“F**gots Attend Church”: Cannabis Finds a Higher Power at a Picnic for 700 Stoners

April 25, 2025

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Ramie Ahmed

If you’re searching for Biblical support that the oil Jesus used to anoint the infirm was actually cannabis oil, look no further than queer cannabis company FLAMER, which hosted a near religious experience in Prospect Park on Easter Sunday, which also happened to fall on 4/20 this year.

And whether or not Jesus was dosing a hybrid for ceremonial purposes, something that is guaranteed is the relationship between the LGBTQ+ community and cannabis, which is a complex and deeply generative one that dates back to activists fighting for patient access to cannabis during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Today, queer people are more likely to use cannabis than their straight peers, and companies like Flamer are determined to make sure their communities are fully represented in the growing cannabis culture that’s sprung up around U.S. decriminalization.

“Because 4/20 fell on Easter this year, we were like, ‘We want to lean into it,’” FLAMER co-founder Wyatt Harms said recently, adding: “FLAMER is already a reclamation of terminology, and we were both raised in churches and grew up in that kind of atmosphere; for a lot of queer people, there are mixed feelings about that history, and I feel like this is an opportunity for us to bring everyone together with this plant that helps unlock your spirituality and create a safe environment for people to meet each other.”

FLAMER’s memorably named “Faggots Attend Church” event drew over 700 attendees out of their homes and into the park on Easter Sunday, and the outfits absolutely spoke for themselves. (“We’re asking our attendees to dress in their Sunday best,” read the invitation, and guests more than delivered on that front) Of course, no proper weed-themed park hang would be complete without a host of activities, and to that end, FLAMER organized everything from sound baths to meditation with lifestyle brand Weed Auntie to field day-inspired games that likely did their part to help erase some of the traumatic gym-class memories that so many queer, trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming individuals still hold onto from youth.

“Back when bars and museums were closed and there was nothing you could really do, socially speaking, the parks really opened up this sort of social space in which people could hang out at the same time that cannabis was decriminalized, so we wanted to kind of honor the park as this public, affordable, and accessible space,” said FLAMER co-founder Matías Alvial.

While FLAMER’s annual 4/20 picnic was focused squarely on LGBTQ+ creativity, spirituality, and joy, there was also an element of anti-corporate reclamation to the event, Harms said.

“In New York, the cannabis industry is so queer, but it’s still part of this corporate, washed experience associated with ‘Big Cannabis,’ and FLAMER is really about us being able to create our own thing.” Harms points to his experience relaunching Buzzfeed’s LGBTQ+ vertical as evidence of the cishet world “profiting off of queer identity.”

“I made them millions of dollars off of Pride, and they refused to reinvest any of that into the community or even hire a queer editor,” Harms said, adding: “When corporations are so quick to commoditize our identity and then disappear when times get hard, it’s just extraction, right? I hope FLAMER is just one example of us starting to build more efforts that can serve as mutual aid to build even greater solidarity across our movement.”

Indeed, extraction and commodification were the antithesis of the vibe in Prospect Park last Sunday, with attendees running free in fabulous self-styled fits that declared to the world their pride in their identity, their community and, of course, their recreational drug of choice.

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