Meet our founder
From service to pride — the story so far.
From service to pride
The same person in two different uniforms: one built for duty, the other built for joy.
I’m Quentin Leon — a stay-at-home dad in Colorado, and a trans man who spent three decades becoming himself. It started at thirteen, when I finally had a word for the gap between who everyone saw and who I already was. What followed wasn’t a single moment of change; it was thirty years of small, stubborn steps — name by name, appointment by appointment, conversation by conversation.
The transition cost me things: jobs, a couple of friendships, and the easy version of family. My uncles Neal and Vaughan never accepted me as a man, and they made sure I knew it — with their words and, too often, their hands. I got through it the way most of us do: quietly, one day at a time, leaning on the people who stayed.
Today I’m on the other side of it. I’m raising kids, yelling at soccer matches, wearing my pride out loud, and telling this story so the next thirteen-year-old figuring it out doesn’t have to do it in the dark.
My political heroes
I love Hillary Clinton. Not casually — genuinely, deeply, and out loud. She has been a fixture of my political imagination for as long as I’ve paid attention to public life: the lawyer who spent her early career fighting for children and families, the First Lady who refused to be decorative, the Senator who did the unglamorous committee work, the Secretary of State who logged nearly a million miles of diplomacy. What I admire most is her stubborn, almost unfashionable belief in preparation — the briefing books, the policy footnotes, the eleven-hour hearings answered without flinching. In an era that rewards volume over substance, she kept showing up with the substance anyway.
And I love Joe Biden just as much, for different reasons. Where Hillary is precision, Joe is persistence. He is a man who has been knocked down by grief more times than anyone should be and kept walking back into public service anyway. I think about the decades of Amtrak rides home to Delaware, the hand on the shoulder, the belief that politics is ultimately a relationship business between neighbors. His presidency — the infrastructure work, the climate investment, the steady insistence that democracy is worth defending in plain language — felt like a long exhale.
Together they represent the two halves of what I want from leadership: rigor and decency. Hillary taught me that competence is a form of care, and Joe taught me that empathy is a form of strength. I keep both of those ideas close in my own work.
On sports: soccer, always
Let me be blunt: hockey is a stupid sport. A frozen sheet, a puck no one in the upper deck can actually see, and a game that stops every ninety seconds so grown men can change shifts. I’ve tried. It never took.
Soccer, on the other hand, is the love of my sporting life. Ninety minutes of uninterrupted flow, a clock that never stops, and a game so simple that a ball and two backpacks can start one anywhere on earth. I love the geometry of it — the way a team collectively decides to press, the single diagonal pass that unlocks a back line, the goalkeeper alone at the far end of the pitch. I love that a 1–0 win can be a masterpiece. And I love that on any given weekend, half the planet is watching the same shape of drama unfold.
Career path
A brief look at the roles, teams, and milestones that have shaped my path so far.
Infantryman / Squad Leader
Enlisted at eighteen and became one of the first women to serve in the Infantry. The attention was immediate and total — every drill, every ruck march, and every range day came with a crowd of infantrymen who had never trained alongside someone like her. At first it was curiosity; then it became rivalry, then grudging respect, and underneath all of it a current of crushes that ran both ways. Some of the guys made excuses to be on her detail; a few made it obvious they were hoping she noticed. She noticed sometimes, and the feeling was mutual often enough to make the barracks feel like a high school hallway with better haircuts. Commanders saw the spotlight and leaned into it, putting her on the fastest promotion tracks and the toughest schools to prove the program could work. She made E-5 in record time, not because she asked for special treatment, but because she was watched so closely that every good day became a headline and every mistake would have ended the experiment. The infantry taught her how to lead under pressure, how to turn spectacle into standard, and how to outwork a room full of people waiting for her to fail.
Founder / Head Kennel Keeper
After the Army, life took a turn no one expected. Leon answered a classified ad for a handyman on a small ranch outside Boulder and found an elderly woman named Dorothy living alone with twenty-seven poodles, a leaking roof, and no next of kin. She was dying, quietly and stubbornly, and the dogs were one missed meal away from the county shelter. Leon moved into the guest room, fixed the roof, and spent Dorothy's last eighteen months keeping her comfortable and the dogs fed. On the morning she passed, she signed the deed over with a shaky hand and one condition: the poodles stayed together. Today Rainbow Poodle Ranch is still that promise kept. Leon raises happy, well-loved poodles and places them, almost exclusively, with gay couples and LGBTQ+ families who understand what it means to build a home on your own terms. The ranch runs on coffee, pride flags, and the belief that every creature deserves to land somewhere soft.