When a New Jersey family found an antigay message painted on their garage door last month, they decided to not just erase it, but rather to use the incident to proclaim their own message of LGBT support.
Erin DeLong said her daughter Miranda, 17, woke her and her husband, Joe, July 30 after she arrived home from work and found the words “I’m Gay” scrolled across the family’s garage at their home in Villas, N.J., in Cape May County.
Miranda and her 14-year-old sister, Emily, identify as bisexual.
“It was really upsetting. We were expecting to see that someone tagged the house when she woke us up but when we saw that it said, ‘I’m gay,’ it took a few seconds of really not being able to register it,” DeLong said. “And then it was like, holy cow, this is a hate crime. Someone committed a crime and vandalized our house because of the kids’ sexuality. It was very disturbing.”
The vandals also painted vulgar messages on the family’s truck, DeLong said.
Miranda attends a local performing-arts school, which has a very accepting environment, while Emily, who goes to the local public school, has seen some pushback for her sexuality, DeLong said. She may have been the target, her mother added.
The family filed a police report and DeLong shared a photo of the graffiti on her Facebook wall.
“I put a picture of the graffiti on Facebook and a lot of my friends were supportive and said things like, ‘Let us know when you want help to paint over it with a rainbow.’ It was a joke at first and then when we actually went out to buy paint, we thought, Why white again? Let’s do the rainbow. We’re not ashamed.”
DeLong said she and her husband have been very supportive of their daughters’ sexual orientation.
“We didn’t have a problem at all,” she said. “It’s not our place to make a path for them. We accepted their brown hair and brown eyes, and we accepted the fact that they’re bisexual. They were born that way.”
So, the family bought seven colors of paint and DeLong, Emily and their 9-year-old son painted the blocks of the garage door in rainbow colors.
DeLong posted a photo of the tagged garage, and its rainbow update, on Stop Homophobia’s Facebook page, and Emily shared it to the Have a Gay Day Facebook page — and from there the story went viral. It was picked up by local television news stations, print publications, HuffingtonPost, Yahoo.com and countless other outlets.
“We just put it out there for a show of support and it kind of went crazy from there,” DeLong said. “We did not at all expect that to happen.”
Except for some negative comments on the Yahoo story, DeLong said, the family has seen overwhelming support.
While she said her daughters already knew they had their parents’ acceptance, the reaction they’ve seen should bolster that.
“Our family and friends have been so supportive. Any time another article or post comes out, they share it on our Facebook pages. They’ve been fantastic,” she said. “I think [Emily and Miranda] were proud to begin with — they were never ashamed of it — but right now I think it’s even a little bit more than that. Not only are they proud of themselves, they know they have the support of their family behind them.”
DeLong said the family plans to keep the rainbow paint up permanently.