Ranch becomes haven for queer people in rural Colorado apnews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from apnews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
On a February morning in Custer County, the wind carries clouds over a ranch where alpaca wake up, their frames silhouetted against the bright pink sky.
It’s a sight not unlike many farms in Westcliffe, the mountain town southwest of Colorado Springs, but the people on this land have a unique purpose.
“Yeah we’re queer and leftists so we paint a new picture,” said ranch founder, Penny Logue. A haven for all:
With 180 alpaca, Logue named the farm the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch.
Logue co-owns the alpaca ranch with Bonnie Nelson, and together they provide a haven for people who identify as transgender.
Luna Anna Archey/High Country News
How a transgender-owned alpaca ranch in Colorado foretells the future of the rural queer West.
A year ago, transgender rancher Penny Logue found the dome. Fed up with a hostile landlord in the city and fearful for their safety amid record-high deaths in the transgender community nationwide, Logue and her business partner, Bonnie Nelson, sought refuge in the rural, open rangelands.
The geodesic dome perched on sprawling acreage in the remote Wet Mountain Valley on the eastern flank of the Sangre de Cristo Mountain Range, near the rural ranching hamlet of Westcliffe, Colorado.
They were intrigued. “Domes are funky and cool and a bit against the status quo and they help the planet,” Logue told me. So they bought it.
This month, we take a long look at the end of an era: the half-century when coal defined the energy economy of the West. Lights burned, rivers were diverted and subdivisions boomed, all thanks to coal. But as Jonathan Thompson explains in this month’s “Facts & Figures,” the “Big Buildup” is over, and what he calls “the Big Breakdown” is on. The transition will be felt across the West, from workers who need to find new jobs to communities whose longtime residents are leaving to find work.
A train loaded with coal travels through West Texas. Since its peak in 2007, coal use by U.S. power plants has dropped by half.
The Tenacious Unicorn Ranch was officially founded in 2018. (Instagram/ Tenacious Unicorn Ranch)
The desperate need for safe housing has led a group of trans people to form the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch, a community of armed, anti-fascist alpaca farmers in rural Colorado.
Fearful for her safety and the safety of other trans people after Donald Trump‘s election in 2016, Penny Logue sought refuge at a rented ranch in Northern Colorado.
Recalling her original idea, Logue told the
Socialist Rifle Association Podcast: “We were just living our lives, and then the election happened [in 2016] and Trump got into office.
“We really saw the writing on the wall with the way that rhetoric was changing so quickly, how nasty the ramp-up to the election was, how damaging it was for queer people specifically.