Queer community thrives on trans-owned ranch

“Bedtime, girls! Bedtime! Bedtime!” Penellope Logue yelled as she clapped her hands behind a herd of about 100 female alpacas.

It was about 9 a.m., so it wasn’t bedtime for the alpacas, but some of them understood the command to mean “Go into the barn,” where Logue and about a dozen volunteers were trying to corral them for their annual shearing.

This year, the shearing was a come-one, come-all event. Over the course of three days in late June, about 50 volunteers visited the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch in southern Colorado to help shear the alpacas. Logue, 40, founded the ranch in 2018 as a safe place for transgender people like herself, and she now co-owns it with Bonnie Nelson, 34.

Over the last two years, the ranch has received national recognition through more than a dozen news articles and has built an online reputation in the queer community as an armed, anarchist haven that shares cute photos of alpacas on Twitter, where it has more than 14,000 followers. Most of the volunteers who traveled to the ranch for the shearing were LGBTQ people who said they found it through social media.

Penny Logue removes her bulletproof vest and gear after finishing practice at the range with fellow ranchers on the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch in Westcliffe, Colo., on May 27, 2021.Leah Millis / Reuters

One alpaca at a time, the volunteers, ranch residents and a team of three Denver-based professional shearers clipped the fiber, as it’s called, off of nearly 170 alpacas. The fiber is…

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