I'm standing in a crowd of about 40 people—a collage of pink, camo, cutoff denim, rhinestones, and cowboy hats in many styles—at the street car stop in the Crossroads district of Kansas City, Missouri. The free-to-ride cars roll through the main drag every 10 minutes. But we're not waiting for just any car. We’re waiting for the one. We look north, and a powder blue and baby pink vehicle slides into view.
The Pink Pony Express is coming.
Images of stars, hearts, and women riding dragons adorn the hull. We applaud. We wave. The driver, wearing a pink cowboy hat, waves back. This Pink Pony Express is just one car out of a Kansas City fleet that has been decorated in honor of Chappell Roan’s homecoming concerts, which are happening here this weekend. Roan grew up in Willard, three hours away. The Pink Pony Express has arrived to take us to the promised land.
However you first saw or heard Roan, you likely did not forget her. How could you? She is the red haired sapphic pop star with a voice to blow down a mountain. She is the stealer of every show she has ever been invited to. There was that Tiny Desk, then that Coachella set. One weekend she was the Statue of Liberty in New York and the next she was in Tennessee nearly shutting down Bonnaroo. Her shows sell out stadiums in minutes and resale tickets go for hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars. She could perform anywhere, but this weekend she decided to come home—with her Visions of Damsels and Other Dangerous Things tour taking residence across one weekend at Kansas City’s Museum and Memorial Park.
On the Thursday evening before night one, the air at Hamburger Mary's weekly charity drag bingo is hot with anticipation. This is one of Kansas City's most iconic drag bars—and one that long predates Roan.
“Rumor has it, Chappell Roan is in town,” says drag queen Melinda Ryder from atop the stage. Ryder’s sly charisma—honed over 50 years of being Kansas City’s “drag matriarch”—is at work. We all know Roan is in town. The rumor is she might come here, to Hamburger Mary’s, tonight.
But it’s clear that no one is looking to celebrity-watch. Most bingoers are families, young couples, and friend groups in their 40s and 50s. They are here for Ryder, for drag bingo, for a fabulous Thursday night. And so am I, ordering the Fried Twinks (two heaping deep fried Twinkies with whipped cream and chocolate sauce) and watching Ryder dazzle the room. When someone gets bingo, Ryder instructs the winner to walk a victory lap around the bar while losers pelt them with their crumpled up bingo cards, Ryder chanting, “Pelt that weiner! Pelt that weiner!”
Kansas City, as far as hubs of queer culture go, is not as random as you might think. In 1966, three years before the Stonewall Uprising in New York, Kansas City was the first to host a national conference for queer rights organizations. Long before that, during prohibition in the 1920s, queer people here took advantage of a lack of regulation at bars to form community. Speakeasies became gay bars. Drag flourished, and because of Kansas City’s freewheeling government at the time, it continued to do so after prohibition was repealed. Amid many eras of moral panic in America’s heartland, Kansas City earned a reputation as a place where, especially at bars, people could act as they were. It’s a legacy that many establishments carry on today, including Hamburger Mary’s.
It's also where Roan first experienced drag herself. The story goes that Roan’s gay uncle drove Roan 160 miles from Willard to Kansas City to see her first drag show at age 18. At first, Roan was overwhelmed by the show’s vulgarity, but then she embraced it. Drag is now the basis of the Chappell Roan aesthetic–campy, vulgar, maximalist, unashamed. It was something unfamiliar in her small town of Willard. And it changed her life.
This experience sounds familiar to many Kansas City residents.
“With Kansas City folks, it's a lot of small town gays whose gifts maybe weren't always valued or encouraged in their small town,” says Lance Pierce, who is himself from a small town, and is now the owner of the queer bar Q Kansas City. “Then they came to Kansas City and found their people. I think that's Chappell’s story as well.”
Pierce opened Q this past February in Kansas City’s Westport neighborhood. While Q has all the sparkly glitz you’d expect in a fun queer bar, it also has elements that feel designed to comfort the anxious. There are no mirrors, save for those in the bathrooms, as well as a debrief room meant for clubgoers to be able to collect themselves in a quiet space that is not also a bathroom. “As fabulous as the gay community is, it can be very overwhelming to feel like you're performing all the time,” says Pierce. “Everyone can use a breather.”
It’s easy to imagine places like Q or Hamburger Mary's making it easier for someone who grew up isolated from a queer community to blossom here in the presence of one. Someone, for instance, like Roan—who in 2023 told the Springfield News-Leader, “My whole goal with this whole thing is to give kids in the Midwest who don't have a queer space to go to, maybe my show can be that and they can dress up and feel safe and know that everyone else is dressing up with them and their queer friends are around them.”
Kansas City is happy to have Roan back. Throughout the weekend, local haunts like Cafe Cà Phê and Café Corazón feature Roan-inspired pop-up menus with drinks that feature things like rose water and edible glitter. Fetch, a raunchy queer merch store, sells out of its new Chappell-related goods almost immediately–by the time I stop by on the Saturday, all that’s left is a pink Pink Pony Club neon sign. Across the parking lot from Hamburger Mary’s, there is now a giant mural of Roan, completed by local artists Jared Horman and Christine Riutzel just days before the concert. The mural shows Roan’s face in a sea of her unmistakable red hair. No name needs to be written here, just Roan’s ever-present moniker: Midwest Princess.
Roan’s uninhibited midwestern pride is a big part of why she is so celebrated here.
“It’s been so cool to see someone who’s from here really claim the Midwest,” says Kelsey Rhodes, who arrived in Kansas City from San Diego in 2020 after coming out as queer. Rhodes moved here for a relationship–her first queer one–and was elated to find a community of creative and supportive queer people in the midwest. Rhodes says part of what makes Roan special is the way she appears to live these values, too. “What I love about Chappell is that she’s not afraid of the fact that she shares her audience’s values,” Rhodes says. “She's queer, she loves trans people, she stands against nationalism and genocide… I think that feels a lot like Kansas City—this unassuming group of people, clinging to our shared values and building things that actually look and sound like us.”
“It’s about Chappell, but it’s also about young queer visibility, particularly coming out of Missouri,” says Horman, who was born and raised in Kansas City, of his mural. Horman and Rhodes both acknowledge the hardships of living in a city between two red states with governments implementing harmful laws that put trans lives at risk and dismantling reproductive rights. “I think the music [Roan] is making is so indicative of living in a place that is so proud of who we are, but also surviving amidst all of this restriction and oppression,” says Rhodes.
Still, locals will tell you, there is so much to love here, and so much to be proud of. It is the community of people fighting against that oppression that turns despair into a complex, kaleidoscopic sense of pride. It can be difficult to explain to outsiders, but across the South and Midwest, people tend to know it well.
On both nights, 35,000 people show up at Kansas City’s Museum and Memorial Park. There are families in matching pink. Octogenarians in drag. And handmade merch. So much beautiful handmade merch. When I ask fans where they got their sparkling rhinestoned vests or pants or jackets or hats that could go for hundreds in any Brooklyn thrift store, the most common response I get is, “My friend made it.”
Of the fans I talk with, both at the concert itself and at the Loews Kansas City, where I am staying, most traveled from nearby towns in Kansas or Missouri like Lawrence, Richmond, Springfield, and Wichita. There are some from St. Louis, a few from Chicago, others from parts of Texas. But the throngs of tourists from the coasts–perhaps those who could not get tickets to the Damsels shows in New York and Los Angeles, which sold out in seconds–whom I had expected to find, are noticeably absent. It is the most intimate crowd of 35,000 you’re likely to find. This is a homecoming show.
After opening sets from local drag queens, as well as Japanese Breakfast on night one and Baby Tate on night two, Roan takes the stage dressed in a medieval style getup–pink satin, maroon gemstones, and high boots.
Throughout the set, I think about how so much of Roan’s music, as widely popular as it is, looks squarely back to the Midwest. There’s “California,” where Roan sings of missing the changing seasons after moving to LA. Roan introduces “The Giver,” a country song, on night one by saying, “a lot of people didn’t like it when it first came out. But I knew y’all would like it.” On night two, she puts it plainly: “This is a song I wrote for the South and the Midwest.”
When Roan sings “Could go to hell but we’ll probably be fine,” a line from “Naked In Manhattan,” I think of the strict religious upbringings so many people are born into in places like the one Roan came from. I think of my own in the rural South. I think of my queer friends who have moved away, come out, and found their best lives in faraway cities. I think of my queer friends who have stayed, carving out community in their first home. I remember the people who told them that they, too, could go to hell. After the show, I join the party in the street. The pink-camo-denim-rhinestone river flows in every direction. Lucky ones pack into cars or catch the bus towards Westport–Q is having an after party, and it’s rumored that Chappell herself is going to the legendary Missie B’s, which has been bringing drag shows to Kansas City since the 1990s. Others go on foot, and I join them. Heels in hands, cowboy hats on backs, makeup fighting to stay on faces, we walk or dance along the sidewalks still singing “Pink Pony Club,” Roan’s final number.
I think of something Melinda Ryder said at Hamburger Mary’s the night before.
“I used to be an altar boy,” Ryder said from the stage, lavender eye shadow glistening in the spotlight. “Now look at me.”
Now look at Roan.
