How To Make Your Yuletide Extremely Gay, For Jesus

It's the reason for the season!

Hello, Moral High Grounders! This little scrappy newsletter just passed 8,100 total subscribers, can you believe it? If you’re a new reader, welcome! Click here to learn what this place is all about and why you belong here.

If you love this newsletter and you haven’t done so yet, PLEASE upgrade your subscription to PAYING and/or founding subscriber.

Why? Because independent media is more important than ever in these dark days we’re heading into, and we need voices who aren’t afraid of calling the tyrants whatever mean and nasty names I want to call them.

Plus, subscriptions are 35 PERCENT OFF until the end of December, which is DEFINITELY the biggest sale ever!

It’s like, less than 5 bucks a month. Less than 4 if you pay the whole year at once!

Paying subscribers get access to a growing number of benefits, like audio versions of the weekly newsletter, plus the weekly live-chat, where you can ask me brilliant questions and we can just generally yap at each other. (We missed last week because of some technical difficulties, but I promise it’ll get back to normal at the latest by the new year.)

Coming up? Exclusive interviews with other brilliant Substackers and more brilliant people who aren’t Substackers!

More features and benefits will come as the place grows. A more professional podcast is coming, but realistically I’ll need to be in the neighborhood of 15 or 20,000 total subscribers for that to happen. Book club? Recipe exchange? Bible study for complete heathens? COULD BE. One step at a time, though! So upgrade that subscription and SHARE, SHARE, SHARE this post everywhere you share things.

Bluesky? I’m there! Facebook! Reddit! ALL THE PLACES! (But really, though, Reddit, if any of y’all are there.)

Thank you so much, I appreciate every one of you.

Now let’s make this yuletide extremely gay, y’all!

Flamy Grant, Spencer LaJoye and Crys Matthews, three of the artists on the Make The Yuletide Gay tour. (Courtesy Flamy Grant’s Insta)

Is the world still burning down? Is President Elon Musk shutting down the government, and are his pets Donald Trump, J.D. Vance and Speaker Mike Johnson completely powerless to stop it?

Is this happening?

Oh dear God.

Who wants to take a well-deserved break from talking about all that shit because Christmas is in five days and fuck it?

Let’s shift gears.

In the wee few months since the inception of this right here Moral High Ground newsletter, we’ve talked about lots of things that fall within the site’s description, about white conservative right-wing Christian fascist men, the Phyllis Schlafly clones who support them, and the extremely weird fears, feelings, emotions and autoerotic Braveheart fantasies that make them The Way That They Are.

Obviously we’ve talked a lot in these weekly Friday newsletters about the election and its horrifying aftermath.

But there’s another element here that I said I wanted to be present in this newsletter from the very first post, no matter if it’s just a little Substack or if it somehow grows into a great big media network.

I said this place is called “The Moral High Ground” because the bigoted, misogynistic assholes standing in the way of everything that’s good and holy are 100 percent certain they are the sole possessors of that high ground. I said that’s a toxic tumor of an idea that is unfortunately still given a shameful amount of weight in our society. You see this any time a corporate media source feels the need to host a hate-mongering bigot from a right-wing Christian group, to give “both sides” of whether LGBTQ+ kids should be allowed to live with dignity, or whether people should be forced to submit their bodies to the state for regular uterus inspections.

And I said that toxic tumor of an idea unfortunately still survives within far too many of us who have personally been abused by the conservative Christian church, or who are still currently enduring its abuse. It can be subconscious, like a vicious disease you think is gone, but then it rears its ugly head when something triggers it, telling LGBTQ people they’re not good enough, that maybe they really are going to hell, telling closeted LGBTQ kids in homeschooling households in East Cowfucker, Kansas, that they will never be able to get out, that Jesus really couldn’t ever love them.

And I said fuck that shit.

I said this isn’t a support group, and it isn’t a Christian website, but it’s a safe place for literally whoever you are, and I want the negation of the toxic messages I was just talking about to be loud and clear, front and center at The Moral High Ground at all fucking times.

And I want to showcase and bring together other people who are doing that work in their own brilliant ways.

So let’s talk about Christmas, Christian music, Christian drag queens, lesbians, non-binary people, and just generally ridiculously brilliant Christian and Christian-adjacent artists who, number one, EXIST — that’s right, LGBTQ kids living in right-wing Christian hell, they EXIST! — and who are out there this holiday season making the yuletide extremely totally fuckin’ gay.

I’m talking about Flamy Grant, Crys Matthews, Jennifer Knapp, Spencer LaJoye and Heather Mae, who have been out on tour this month that’s literally called Make The Yuletide Gay. I got to see them — well, three of them — last Friday night in Memphis, and it was so good, y’all.

If you read Wonkette AKA my day job where I am the managing editor, you may have heard of Flamy Grant. I posted the video above in 2022 in a piece about how a gay wedding was happening at Amy Grant’s house, and how it was pissing off pigfucks like Franklin Graham, AKA the ickiest byproduct of Billy Graham’s participation in the human reproductive process.

I mentioned in my post that my own personal first concert was in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1991, Amy Grant, on the Heart In Motion tour, front row, Baby Baby! (My church youth group really had the hookup on that one, I guess.)

Then in 2023, Flamy Grant started taking over the Gospel and Christian charts, for the best, funniest reason. You see, this dildo-witted MAGA preacher named Sean Feucht was birthing entire full-grown cows because Grant — a Christian drag queen for whom listening to Amy Grant was also quite formative — had collaborated with Derek Webb, who had huge success in the Christian music world back in the day with a band called Caedmon’s Call. (Webb, you might deduce, is also in a bit of a different place these days.)

This was obviously a sign of The Last Days to excitable types like Sean Feucht. Also that loud flamboyant Greg Locke creep. He’s real exercised about Flamy Grant.

So God, being the way God is, thought it’d be funny to use that moment to make sure Grant’s song with Webb and the album it came from went straight to the top of the charts. The Gospel and Christian charts.

AND WHY SHOULDN’T THEY HAVE?

That question is the entire point. Turns out, there are queer Christian artists — quite a few of them, in fact! And literally every one of them is better than that gross weirdo Steven Curtis Chapman, fuck that guy.

Hear that, LGBTQ+ kids who are still trapped? QUEER CHRISTIAN ARTISTS. They are real.

So that’s enough context and intro, and brings us back to Make The Yuletide Gay and the show I saw.

Spencer LaJoye, Crys Matthews and Flamy Grant performing in Memphis on the Make The Yuletide Gay tour, December 14. (Pic courtesy Folk All Y’all.)

A friend of mine runs the coolest concert series in Memphis called Folk All Y’all. It started as house concerts — folky ones, reckon you guessed — and then it grew and grew, and these days most of the shows are held in a gorgeous event space called The Green Room at Crosstown Arts, which is located in Midtown Memphis at Crosstown Concourse, the massive urban village that now lives in what long ago was a massive Sears catalog and order processing behemoth.

That was the setting for the Memphis stop of this Christmas show on December 14, featuring queer Christian and/or post-Christian and/or still-finding-their-way/figuring-it-out artists, where there was space for whosoever — ho ho ho, merry Bible reference! — happened to be there, no matter how they feel about Christmas, whether this is a season of joy, sorrow or all of the above for them.

As I said, there were three performers in our show, because that’s how this tour works. It’s a songwriter’s round, which if you are not familiar is a setup where however many artists take turns, in order, singing songs, often kind of playing off each other, making up the setlist as they go along, following the vibe that particular show and audience are creating together.

In our case, the order was Spencer LaJoye, Crys Matthews, Flamy Grant. Spencer, Crys, Flamy. Spencer, Crys, Flamy. And so forth, round and round.

I’ll present you a few songs we heard that night, and then instruct you to go buy all these artists’ music and become their superfans in everything they do and go see them when they are in your town. (Galveston and Fort Worth, you can see this tour tonight, Friday, December 20, and tomorrow night, Saturday, December 21. Just FYI.)

Spencer LaJoye!

Spencer LaJoye (they/them) was a revelation, and this song was one of the times I might have perhaps gotten something in my eye (???) during the show.

LaJoye’s bio on the Folk All Y’all page says this:

Spencer LaJoye’s a veracious songsmith with an unshakeable pastoral presence and a robust catalog documenting their journey from Christianity through disillusionment after coming out as gender nonbinary to finding peace as a post-Christian with a belief “that art can change the world simply by making us feel something.”

And that song above, “Plowshare Prayer,” is the kind of guttural cry that those of us with churchy backgrounds were maybe taught prayer should be, whether or not any of us ever lived up to it. Of course, I think the inclusivity and vulnerability of it probably would make it far too Christlike for most conservative American Christians.

So that was pretty fuckin’ cool.

Crys Matthews!

Crys Matthews (she/her) brought the social justice to the round, the “Pretty sure Jesus’s message was largely about afflicting the comforted, thank you very much” of it all. She talked about how she’s a Black lesbian who moved to Nashville, because sure why not, Tennessee seems welcoming! Yeah, you betcha, hashtag uncomfortable laugh!

She played this song, “Like Jesus Would,” about leaving behind the hateful church signs of the South and taking a road trip to New Hampshire, where she came around the bend and saw a church so covered in Pride flags and Black Lives Matters banners, a place that just screamed, “You are welcome here.” And what the people inside that church and steeple might be like:

“Bet they don’t just pray when the sick take ill, or just send thoughts when another gun kills. I bet they vote like Jesus would, like the choice they make might do some good for somebody. That’s my kind, my kind of Christianity.”

She talked about how she’s tried three times to replicate the weird route Google Maps sent her on that took her by that church, and how she’s never been able to find it again. And that’s where that song came from.

So that was also pretty fuckin’ cool.

And Then There Was Flamy Grant!

Grant explained that this song was the one that got her kicked out of the Christian music category at the Grammys and I think somewhere else, I forget.

And yes, it COULD HAVE BEEN because she uses the word “cock” in it, by which she means “penis.”

But what’s funny is that it was one of the most Bible-heavy songs we heard all night. It’s called “Esther, Ruth and Rahab,” and it’s about how if you actually take the time to read about them, pretty much all the women in the Bible were just absolute badasses. And how, so often, they were there to fuck these patriarchal Bible men up, in the best way.

But yet, women very often aren’t even allowed to speak in conservative Christian churches, whereas any dude with a — well, I don’t want to spoil the lyric! — can babble for hours and hours on end in a church, like any of them have a fuckin’ thing to say.

It’s almost like the Christian conservative men run things the way they run them on purpose, Grant suggested to gasps from the skeptical audience.

So that’s what that’s all about, and it was really fuckin’ cool.

And That’s What This Post Is All About!

As I said, two other artists, Heather Mae and Jennifer Knapp, are part of this tour. If you were around Christian music in the 1990s-ish, you probably remember that Knapp was a HUGE star in that world. She also came out as gay in 2010. And now I need to go find out more about Heather Mae, who I’m quite certain is also incredible!

Hopefully as time goes on we can hear more from every one of these artists on The Moral High Ground. This just an intro, a glorified concert review, but they are all amazing and totally embody the spirit of what I’m trying to build here.

So yeah, if you’re in Galveston or Fort Worth this weekend, you can catch this tour before it’s over. (It’s Flamy Grant, Crys Matthews and Heather Mae for the last two shows.) And you can follow all of them wherever they are by following the links on each of their names in this post.

So that’s your damn Christmas week newsletter.

As I’ve said, this isn’t a Christian newsletter, nor it is an anti-Christian newsletter. It is, however, a “Speaking out loudly against hateful motherfuckers and making everybody who’s a decent person feel welcome” newsletter.

So whatever you’re doing this week — celebrating, not celebrating, following Christianity, following another religion, following no religion, or It’s Complicated — I hope this week and next are gentle and peaceful for you, if that’s what you want them to be.

Just make sure whatever you’re doing, it’s totally gay.

HAPPY HOLI-GAYS!

Hello, lovely readers and subscribers! Yes, we do this at the bottom of posts too! If you like this post and want more like it, please share, recommend this newsletter on your Substack, subscribe and most importantly become a paying subscriber if you can! (Or upgrade to Founding Member!)

If you’re feeling limited by the subscription options and want to donate more like some kind of high roller big bucks luxury patron, use these Luxury Buttons! (PayPal and Venmo, respectively.)

Suggested donation: ONE MILLION DOLLARS.

Again, the Luxury Button is a PayPal link, and the Other Luxury Button is Venmo, so they won’t AUTOMATICALLY confer the benefits of subscriptions like above. Go ahead and put your email in the subscription box regardless, and if you ever don’t have access to something after you’ve subscribed/donated that way, gently nudge me to let me know, because I have to do those manually.

Thank you, love you all!

-Evan