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Kalyn Heffernan announced her candidacy for mayor of Denver as an April Fools’ joke.
The 31-year-old music production teacher and MC of the experimental hip-hop group Wheelchair Sports Camp is a well-known figure in the Denver arts and activism communities. Heffernan’s involvement in organizing wasn’t exactly voluntary. As a queer disabled woman, Heffernan says, “my body is politicized, so I can’t avoid it,” but she has always seen herself as an outside agitator, not a participant in the political machine. However, people have been encouraging her to seek elected office for years, especially since her participation in the widely publicized ADAPT sit-in at Senator Cory Gardner’s office in 2017. Heffernan and several other disability rights activists attracted national attention when they were arrested after staying in the senator’s office for nearly 60 hours to demand that he oppose any bill targeting the Affordable Care Act that would cut funding for Medicaid.
Upon traveling back to Denver from a tour date in Albuquerque this March, Heffernan and her bandmates spent hours strategizing for a hypothetical campaign for mayor. She wasn’t sure she actually wanted to run — or, as she puts it since she uses a wheelchair, “sit” — but “I could see myself making a funny video as a prank,” she says. Back home in Denver, she got together with some friends and, using an iPhone, recorded them carrying her wheelchair up the Colorado State Capitol’s steps. The video features Heffernan in a “PROTECT TRANS LIVES” T-shirt and a fake mustache proposing a platform of rent control, women’s rights, and banning stairs. It wasn’t intended as a serious declaration. “It was a way of processing my feelings of, could I really do this? Is this for real?” she says.
Within an hour of posting the video, Heffernan was flooded with comments and messages from people promising her their votes and asking how they could volunteer for her campaign. Heffernan’s creativity and sense of humor — her campaign slogan is “Vote for me, because I won’t stand for any of this shit” — combined with her unabashed outsider status seemed to resonate with a population of Denver voters whose interests have long been underrepresented. “People were so excited that I felt like I kind of have to keep going with it,” she says.
Once she started looking into the process of filing, Heffernan says, “it became less a question of yes or no, and more about how?” Shortly thereafter, she officially joined a field of candidates getting an early start on campaigning for the 2019 mayoral election. (Current mayor Michael Hancock has not yet announced whether he will run for a third term.) “The joke is super on me now,” says Heffernan.
As the image of Heffernan being carried up to the Capitol in her wheelchair incisively reveals, electoral politics has seldom been accessible to people from marginalized communities. “The system is built to keep people like me out,” she says. If elected, Heffernan would be the first woman, the first out queer person, and the first disabled person to be mayor of Denver.
Heffernan’s platform offers progressive solutions to many pressing issues facing Denver today. She wants to fight police brutality and the urban camping ban that effectively criminalizes homelessness in Denver, which is thought to contribute to rising mortality among the homeless population. Accessibility, of course, is also a high priority. Heffernan wants to incentivize making buildings more accessible to disabled people, but she points out that access isn’t just about the physical ability to enter a building. “We need access to physical places, to income, to shelter, to food, health care, access to basic human rights,” she says. “We live in a city that’s doing so well, and yet such a large portion of the city doesn’t have access to the wealth.”
Heffernan also wants to preserve the diversity and history of Denver in the face of an onslaught of real estate development squeezing longtime residents out of the city. “The culture that is capitalizing on Denver right now is very homogenizing and doesn’t represent the city I grew up in,” Heffernan says. In recent years, Heffernan and other longtime Denverites have seen dramatic changes to the city. Rising prices in the trendy Santa Fe Arts District combined with the increasing sense that the neighborhood’s new, wealthier residents didn’t want them around eventually drove the band out of the district.
Heffernan sees her activism, and now her campaign, as a continuation of the story of homegrown Denver resistance. Shortly before the sit-in last year, she was feeling stymied and frustrated that disabled people were being excluded from supposedly intersectional social movements, including in the LGBTQ+ community. Searching for more connections to disability activism, she read up on the history of the grassroots disability rights group ADAPT, which was formed in Denver almost 40 years ago. More than a decade before the Americans with Disabilities Act, ADAPT protesters blocked intersections in Denver to protest the lack of wheelchair-accessible public transportation, inspiring a wave of demonstrations nationwide. “Finding out that started in Denver, it was like, no wonder I love this city,” says Heffernan.
And it’s her love for Denver that underpins her entire campaign. Heffernan intends to improve her city by “sitting” for mayor, whether or not she wins. “Typically, politicians are like, ‘When I get into office, here’s what I’m going to do for you,’” she says. “I want to be like, here’s what I’m doing now.” She hopes to channel the passion of the DIY arts community into creative, attention-getting solutions to issues the city faces every day. One idea involves building small ramps to make buildings with a single step wheelchair-accessible. The ramps, of course, will feature a “Kalyn 4 Mayor” logo.
“Politics has this reputation of being boring,” says Heffernan. “I want to throw events that feel right, that everybody can understand, that are accessible to everybody, and mostly I want to have fun. That’s the big question. How do we do such a daunting task and have fun?”
So far, Heffernan is having fun, cracking jokes, and swearing liberally without trivializing the issues Denver must confront. Heffernan credits her years of experience fronting a band, putting on events, and volunteering in the community with helping her develop the skills needed for the campaign. “There’s a theatrical side of politics,” she says. “That’s something I can see through and play on, like I always have with my music.” She notes that as a participant in activist and artist communities, she has access e to ongoing conversations about how to increase turnout and engagement, and about who’s not being represented or offered the mic. “Other people are spending a lot of money to meet with people and be advised and have these conversations that I’m having every day,” she says.
In addition to campaigning, Heffernan is working on a new album with Wheelchair Sports Camp. She says she has no intention of taking a break from music to focus on politics; after all, her mayoral platform highlights the importance of artistic expression and self-care. “I see so many leaders and activists and people who care so damn much burn out and die, and I’d like to see us have more fun and be more creative so we can survive,” she says. Among her other firsts, if elected, Heffernan would also be Denver’s first mayor to front a band while holding office. “I identified with hip-hop before I identified with myself,” she says. “That’s what I’m gonna do before the campaign, after the campaign. That’s who I am.”
This piece is part of our 50 States of Queer series.
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