If Life's a Drag, Kansas City's Been Living: Jared Horman's Latest Mural

There's something loud, in the best way, happening on the side of Passions KC.

Jared Horman's new mural hits you with color first, then history. Not in a "read the plaque" kind of way, but in a way that feels alive. The piece celebrates 150 years of drag in Kansas City, bringing together eighteen performers whose stories stretch across generations of local queer history.

But the mural doesn't over-explain itself. There isn't a giant headline announcing it as a history lesson. Instead, visitors are greeted by a simple phrase across the top:

"If life's a drag, Kansas City's been living."

"It's a way that I found to summarize the purpose of this mural," Horman said. "Drag queens give life in a fun way, in a joyful way, in a political way."

Visually, the piece draws from several inspirations. Horman blended the bright energy of Andy Warhol's portraits with the timeless feel of cameos, creating something that feels both contemporary and nostalgic. The result is unmistakably his own: bold, graphic, colorful, and impossible to ignore.

Each portrait includes the performer's name and the decade they first stepped into drag. The mural trusts viewers to be curious, inviting questions rather than answering every one of them.

That curiosity is part of what makes the project so compelling.

To create the mural, Horman collaborated with Stuart Hines of the Gay and Lesbian Archive of Mid-America (GLAMA), Nasir Montalvo from the Black Queer Archive of Kansas City, and Joel Barrett of KC Rainbow Tour. Drawing from archival collections, community histories, and years of research, they helped identify many of the performers featured on the wall and brought generations of Kansas City's drag history into focus.

But just as interesting as the stories that were found are the stories that weren't.

"The most interesting thing is always the absence," Horman said.

Throughout the process, people reached out asking whether certain performers would be included. In some cases, there was little or no archival material available. Flyers had disappeared. Photos had been lost. Memories remained, but documentation had not.

Rather than seeing that as a problem, Horman sees it as a reminder of why archives matter.

"If you have any ephemera or anything about this person's story, go put it in the archive," he said. "Otherwise, this is going to be lost to time."

History doesn't preserve itself. It survives because people save things. A photograph. A ticket stub. A flyer from a show. A story told often enough that someone finally writes it down.

In many ways, the mural is as much a tribute to those storytellers as it is to the performers themselves.

That idea appears most clearly in the bottom corner of the mural, where an unfinished portrait frame sits beneath a dedication: "To the storytellers and the story makers."

For Horman, that line sits at the heart of the project.

"It's both a celebration of all these drag artists that made the story what it is," he said, "but it's also to the storytellers, those that have archived, those that have preserved this story and these histories so that I could make this mural and celebrate it."

The mural isn't trying to tell the complete story of drag in Kansas City. No single wall could. Instead, it opens a door. It celebrates the artists who came before while encouraging today's community to keep preserving, documenting, and creating.

And above all else, it leaves viewers with the feeling Horman hoped it would:

"Joy. Appreciation for the past, and excitement about the future."

Photos were provided by John Brant - Faded Sons & Martin Cram