Kansas City area farmer goes viral with ‘whimsical’ posts about gay pigeon drama
Chase Barnes and his partner live quietly with a menagerie of animals on three acres of Cass County farmland south of Kansas City.
They share their life with Peaches the goat, Anderson Cooper the chicken, Becky the duck, a fluffy Scottish Highland cow named Princess Fiona, and the chickens and pigeons Barnes breeds and shows.
Barnes, a longtime fan of birds, began breeding pigeons a couple of years ago. When he works with local 4-H kids he encourages them to pay close attention to the details that make a pigeon a pigeon. The angle of their backs. The shape of their heads. The way they behave.
“I think what I enjoy about the birds, it’s a lot of being quiet and looking and paying attention to what is there, which is one of the things that I teach the kids about - look at the bird that’s in front of you,” Barnes, who is 33, told The Star.
In late November he decided to share some of his observations with the farm’s TikTok and Instagram followers by introducing them to two male pigeons that had bonded and become inseparable, detailing how they became part of a “throuple” relationship unlike anything he’d ever seen.
“Sit down. I have to tell you about a bisexual pigeon and all of the drama that he has brought to my barn,” Barnes said in the video, posted Nov. 29.
Who knew pigeons could be as interesting as “Real Housewives?”
The video quickly went viral. People had so many question and comments. Namely, how did Barnes know the pigeons were gay?
In the months since viral fame found him, Barnes has changed jobs, was featured in People magazine and has been interviewed by gay media about the LGBTQ community’s involvement in agriculture. All because he just wanted to make interesting social media content.
“People really thought it was funny. They really enjoyed it,” Barnes told The Star. “I say it’s something kind of whimsical that you can look at when everything else seems a little bit ridiculous.”
Barnes hails from a long line of Missouri farmers. He grew up on his parents’ 20-acre farm where he got his first pony when he was 2. He grew up showing horses and poultry and raising cattle.
He and his partner, Zach Schollmeyer, who works in risk management, lived in Lee’s Summit when they decided to leave the suburbs and buy a piece of land where Barnes could reunite with his animals, most of whom were living on his parents’ farm.
“I just wanted to have my animals with me again,” said Barnes, who until two months ago worked as a veterinary technician at a local vet clinic.
They wound up buying a modest ranch house on three acres just down the road from his parents where he grew up. It’s a community he knows well and knew would welcome him and Schollmeyer.
“It’s always a thought, just as a gay person, you always kind of have this thought in your head, ‘oh, is somebody going to have a problem with me,’” he said.
“Growing up showing livestock there were always gay people around, there were always queer people around ... so I knew that those people were out there and maybe that’s why I was also drawn to it because I felt like I had a community in that regard.”
‘A little bisexual pigeon throuple’
In the video that went viral in November, Barnes held up a handsome bird, an almond-colored Italian Owl pigeon, a champion who won best of breed at the National Pigeon Association Grand National Show in 2024.
“Our story starts with this king. This guy is an almond Italian Owl ... he is owned by my friend, Levi, who sent him to my house to try and raise more babies this fall because Levi travels for work.
“This bird previously, over the summer, was paired with a red bird that we thought was a girl. The two bonded, paired. And just never laid eggs. But, when you gave them babies, they would raise them. Turns out the red is a male.”
He explained Mr. Almond Pigeon was paired with another hen “and they have two babies that they are raising. What gets funny is that the almond and this male and his current wife are all raising the two babies together.
“They’re in a little pigeon throuple, a little bisexual pigeon throuple. I’ve never seen it before. It’s the craziest thing.”
Social media agreed, dropping comments like these on Instagram.
“Real House Hens of Pigeon County.”
“I need this to become a reality TV show immediately.”
“The court records must be a (dang) mess!”
“ ... it actually doesn’t sound like drama at all! Just a really nice family working together to raise some kids in a tough economy.”
Barnes’ videos also became lessons in animal husbandry, as it were, demonstrating that same-sex bonding, behavior and parenting have been observed for centuries in more than 1,500 animal species — birds, mammals, insects, fish — wildlife experts say.
One example: In November, Esquire wrote of L.A. designer Michael Schmidt teaming up with a German gay farmer and the dating app Grindr to help save gay rams sent to the slaughterhouse because they don’t mate with ewes.
The farmer manages a male-only herd of sheep. Schmidt used wool from those sheep to create a knitwear collection called “I Wool Survive.”
With pigeons, breeders typically assume the gender of their birds based on observation. The males strut, coo, puff their chests and enthusiastically preen to court females. The red pigeon in Barnes’ throuple was presumed to be female because it had never been seen courting.
“Working in veterinary medicine you pick up on animal behavior,” he said. “So most of what I do with pigeons is watching behavior because I don’t know the gender of a bird until it tells me.
“It’s one of those things where you can never ... you can kind of assume and you can have guesses. But I think because pigeons don’t tell you who they are until they’re ready.
“You really don’t know the gender of a pigeon until it either starts cooing and strutting and acting like a male performing, or until it lays an egg. When they’ve paired and they’ve raised babies together, you pretty well know.”
A ‘Heated Rivalry’
In an early December TikTok Barnes asked for help naming the gay pigeons, specifically asking for celebrity names since he’s given food names — Tuna Fish, Ham Sandwich — to his other birds.
“I will need names for the gay pigeon, the bisexual pigeon, the bisexual pigeon’s wife, the homewrecker and the cheater,” he said.
He wanted to name the bisexual pigeon’s wife Elizabeth Taylor because the actress “was famously married to a gay or bisexual man,” he said, referencing British actor Michael Wilding.
“If the homewrecker isn’t Jolene I’ll be disappointed,” one commenter wrote.
“You need to name one Elton after Elton John.”
“All I think of is the cast of ‘Will and Grace.’”
“How many members were there in Fleetwood Mac?”
In a Jan. 24 Instagram post, Barnes alerted followers that two more male pigeons had bonded on the farm, writing: “It’s happened again! Our barn may as well be Studio 54,” referencing the famously wild 1970s New York nightclub.
“I made a video joking about if I had a nickel for every time I had a gay pair of pigeons I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened more than once,” he told The Star.
He introduced his “next same-sex couple,” joking that he “didn’t know the gay agenda was to turn my pigeons gay, but here we are. I must have missed that meeting. This guy is a Modena who already has a home. He’s supposed to be going to a friend of mine as a pet because he’s not a great show bird.”
He held up a second bird.
“This bird IS,” he said. “He was supposed to go to the grand national this weekend but we had terrible weather and I scratched birds and he’s kinda disheveled and moulty. And now they’re like, ‘we’re in love.’
“What’s going on guys? Why is this my life right now? The water’s turning the birds gay.”
But when he said the two birds couldn’t stay together, people accused him of separating them because he’s homophobic.
“So that’s why I was like, ‘I wonder if I should just come out and tell these people I’m gay,’” said Barnes.
He did a few days later in a follow-up post when he announced that the two pigeons - named Shane and Ilya after the two male hockey players in the hit series, “Heated Rivalry” - would be staying together after all, and possibly starting a hockey team.
“Some of you guys got very pressed over these pigeons, to the point of accusing me of being homophobic,” he said in the video. “I’m gay. And, uh, this farm is owned by two men ... take that information and do with it what you will.
He wound up blocking one commenter who wrote that “you can be gay and homophobic and you are a prime example.”
“I will say I have not gotten any homophobic comments toward me,” he said. “So that was a plus, silver lining.”
The posts grabbed attention from gay media publications that wanted to know more about the birds and “Zach and my story, gay people in different parts of agriculture,” he said.
Becoming a spokesman for gay farmers wasn’t on his bingo card. Others on social media — including Two Guys and Some Land on TikTok — are already documenting their experiences.
“It’s not really anything that I thought was going to happen,” said Barnes. “I’ve always been an advocate for people getting in, no matter who they are. That’s part of why I work with the kids and make sure that I extend all these opportunities to them that I can.”
Certainly though, what’s happened since Thanksgiving weekend has given him new wings.
“I think honestly one of the biggest ways that it has helped me, I had worked in veterinary medicine for 10 years. And that’s kind of the only field that I’d known and I thought I was going to be stuck there forever,” he said.
“While I loved the work I was very unhappy and trapped ... kind of just working for a corporation that was problematic. And when the videos kind of took off, I thought what if I looked at other careers?”
He landed a new day job with Martin City Marketing and is spending a lot more hours creating social media content on the side, not that he’s complaining.
“You work your 40 hours a week, then you come home and you do all your farm chores, and it’s like, ‘oh I also need to make content,’” he said.
“It sounds like oh woe is me. But it’s such a neat experience that ... somebody has said, ‘hey, you’re entertaining and I want to know what you’re doing.’
“My biggest goal is I want to get people interested in agriculture, especially agriculture associated with birds, oultry and pigeons.
“So I’m going to keep posting about it and talking to people about the funny things that happen on our farm.
“We are raising a lot of babies right now. Spring is rolling in. So I’m going to post about the different babies that are hatching out right now. And we’ll start going to some shows in April, so we’ll be taking people along for that, too.”
And the two birds that started this new journey for him?
They’re back with his friend, Levi, living their best pigeon lives in Kansas.
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