowa City said, “A good worship service transforms the congregation in the way a Greek tragedy was supposed to transform the audience members. … Drag is just one expression of that, one that has been in the theaters for a long time, and it’s now making its way into churches.”

One of the pioneers of drag queens in worship is Flamy Grant, a wonderful drag queen who was recently in Albuquerque, the city in which Flamy’s husband grew up. Flamy’s song and stories are liberating, sassy, fun, and serious. Can’t get better than that.

Here’s a link to the article: https://religionnews.com/2024/06/20/drag-worship-where-queer-faith-and-performance-collide/

While in some towns, and among some people, there is friction with drag queens (go to Max’s “We’re Here” for more on the friction between drag queens and conservative towns and cities), in the end, most good drag queen and king shows I’ve seen are empowering and liberating, filled with love, just like the Gospels.

And we need more of that today.

May it be so.



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