Janelle Smith is used to kind words from customers. Wishing Tree Books, her children’s bookstore, has become a fixture in the Perry neighborhood. In the last 10 days, though, the support has changed.
One person left an anonymous message on the store’s answering machine just to voice their support. “I had a lady walk in the store that happened to be in the neighborhood on Friday and heard what happened,” Smith said, “and she's like, ‘I just wanted to come in and give you a hug.’”
On the morning of October 13, Smith received a call from a friend telling her that vandals had ripped down the store’s pride flag overnight, smashed decorative pumpkins, and covered the storefront in raw egg. The same night, the homes of two nearby neighbors with pride flags were also hit, capping more than a week of intermittent theft and vandalism from North Monroe to Perry, all targeting the 2SLGBTQIA+ community and its allies.
Community members we spoke with believe incidents of hate are escalating, threatening spaces which are supposed to be safe for the queer community. Crimes like this do not often result in arrests, and with whoever did this still unknown, it’s easy to get bogged down in fear and uncertainty. But instead it’s led to resolve.
“These actions are designed to make LGBTQ+ youth and young adults feel unwelcome and othered in their own community,” Ian Sullivan, Executive Director of Odyssey Youth Movement, one of the impacted organizations, wrote in a press release. “Odyssey will continue our work of ensuring that ALL spaces are safe and affirming for LGBTQ+ young people in Spokane.”
And while the people and organizations we spoke with appreciate that police are investigating the event as a possible hate crime, and that city council has asked state legislators to improve hate crime laws, the real solace has come from experiences like Smith’s — from an outpouring of community members taking time to care for one another and help rebuild.
Odyssey was hit the night of October 5, with vandals covering the building’s sign in paint. The nearby rainbow crosswalk in Perry and the intersection of Spokane Falls Boulevard and Howard Street, where the entire intersection was painted with the progress pride flag design for this year’s Pride celebration, were also defaced with paint. Almost four miles north of Odyssey, Atomic Threads boutique on North Monroe had one window smashed.
Vandals returned to Odyssey the following night to spray paint hate speech across the front of the building and scatter its community library books on the ground. Neighbors interrupted a possible third night of vandalism on Saturday, October 7, when individuals in a truck were spotted lingering around the Perry crosswalk. They took off after realizing they’d been seen, leaving black tire marks on the rainbow crosswalk .
Odyssey has been one of the places hit hardest by the recent vandalism. The organization provides space for queer youth to hang out after school and participate in activities and organizes the annual Pride in Perry street fair and other events like Youth Queer Prom. They also help young people acquire gender-affirming clothing and connect them to other resources like counseling, housing and transportation.
For Odyssey’s Chandler Wheeler, repeated acts of hate like those of the past few weeks only make it more clear how important the resources Odyssey offers are.
“We will continue to provide these resources for queer youth because now more than ever it is so clear that there are not just youth, but so many people in this community that need safer spaces, that need, like, actual visible support for who they are,” Wheeler said.
That support was evident the following Wednesday, when community members volunteered to help clean Perry’s rainbow crosswalk. Scrubbing away with brushes and using a community member’s power washer, they were able to cleanse away almost all of the vandals’ paint and restore the vibrant rainbow underneath.
Wanting to do more than just repair damage, community members organized a Pop-Up Pride in Perry event for October 12 to demonstrate that the community shared Odyssey’s resolve. At the event, the president of Spokane Pride, Matt Danielson, took a ceremonial walk across the cleaned crosswalk and rededicated it. Wishing Tree Books invited visitors to peruse their collection of queer literature and Odyssey Youth Movement greeted folks who stopped by a table they had set up outside. People gathered for the event waved pride flags, while others drove through Perry with rainbow flags held out of their car windows.
“We had so many people kind of just coming to the neighborhood and really showing up for the queer community here and showing that we’re not going to be scared away by a little spray paint,” said Wheeler.
After the Pop-Up Pride in Perry, vandals struck again, targeting Wishing Tree Books and taking down pride flags from homes in Perry. In footage captured on a doorbell camera, three suspects can be seen tearing down pride flags from private residences. The images were published in a police department press release this week asking anyone who recognizes any of the individuals to contact police.
Property crimes against queer spaces and business are not new to Spokane. Perry’s rainbow crosswalk was first unveiled at Pride in Perry this past June. By September, it had been defaced. Even in between the cleaning of Perry’s rainbow crosswalk and getting a photo for this article, new tire marks have already reappeared on the crosswalk.
Atomic Threads has been vandalized multiple times, including having its pride flags torn down and having the store’s exterior get hit with paintballs last winter.
“I think people are becoming more brazen and that's really scary because just existing is hard sometimes,” said Atomic Threads co-owner Tina Brandvold.
Beyond offering inclusive sizing in the alternative and vintage clothing in the Atomic Threads boutique, Brandvold also uses the building to host a variety of events for the queer community. They regularly put on burlesque shows called The Bombshell Revue, host queer clothing exchanges and, this past spring, the store hosted a Queer Prom. The store also partners with Spokane AIDS Network to offer sex education events and hosts a queer youth support group in their space.
Whenever something like this happens, Brandvold says people rally around them and offer to help cleaning up broken glass or doing repairs.
“I think that's why it becomes so important for places like Odyssey…that offer those safe spaces for our community to keep going because the negativity can get so loud and be so in our face,” Brandvold said. “It definitely is important to band together and create a safe space in our community as a whole.”
It’s already illegal to destroy private property, and it’s possible to charge such destruction as a hate crime when the victims are members of a protected group. There are small loopholes in the existing state law, though, and at their October 16 meeting, Spokane City Council adopted a resolution to condemn acts of hate against the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, request an update to Washington State’s code regarding hate crimes and support a bill to better track hate crimes.
While all seven council members ultimately voted to pass the resolution, it was the lengthiest and most contentious part of the meeting. Multiple members of the public gave comments for or against the resolution and Council Member Jonathan Bingle brought forth concerns about the words “hate speech” being included in the resolution’s title.
Bingle repeatedly asked if saying “a man is a man and a woman is a woman” would be considered hate speech, engaging in a back-and-forth with his fellow council members until there was an agreement to remove the reference to “hate speech” from the resolution.
Right now, the part of Washington State code governing hate crimes only applies to private property, so the repeated vandalism of Spokane’s rainbow crosswalks may not currently qualify as hate crimes. Spokane will now be requesting that the code be updated to include public property and infrastructure like roads.
The bill city council voted to support, Senate Bill 5427, serves multiple functions: it would provide a statewide hotline for hate crimes and bias incidents, better tracking for these incidents, and it would create a compensation and assistance fund for those impacted.
Bill 5427 could also provide financial support for repairs and cleaning costs for affected organizations like Odyssey and business owners like Brandvold.
Until legislation like that passes, affected organizations must turn to the community. In a recent Instagram post, Atomic Threads asked for donations to repair the broken window.
And that’s where things stand, for now, with the organizations and businesses affected by the recent spat of property crimes vowing to continue doing what they do best: supporting the queer community, and members of the community supporting them in return.
Wheeler says their favorite part of working at Odyssey is getting to see moments of queer joy. “Every time I give a binder to a youth who has been in need of one and couldn't afford it. Every time we have youth in the kitchen here at Odyssey cooking dinner together. Every time I come upstairs for a break from my computer during drop in and there's youth playing Mario Kart on the Nintendo Switch.”
“It's just queer joy, right? It's seeing these youth have spaces to just be themselves and have fun.”
