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.”