An LGBTQ musician managed to get a spot on stage at the “Hetero Awesome Fest” in Boise, Idaho, last weekend, where he put on what he called his “battle jacket” — which has an upside down American flag on one arm and a rainbow Pride heart on the other — and his tan beret from serving four years as an Army ranger and then played a song in protest about a transgender boy.
His performance, which was live-streamed both by the festival and by a local journalist, went viral across social media this week.
Daniel Hamrick, a Boise-based musician who performs at Renaissance festivals and with his band, Buzzbomb 7 Eleven, said his goal was to reach children and young adults in religious or conservative families who have to hide who they are for their own safety.
“I believe that anyone who’s out has a responsibility to be gay and loud for the people who have to be gay and quiet,” he said in an interview with NBC News.
Mark Fitzpatrick, owner of the Old State Saloon, a bar and restaurant in a suburb of Boise, announced the event in April as an alternative and a response to LGBTQ Pride Month, which is recognized annually in June. He said at the time that the event would be a celebration of “traditional family values” and was inspired by the restaurant’s inaugural “Heterosexual Awesomeness Month” held last year.
The two-day event took place over the weekend in Cecil D. Andrus Park, directly across the street from the Capitol, and featured live music, conservative and far-right speakers and local food and drink vendors. The event’s budget was about $85,000 and a few dozen people attended, according to KTVB, an NBC affiliate in Boise.
Hamrick said he reached out to the event’s organizers shortly after it was announced and coordinated with them over the last two months so he could perform. He said he never lied about who he was or what his intentions were in any of his phone calls or emails.
“I never straight up said, ‘I want to play music in support of your message,’ but I was like, ‘Oh, I’m so excited. I’m so enthusiastic about doing this,’ which I was,” Hamrick said, adding that at one point, there was a long silence from the organizers, and he assumed they had Googled him and found his social media, where he posts about politics and has a profile dedicated to his Renaissance festival persona. But then one day, he received an email with administrative information for musicians, “And I was like, ‘Oh, great, I’m in.’”
Hamrick arrived at the festival Saturday wearing a short-sleeved button-up shirt and a baseball hat. Once on stage, he asked if there were any veterans in the crowd and put on his tan beret because he said, “it was important that I opened with, ‘I am a veteran. I fought for this country.’ I believe in the country that America claims to be, even if it isn’t that.’”
Then he removed his button-up shirt to reveal a Canyon County Pride cropped T-shirt. He put on his “battle jacket” and began to play the song, which is called “Boy.”
“They put him in dresses to keep him in line; they say it’s a phase and it’s all in his mind. They put him in ballet; he wants to play ball. What matters to him doesn’t matter at all. The boy that everyone thought was a girl,” Hamrick sang.
Other lyrics in the song included, “It’s not just aesthetics; it’s down to his heart. They’re breaking his will, and he’s breaking apart,” and later in the song, “Let teacher take a glance, what’s in your underpants,” a reference to the surge in state laws that regulate which sports teams trans youth can play on at school and which bathrooms they are allowed to use.
Nearly three minutes into the song, one of the festival organizers pulled Hamrick’s mic off the stage, and then security escorted him off as he continued to play his guitar and finished the song without a mic, according to a video posted by the Boise Blackbirds Instagram account, which is run by a local independent journalist and activist.
Hamrick said he wrote the song last year. He is bisexual and not transgender, but he said he has many loved ones who are trans.
“The song is for everyone who listens to it and feels heard and seen and maybe just a little less alone,” he said, adding that it’s for people who might be in conservative, religious communities who don’t have a community they can trust.
“Know that your pastor or your parents or your Boy Scout troop leader isn’t this insurmountable, unquestionable force of nature, but that if you have to hide right now, then that’s what you have to do,” Hamrick said. “You have to survive. But once you are out of that, there is a community that is ready to take you in and love you and support you.”
Fitzpatrick, the festival’s organizer, described Hamrick’s actions as a “pathetic and evil act” in an email to NBC News.
“Our festival is a fortress for traditional family values: faith, freedom, truth, and the sanctity of what makes us human,” Fitzpatrick said. “He lied to us to get a chance to play on stage in front of our guests, children included, stating his act would honor that. When he got on stage, he threw on part of a military uniform dishonoring the Army, and unleashed a song glorifying transgender ideology. It was a vile anthem pushing the lie that boys can be girls and girls can be boys. So I yanked his mic and told him to leave.”
He said the festival was still a “bigger success than I ever dreamed.” He said he spent about $40,000 personally and is “getting millions in publicity against the Left wing PRIDE nutjobs.”
As for Hamrick, he said Buzzbomb 7 Eleven is working on recording “Boy” and another song so that they can release it publicly.
Some of his supporters have called him a “hero,” but Hamrick said he’s very uncomfortable with that.
“If it inspired a lot of people to get involved, that’s a wonderful role for me to have,” he said. “I’m so happy that I get to play that part, but it is just a small part. If you want to send love, send it to your organizers. Send it to the people who are putting together protests, who are doing food drives for unhoused people. There are people who are on the ground, working every day to try to make life more livable for queer people in this country.”
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