It was about five years ago when — after deciding that Salt Lake City’s pride festival had grown too commercialized for his liking — Heber City local Joshua Knight decided to forgo the event and host a weekend celebration in his own backyard.
“My brother does drag in Salt Lake,” he said. “We kind of had this harebrained idea while he was up here. I’m like, ‘Why don’t you bring your drag stuff up, perform a little bit, and we’ll have a great time along with Pride. And afterwards, I think a couple of people shoved money in his décolletage, his cleavage.”
Thus, the idea for Heber Valley’s annual Not Your Mama’s Backyard Drag show.
The first formal show was in 2021, when Knight’s brother returned to the valley with several of his friends and fellow queens.
“We had just broken free from COVID, and we had 107 people in the backyard. My neighbor had the food truck, we had Porta Potties, we had the whole nine yards,” Knight said.
He said the had a “rinky-dink” setting that included lighting he bought from Amazon, a rented sound machine, and a back porch with black sheets that served as curtains.
“We sold tickets on Venmo, and we donated the money in the first year to the Encircle House here in Heber,” Knight said.
The next year, they sold out of tickets, and the show has only gotten bigger.
Now they hold the event in his other brother’s house in Daniel, and attendance is only growing. This year, they had 365 attendees.
Though he was still crunching some numbers, he estimated the event had raised over $10,000 for the Cavalier Crazy Rescue in Salt Lake — where he got his furry companion, Walter — and The Horse of Many Colors, a nonprofit group supporting cancer patients and their loved ones.
Despite the positivity Knight aims to promote, he acknowledged it hasn’t always been easy to find community support for his drag show, or even to live as a gay man in Heber City.
The first two years he held the event, he said it went without a hitch.
He told neighbors there might be some attendees parking on the street, and he asked people not to block driveways.
Last year, they got a dozen complaints.
“My brother got calls from Daniel township’s mayor saying that there had been complaints, emails, phone calls,” Knight said.
He doesn’t know who filed the grievances. He doesn’t want to.
“Their complaint was parking. We all know it wasn’t about parking. I will put my neck on the line about that,” he said. “We took care of everything we needed to with the city and the county.”
As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, it wasn’t the first time he’s felt pushback because of who he is in Heber City.
“We were tiny growing up. … I was born in 1982, was educated here in the public school system in Wasatch County, and I was bullied, teased,” he said. “There wasn’t a day that went by walking down the high school hallway that I wasn’t called a fag or a queer or a homo. And it definitely opened up my eyes to a different aspect of my community where hate could lie in a place where everyone professes to be religious and Christ-like, and it definitely opened my eyes to the true meaning of what it means to be an active member of the community.”
On a religious note, he added, it taught him something further about what it really means to be Christ-like as people who preached divine peace on Sundays made his life hell between school classes.
“I didn’t come out until I was 32. I was scared. I owned a small business here in town, I just bought a home. My mom had passed away a couple years prior,” he said.
When his brother came out, it helped. But it still took him seven more years.
Though he still faces slurs today, it’s a less common occurrence, and he said it’s completely different from Heber City in the ’80s and ’90s.
Still, he sees first hand the mountains left to climb.
Just this year, someone has twice ripped down the Pride flag that hangs next to the Stars and Stripes in front of Knight’s home and business, Five Penny Floral.
The hateful act won’t deter him.
“I grew up on the back of a horse. I tried to play the part. I tried to do the role. In my late 20s and early 30s, I said, ‘I’m not doing this anymore.’ I needed to live my authenticity and be who I am,” he said. “I’ve never looked back.”
He’s working to be a part of a welcoming community he didn’t have growing up, one he doesn’t think Heber City was ready to provide back when he was young. It takes generations to break cycles of harmful ideologies, he explained, and many that target members of the LGBTQ+ community are still alive and well.
With his drag shows, he hopes to change that, to show the community that it’s “an expression of elevated art.”
“They say we’re groomers. They say that we have issues. They say that we’re pedophiles,” he said. “Most of us have been victims to a pedophile or a predator. … We are capable of amazing and incredible things. We love. We give back to our communities. We are about love and compassion.”
He said he giggles when people say drag performers are grooming kids. For his nieces, he explained, the drag community has been a way to promote inclusion.
Drag queens, he said, don’t make bank-breaking salaries through their performances. What they have to gain is expressing themselves, things they’ve had to hold inside.
“They do it because they’re passionate about it, and they do it for the sisterhood, and they do it for somewhere that 9-year-old boy,” he said of queens. “It’s giving that 9-year-old boy hope that there’s a beautiful world out there, that that 9-year-old boy has a home and has a place to be creative and to express and to be who they want to be.”
The pride flag still hangs from Knight’s porch, and he’s still an active member of the community. He plans to continue to make the drag show even bigger in future years.
“Drag has been around for centuries. It has taken different shapes, different forms. We have all been entertained: ‘Bosom Buddies,’ ‘Mrs. Doubtfire,’ Klinger off of ‘Mash,’ ‘Tootsie’ by Dustin Hoffman,” Knight said. “To anyone who doesn’t understand, open your eyes. … I’m a proud member of this community, so is my brother, and so are many, many of my friends and supporters and clients. We’re not going anywhere. We will continue to get better. We will continue to raise more money for causes that are near and dear to our hearts.
“To anyone who doesn’t understand, you’re not going to lose a recommend, you’re not going to lose friends over coming to a show. We are about love, we are about inclusion, we are about hope. We are about hope that your children will not have to go through what we had to go through with chills saying that your friend has taken their own life.”
