His campaign poster was defaced with a homophobic slur. The community fought back.
When Justice Horn found his campaign sign graffitied with a homophobic slur last week, he was shocked but not surprised.
Horn, who is running to become the first openly gay elected official in the Jackson County Legislature in Missouri, is in the final stretch of his campaign, with election day on Aug. 2.
“It's one of those things that never surprises me,” he said in an interview with The Blueprint. “But it makes me thankful to be in this work, because it's always a risk… You never know if the community is going to come out.”
A graduate of Blue Springs High School in Jackson County, he grew up playing football.
Horn’s coach told him that becoming a wrestler would make him a better football player. He was right. Before long, he won two state rings and found himself being scouted by division-one universities to play on their football teams.
But Horn never made it to the big leagues. His health had other plans.
“Your football career is over,” his doctor told him in his senior year of high school. “You’ve had one too many concussions.”
With the prospect of playing football completely out the window, Horn dove into wrestling full-time.
It paid off when Horn earned a scholarship to wrestle in college. While he noted the team and coach were inclusive, Horn added that he was made keenly aware that he was one of the first openly gay wrestlers in the NCAA at the time.
In 2018, Horn was profiled by The Huffington Post in a story that explained he was inspired to come out in the wake of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida, that took the lives of 49 people.
But when a close friend who wrestled alongside him was diagnosed with an enlarged heart, Horn made a career-changing decision.
“It was a reality check on what was making me happy,” he explained. “What made me happy was being back in my community and serving others.”
Upon returning to Kansas City, Horn immersed himself in community activism and student government. Even though he only spent three months at the University of Missouri, he still managed to win student body president, representing 17,000 students even just for a short period of time.
Horn’s advocacy work taught him about the ways people are supposed to move and operate in a community. But he also learned that, in many ways, activism is a numbers game.
“You can't have a protest or have any success if not for building coalitions and having other people around you,” he explained. “I think that's the same thing that happens in any transformative era or policy.”
That’s a lesson he hopes to take with him to the legislature.
“Even if my intentions are pure at heart, if you move without the community, you can cause harm to the communities you care about,” he said, adding that lawmakers should listen to the people rather than consolidate power.
While Horn is grateful for the wave of support he’s received since the incident, it’s bittersweet that his campaign’s breakthrough moment came at the hands of hatred.
Throughout his campaign, Horn has been vocal about the need for LGBTQIA+ representation in local government while also challenging Republican efforts to implement anti-trans legislation or ban books that teach about sexuality.
“In this work, and you can see historically, if you're not pissing someone off, you’re not doing the work that is important,” Horn said.
The child of a Black and Indigenous father and a white and Polynesian mother, Horn hopes winning his election will help show other Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders that they can run for office too.
“My work is my personal life,” Horn said, noting that he works hard to leave the world in a better place than it was yesterday.
When he isn’t campaigning or mobilizing advocacy, Horn spends a lot of time at the gym, which he believes is a main contributor to his mental health.
On the campaign trail, Horn has learned that while he’s sharing himself with the community, he still has to protect his own wellbeing.
“Not everything in my life is up for running for office, and that's fine,” he said, noting that at the end of the day, he’s still a person.
And as a young person, Horn recognizes age as a significant barrier to entering politics. Those barriers only grow and intersect for racialized candidates and working-class people who don’t come from money, and as a result, struggle to mount a competitive campaign for office.
Coming from an activist background, Horn doesn’t have connections to wealthy donors with deep pockets. Instead, he connects with those who have deep roots in their communities.
“I may not have the bandwidth to buy billboards all over town, but we have folks who are really good at making posters,” he said, pointing out how important the element of mutual aid has played throughout his campaign. “There are ways that we lean on one another as a community, and as a coalition.”
Looking back on his wrestling career, there are a few lessons Horn will carry on with him in politics: determination, progress, and knowing that you’re never going to win them all.
“But in every fight and every battle, you get better, and that's the point of it.”