Neighbours offer to help erase graffiti
West-end community rallies around gay couple over homophobic messages
A west-end Toronto community has rallied around a gay couple after vandals spray-painted homophobic graffiti on several properties near College and Dufferin Sts.
One of the properties damaged was the home of Mark It Proud cofounder Daniel Malen and his husband, Aaron Boros.
The graffiti was initially reported Thursday but, by Friday, police had discovered five properties that had been vandalized by spray-painted writing that appeared to be anti-LGBTQ in nature.
Malen posted about the vandalism on his LGBTQ-friendly greeting card company’s social-media channels, including a photo of a garage door with the words, “Toronto hates queers cuz your a biggot” (sic) scrawled across it.
Andrew Hovi, who has lived in the area for about eight months, said the graffiti is not indicative of the neighbourhood. The people he’s met there are open-minded and accepting, he said.
Since the incident, Malen said people, companies and even Toronto police have offered to help clean the graffiti, something the property owners would normally have to do themselves.
“People could not have been nicer and more willing to volunteer their time,” Malen said. He and Boros moved to a new home near Eglinton Ave. W. last Saturday and Malen had not been to their old property since then. Boros went back on Tuesday to pick up a few things, and didn’t see anything amiss, but when Malen dropped by on Thursday morning, he saw the graffiti on their garage door.
Originally, he thought it had been a personal attack against him.
“I didn’t know there were other in- cidents in the area, so when you think it’s an attack on myself, my husband, our family, it’s very unsettling to see something like that,” he said.
Police later told him there were other properties damaged in the neighbourhood. “Oddly that made me feel a little bit better,” he said.
Growing up in Toronto, Malen said he has never been the target of discrimination or hate speech before, so the incident is shocking to him. Toronto “is a very accepting, liberal, inclusive city,” he said, but mentioned in a Facebook post that “this is an awful reminder that Toronto and Canada (are) far from perfect.”
In the post, he also alluded to LGBTQ rights abuses around the world, including some of U.S. Presi- dent Donald Trump’s policies and the treatment of gay men in Chechnya.
The post also said that Toronto police took the incident very seriously and arrived on scene within the hour to investigate. The vandalism is being investigated as a case of mischief, which Malen thinks is appropriate.
“I think it’s ignorant. I don’t know who takes the time to do this stupidity, but obviously it happens,” he said. “We’ve lived very blessed lives (in Toronto) overall. It’s something no one should have to see. It’s such a ridiculous, pointless thing.”
Police are asking residents to report any suspicious behaviour in the area and said they are investigating whether it was a coincidence or if the vandal was targeting Malen’s home.