California Pharmacy Vandalized Over Pro-LGBTQ Signs
Corner Drug answered an anti-gay threat painted on its storefront with humor, defiance, and donations to local LGBTQ groups.
Vandals targeted Corner Drug, a family-owned pharmacy in Woodland, California, on August 17, smashing a window displaying several pro-LGBTQ signs and spray-painting an anti-gay threat on another.
The spray-painted message read: “Support f****ts, get bashed.” The “S” was barely visible in crime scene photographs of the damage, while a crossed-out “T” behind one of the letters suggested that the vandals had made an error while scrawling the hateful message.
Corner Drug disclosed the vandalism in a Facebook post, saying the business was targeted for supporting the LGBTQ community. Signs displayed in the shattered window identified the pharmacy as a “Safe Place” for LGBTQ people and declared, “Hate Has No Business Here,” according to the Davis Vanguard.
The pharmacy responded to the vandalism defiantly.
“To the person that did this: we can fix a window but you will always be broken. (I can also see you started to have some trouble with spelling, always practice on a sheet of paper first.),” Corner Drug wrote. “We documented the damage and cleaned up the scene this morning as a family with lots of good humor and teamwork.”
Corner Drug also thanked community members for checking on the owners and supporting the store with their business.
“An attack on us is an attack on our community and this will make us stronger together,” the pharmacy wrote.
The pharmacy also said it would respond to the vandalism by donating to local LGBTQ nonprofits, including Elevate Queer Yolo: LGBTQIA+ Youth & Young Adult Services and the Davis Phoenix Coalition, which combats hate-motivated violence.
Davis City Councilmember Gloria Partida, executive director of the Davis Phoenix Coalition, told the Vanguard that the vandalism followed days of derogatory social media messages and death threats targeting Corner Drug’s owner.
“This was not a spontaneous, out-of-the-blue act by a lone individual,” Partida said.
Partida said a resident had posted a video of Corner Drug’s Pride Month display accompanied by what she described as “inflammatory” and “baseless” claims repeating anti-transgender disinformation.
“The comments on the post are similarly extreme, laced with slurs, calling the business ‘hateful,’ and claiming it is ‘promoting crimes against humanity,'” Partida said. “The business owner has been trying to field these hateful messages and protect staff while also caring for a newborn baby at home.”
Partida did not allege that the resident she accused of spreading disinformation had vandalized the pharmacy. Instead, she placed the incident within a broader pattern in which people and institutions highlighted on the resident’s social media pages subsequently faced harassment or threats.
She pointed to similar incidents in Yolo County, including threats against a public library in Davis and the forced evacuation of local schools in 2023 after the library shut down an anti-transgender Moms for Liberty event. The county eventually settled the resulting lawsuit, agreeing to pay Moms for Liberty $70,000 in damages plus legal fees.
Partida said social media has amplified inflammatory speech and disinformation, allowing it to reach larger audiences and encourage harassment. At the same time, online anonymity makes it difficult to identify those responsible for threats.
“The usage of basic, easily accessible privacy tools such as VPNs makes holding those responsible for making threats of violence almost impossible, and therefore the link to the original, inciting incident also untraceable,” she said. “The perpetrators therefore escape consequences for their actions again and again.”
That inability to identify perpetrators or prove their wrongdoing in court can frustrate community members, she added.
“We are seeing, as a result, a growing frustration in our local community where the link between one resident targeting a business or a person on her social media and the hounding of that business or person afterwards seems obvious to the average person, but is often impossible to prove in a court of law,” Partida said. “This is a dangerous state of affairs for any community.”
Despite the harassment, Partida said attacks on LGBTQ people and supportive businesses have backfired, failing to silence the community or drive its members from public life.
“[W]hat the perpetrators of these acts want above all is for those of us who are LGBTQ+ and allies to the LGBTQ+ community to be afraid,” she said. “The threats of physical violence, doxxing, and social media exposure are meant to force us back into closets, to shut up, sit down, and stop demanding our rights. In this goal, they are failing.”
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