Meet the Gun-Toting ‘Tenacious Unicorns’ in Happy Valley
by Eric Siegel,
High Country New
“How a transgender-owned alpaca ranch in Colorado foretells the future of the rural queer west.”
(Editor/GG: Note the Sangre de Cristo Sentinel is prominently featured in the article (negatively, of course). Hold on to your cowboy hats, fellow patriots, this is one wild ride. For the first time ever, we are warning our readers that the article below is very, very disturbing. In many aspects. It might not be appropriate for some folks or children. Our apologies, but the citizens of this wonderful county need to know how the county has been portrayed.)
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.
“They are weird but useful,” she said, “which is the essence of queer.”
If the dome caught their attention, the dramatic Wet Mountain Valley convinced them to stay. “We fell in love,” said Logue. “You emerge out of the mountains into the valley and the Sangre de Cristo range just breaks in front of you.” She and Nelson were unexpectedly taken with Westcliffe too — its quaint storefronts and theater, the wide sidewalks, signs for “Shakespeare in the Park.”
They bought the dome, and by March, with the pandemic raging and a divisive presidential election roiling, relocated to the valley and created the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch [TUR], a community of gun-loving, transgender, anti-fascist alpaca ranchers. While they already knew the financial, physical, and emotional challenges of operating a successful ranch, they had no idea that the Wet Mountain Valley had become a cauldron of right-wing conservatism — home to militias, vigilantes, Three Percenters — anathema to the ranch’s gender-inclusive, anti-racist, ecological politics.
But rather than retreat, the unique LGBTQ+ community, around a dozen strong, asserted its right to exist. They armed up and began speaking out, quickly developing a local reputation that galvanized other local rural progressives. In the process, they’ve showed how queer communities can flourish. “We belong here,” Logue told me this past November. “Queers are reclaiming country spaces.”
“Queers are reclaiming country spaces.”
But the county defies easy categorization. Locals describe Westcliffe, the county seat, as politically “purple.”
The town is a mecca of sorts, a gateway to thousands of acres of protected wilderness, and its pristine dark skies attract photographers and stargazers from around the world. (It is a certified International Dark Sky Community, one of only a handful worldwide.)
A number of counter-cultural communities have found a foothold there over the years—from Mission: Wolf, an off-the-grid wolf sanctuary founded in the 1980s, to the Mountain Publishing Company, the conservative media organization that publishes the weekly Sangre de Cristo Sentinel (“The Voice of Conservative
Colorado!”). The Sentinel’s articles and columns — one called “Patriot Alert!” — editorialize on gun culture, patriotism and the history of “the Old West.”
Photo in original: Bonnie Nelson with her sniper rifle, a Springfield AR-15.
When I visited the ranch around Thanksgiving, the late-afternoon light was reverberant, volleying off the Wet Mountains and Sangre de Cristos, casting a luminous glow across the landscape. J, a Texan who moved to the ranch in June — after losing her job and housing in the pandemic — waved to me from a long stairwell outside the dome’s entrance. Dressed in all-black denim, she was masked and distanced in a black cowboy hat and stylish black boots, armed with her favorite firearm, a Ruger-57. Ten enthusiastic dogs — five Great Pyrenees and Australian shepherd puppies, all named after Star Trek characters (Worf, Seven of Nine, Geordi, Lore and Data) — howled, tails wagging like windshield wipers. Nearly a hundred hissing alpaca trundled across the pasture.
The ranch exists at a philosophical intersection that is immediately evident inside the dome, where a wall displays prized firearms — Bonnie’s sniper, a Springfield AR-15, two 12-gauge shotguns and a 22-rifle — and
flags for The Iron Front, the anti-Nazi symbol used by 1930s paramilitary groups, which now symbolizes anti-fascism and inter-sectional Pride. Pride flags with colorful stripes — pink, rose, yellow, green, pewter, black, white — bedeck the wall, celebrating asexuality, agender identity, lesbianism and nonbinary gender identities.
When Logue and Nelson first toured the geodesic dome, rainbow light was refracted through coverings on the windows. “It was unicorn magic!” Logue said.
Photo in the original: Using nail polish, Nelson painted the colors of the Transgender Pride Flag on her Ruger-57 semi-automatic pistol. Luna Anna Archey/High Country News
Since Logue founded the ranch in 2018, its frontier libertarian ethos has attracted social justice activists and gun-rights advocates, all seeking sanctuary. “We’re a haven. We offer work, we offer shelter, we offer peace,” says Logue, gesturing toward the expansive open space surrounding us. “There are a lot of people who visit for upwards of a week and just enjoy their time away from society,” Nelson added.
“And cry,” Logue said. “When that ranch gate shuts behind you, the cis world stays out there.”
On that November afternoon at the barn, Justine — a 21-year-old who moved to the ranch in July — filled water basins for the alpaca and sheep and fed the ducks and chickens. “I started the watering because it was needed, but then I realized I was doing it because it got me out of bed,” she said. “As long as the alpaca are healthy and fed, we can keep growing and help more people.”
Logue and her cohort seek to challenge the patriotic myths — about Manifest Destiny, liberty and freedom — that their Wet Mountain Valley neighbors double-down on in The Sentinel. “The American frontier or ‘the American West’ wasn’t conquered with rugged individualism,” she said. “It was conquered by communities sticking together. … Nobody did that by themselves.”
Their social mission — akin to that of mutual-aid networks and similar to anti-fascist groups like The Redneck Revolt as well as leftist pro-gun groups like the John Brown Gun Club or the Socialist Rifle Association — stems from their political commitments. “It isn’t through harsh words and violence that you defeat fascism,” Logue told me. “It’s through building community, but only if you can stay alive long enough to do it. That means you have to be armed — because fascists are armed, always.”
Their social mission — akin to that of mutual-aid networks and similar to anti-fascist groups like The Redneck Revolt as well as leftist pro-gun groups like the John Brown Gun Club or the Socialist Rifle Association — stems from their political commitments.
Photo byline in original: With her sniper rifle, Nelson sits where she watched unwelcome visitors loitering at the ranch’s gate. Luna Anna Archey/High Country News
This is something they’ve learned firsthand. “There are militias in the Wet Mountain Valley,” Logue said. “They’ve showed up armed and threatening.” That spurred the ranchers to arm up. “Moving here demanded gun ownership,” she continued. The ranchers watched from their front porch with a high-powered scope and sniper rifle — the Springfield AR-15 on the living room wall — staking out visitors loitering at the end of their driveway. The visits ceased. It’s rumored locally that militias unofficially “patrol” their surroundings to establish dominance. “In order to be treated as a human, you have to show you can defend yourself more than they can hurt you,” Logue said. “Then you can reach equality.”
Photo byline in original: The [TUR] ranchers run errands for the day. When in town, “we travel in packs, always at least in pairs,” Logue said. Luna Anna Archey/High Country News
But achieving that has been elusive. This past summer, with COVID-19 cases rising, residents disagreed about local officials’ handling of the pandemic. The town’s political conflicts erupted on July Fourth, when armed demonstrators — led by The Custer Citizens for Liberty, a right-wing patriot group that The Sentinel frequently endorsed — paraded through downtown Westcliffe, protesting the Custer County Board of Health’s decision to cancel the annual Independence Day Parade. The ranchers had planned to avoid the protest downtown but got caught in the crowds during morning errands. “We saw them flying the Three Percenter flags front and center and everybody was armed. It was a fascist parade,” Logue told me. “So, we came back and started antifa accounts on Instagram. We called them out on being Nazis by tweeting about them, then on Facebook.”
It was a fascist parade,” Logue told me. “So, we came back and started antifa accounts on Instagram. We called them out on being Nazis by tweeting about them, then on Facebook.”
What happened next surprised them. “There was a real upsurge from the leftist community in the Valley,” said Logue. The outcry created an unexpected opening, as they unknowingly tapped into long-simmering sentiments. Meanwhile, they found another niche: Many residents began employing them in local handiwork and physical labor. The ranchers also provide recycling services at the county landfill. That has exponentially increased their visibility: “It’s really hard for people to paint you as ‘weird’ or whatever, if you’re just helping people,” Logue said.
Photo in original: Before heading off to their work sites, the ranchers gather at Peregrine Coffee Roasters in Westcliffe every morning. Luna Anna Archey/High Country News
Photo in the Original: Nelson buys food for the ranch’s dogs, cats and ducks. Nelson and [the]other [TUR] ranchers open-carry when they are running errands in town. Luna Anna Archey/High Country News
If the political headwinds they faced seem daunting, they’ve also made them adapt. “We’re queer. We get second-guessed all the time,” Logue said. “We’re always having to innovate and think ahead.” When they couldn’t get certain Department of Agriculture livestock loans, for example — alpacas are technically classified as pets — they acquired a few sheep. “There’s something inherently queer about how many alpaca we have. People don’t know what to do with us,” said Kathryn, one of Logue’s partners, who goes by her first name only. “Sure, we’ll bring out some sheep, I guess that makes us ‘normal’ or whatever, but that’s the closest we’ll get to assimilation.”
This underscores a larger point: Exceeding established categories, and reinventing something better in their wake, is a hallmark of “Camp culture” — what critic Susan Sontag famously described in her 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp’” as the “love of the exaggerated, the ‘off’ … the spirit of extravagance.” The perceived surplus or frivolity is the point. Hence the large number of alpaca (nearly 200, as of January): It’s a sensibility, a vision — a distinctly ecological one. “We deliberately chose alpaca because their poop is particularly good for establishing deep soil,” Logue said. “We do natural farming and ranching, so we don’t rob the land of its inherent goodness. We make it better.” The Tenacious Unicorns and their brand of Camp culture are leading the way, seeding a blueprint, reinventing what rural America can be.
“What we lose by thinking of rural America as a white stronghold. …” Logue drifted off. “You know, there’s plenty of space in those communities for queer voices.”
Photo in the original: “There’s something inherently queer about how many alpaca we have. People don’t know what to do with us,” said Kathryn. Luna Anna Archey/High Country News
(Editor/GG: Well folks, the veil has been lifted. For those of you who haven’t seen or experienced left-wing fascism, here it is. From Biden to Polis and all the way down to this hypocritical bunch of hate filled, xenophobes, they are all the same: filled with hate, paranoia, self-righteousness, intolerance, the desire to rule and control, and obsessed with violence. Their radical, narrow minded view of the world and of our rural community is the ONLY allowable view point. All of a sudden, the citizens of Custer County are fascists and nazis and they, who just landed here from, believe me, from some unknown progressive universe, the good people. The Good Americans. And we are hate filled,
Bible thumping, violent, bigoted
rednecks. Nice. Apparently, “LoveThy Neighbor” is not in their bible.
I guess it is okay for the unicorn commandos to show off all their firearm hardware (AR15, large bore “sniper rifle”, handguns, etc.) at their collective (see below) and IN TOWN but OMG, we are all fascists for carrying guns in our Independence Day Parade! (Last year’s Independence Day Parade, spontaneously put on by the citizens of Custer County, was the biggest and best EVER. Heck, half the county was in it. This seemed to offend the patriotic unicorns.)
The barely veiled threats that they will respond with deadly force if harassed is classic left-wing xenophobia and standard persecution complex behavior. The newspaper that wrote this and allowed us to reprint it (thanks) only allowed us one picture from the article (and they chose that). What you don’t see unless you go the web article, is that around half of the article’s other pictures showed the airborne alpaca commandos holding black rifles, open carrying in town, and a picture of a wall in their hovel with a bunch of rifles and progressive nut case flags. One picture showed one alpaca commando shopping in town, open carrying with the caption saying, approximately, that they have come to town in pairs, with guns, because of the danger here from the fascists and nazis. Folks, they mean YOU and ME. Paranoia anyone?
Who are the intolerant ones? Who is doing the hating? They use the classic progressive vehicle, ‘accuse your opponents with doing exactly what you are doing’ to attack us.
Are we pointing rifles at our neighbors on the road by our ranch? Are we hallucinating about “militias”, nazis and fascists patrolling around our land? Are we calling our neighbors we don’t even know horrible names? Good Grief! Everyone has been very nice to these folks. Seriously. This is truly sad and a challenge for Happy Valley.
So, how do we as a community go forward? With prayer. LOTS of prayer. God is the answer here. Not violence or confrontation. These are lost, lost souls, given to theatrics, and the only Christian way to deal with this is PRAYER. Lots of it. King Jesus is the answer. Let’s ask Him, again, for help. This is a tough case for the Holy Spirit, but He has seen worse. God sent these folks here for a reason. God Bless America and God Bless Custer County.)
Please see:
https://www.hcn.org/issues/53.2/south-communities-meet-the-gun-toting-tenacious-unicorns-in-rural-colorado
This article was first published at the High Country News on January, 14, 2021.
