‘It’s like a target on our house’: homophobic murder sparks fears for those flying Pride flag
The Pride flag that hangs outside of Bee’s Knees General Store & Bakery, a cafe and community space in rural Nova Scotia, has been ripped down on four separate occasions. In the most recent instance, in January, the store’s owners, Sue Littleton and Candice Zaina, came in to see it had been trampled and covered in human feces.
“It wouldn’t occur to me to keep it down,” Littleton said. “We’re not going to let this stop us from providing a safe space.”
But they say they’re feeling more shaken after learning of the murder of Laura Ann Carleton, a California boutique owner shot dead by a man who tore down the Pride flag outside her Cedar Glen store. Before opening fire, the 27-year-old yelled homophobic slurs. Officials later said he had a history of posting hateful content online.
“Neither me or my wife have been sleeping well,” Littleton said. “When there’s a noise in the night, we think someone is coming to retaliate.” A week ago, the couple’s son and a friend were the victims of a homophobic attack at a county fair, which caused them to close the shop for a few days.
Littleton said it was important for her to fly the flag as there were not many queer spaces in their town, which has a population of 636. The nearest gay bar is a two-hour drive away in Halifax. “Young folks have found this to be a place where they can be themselves.”
The rainbow flag was designed for a 1978 San Francisco gay rights parade by the artist Gilbert Baker, who was tasked by Harvey Milk with creating a new symbol for the community. Until then, gay men had expressed themselves with a pink triangle, but that had been created by the Nazis to ostracize gay people. “We all felt that we needed something that was positive, that celebrated our love,” Gilbert later said.
After Milk was assassinated a few months later, demand for the flag surged. With its popularity came controversy: in 1988, a man in Los Angeles successfully sued his landlord, who first refused him the right to hang it outside his home.
The flag has been used in times of celebration: it was projected on to the White House after the supreme court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage. It has also been used to show solidarity with attacks on LGBTQ+ community, such as the mass shooting at Pulse nightclub in 2015.
“When a person puts the rainbow flag on his car or his house, they’re not
just flying a flag,” Gilbert said. “They’re taking action.”
Many business owners and residents who own Pride flags have responded to the news of Carleton’s killing with concern and defiance. Krysta Cavin, of Providence Village, Texas, whose children are LGBTQ+, decorates her front yard in rainbow as a show of support.
“What message would I be sending my children if I stopped?” she asked. “It does scare me some, but not enough to stop what I am doing. Mama Bear will always fight for them.”
Across the country, as Republican lawmakers propose or pass legislation restricting the rights of LGBTQ+ people, the flag has become the target of attacks. School districts and towns in Delaware, Ohio, New York state, Utah, Michigan and Wisconsin have voted to ban the flag on public property or in schools.
Many anti-LGBTQ+ demonstrators are desecrating flags themselves. In June, a man was caught on home surveillance video setting fire to a Pride flag hanging on the front porch of a residence in Omaha, Nebraska. That same month, a flag flying outside the Tempe, Arizona, city hall was stolen and burned. There have been similar events in California, Utah, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, California and New
York.
Bradley Smith and Eric Working are a couple who live in Costa Mesa, California. They first hung up their rainbow flag earlier this year, but took it down after having second thoughts.
“It felt like we just put a target on our house,” Smith said. “The initial discomfort was too strong. We decided to take it down and agreed to wait and display it during Pride month.”
They kept the flag up after Pride ended, only taking it down so it wouldn’t blow away in the winds caused by Hurricane Hilary. When they woke up to the news of Carleton’s murder on Monday, Smith said that he paused and thought about keeping the flag down, for fear of violence.
Some social media users expressed similar anxieties. “I have a flag but I am scared to put it outside,” one member of Mothers Against Greg Abbott, a group for liberal Texas moms, posted on Facebook. “We have some very vocal people in our small town and neighborhood, and I never want our political opinions to reflect against my kids’ education or safety.”
Kerry Daly Ruggi, a Suffolk county, New York, woman who helped organize her town’s first Pride parade, feels safe flying her flag. But she understands that others who live in less tolerant communities might feel differently. “Upholding the flag in the face of an antagonistic response is heroic, but it shouldn’t have to feel like that,” she said.
Jared Todd, senior press secretary for the LGBTQ+ advocacy group the Human Rights Campaign, said localities should offer protections to the LGBTQ + community through laws and ordinances that keep Pride flags safe. “But a much more productive conversation would be what legislators can be doing right now to curb gun violence and the all-too-easy access to guns in this country,” he added.
“A rainbow flag in the window of a small business, a residence, or a community gathering spot is a clear and smiling sign to queer people that we will be welcomed and supported,” said Sarah Kate Ellis, president of Glaad. “The burden of the threat of vile antiLGBTQ+ rhetoric and violence lifts, somewhat, when we enter a space adorned with a Pride flag.”
And despite rising anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes by an extremist minority, overall support for the LGBTQ + community is higher than ever in the United States. According to Glaad, 91% of non-LGBTQ+ Americans agree that LGBTQ+ people should have the freedom to live their life and not be discriminated against, and 70% of nonLGBTQ+ Americans believe that businesses should publicly support the queer community.
Ultimately, Smith and Working’s flag went back up. “I felt compelled to display it again in her memory,” Smith said. “It’s a signal that we won’t be deterred by hatred.”
We haven’t been sleeping well. When there’s a noise in the night, we think someone is coming to retaliate
effects. Here was a technique with the potential to switch off inflammation without the need for drugs.
Tracey’s discovery also caught the attention of mind-body practitioners, including the Dutch motivational speaker and “Iceman” Wim Hof, who claimed that he could control inflammation in his body through a combination of breath work, meditation and cold water immersion. “He wanted me to study him,” Tracey says.
They devised an experiment that involved drawing blood from Hof before and after practising his techniques, and analysing them for markers of inflammation. To their surprise, it seemed Hof really could reduce inflammation in his body, although they required more evidence to be convinced his techniques would work in others.
Picking up the baton, Matthijs Kox at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands recruited 12 volunteers to attend Hof’s training camp in Poland, where they spent 10 days swimming in icy water, rolling around in snow, meditating and learning his breathing exercises – which are characterised by a period of forced hyperventilation followed by a period of holding your breath.
Afterwards, the researchers tested the volunteers’ ability to suppress their immune responses by injecting them with a component of bacteria that triggers inflammation and flu-like symptoms. Compared with volunteers who had not undergone Hof’s training, their levels of inflammation were lower and they experienced fewer flu-like symptoms.
But were they really hacking their immune systems by tapping into the power of their vagus nerve? Yes and no. Although the volunteers were able to dampen inflammation, they released large amounts of adrenaline in the process – a key component of the fight or flight response. “This is pretty much the opposite of what you’d expect if
Hof’s techniques were working through the vagus nerve,” says Kox.
Adrenaline also suppresses the immune system, but through a different mechanism. And Kox warns that repeatedly triggering these fight or flight responses could be dangerous for people with cardiovascular conditions.
Hof ’s aren’t the only techniques being espoused as ways to regulate anxiety, depression and improve general health by tapping into the vagus nerve.
Search “vagus nerve hacks” on TikTok, and you’ll be bombarded with tips ranging from humming in a low voice to twisting your neck and rolling your eyes, to practising yoga or meditation exercises.
Researchers who study the vagus nerve are broadly sceptical of such claims. Though such techniques may help you to feel calmer and happier by activating the autonomic nervous system, the vagus nerve is only one component of that. “If your heart rate slows, then your vagus nerve is being stimulated,” says Tracey. “However, the nerve fibres that slow your heart rate may not be the same fibres that control your inflammation. It may also depend on whether your vagus nerves are healthy.”
Similarly, immersing your face in cold water may also slow down your heart rate by triggering something called the mammalian dive reflex, which also triggers breath-holding and diverts blood from the limbs to the core. This may serve to protect us from drowning by conserving oxygen, but it involves sympathetic and parasympathetic responses.
Electrical stimulation may hold greater promise though. One thing that makes the vagus nerves so attractive is surgical accessibility in the neck. “It is quite easy to implant some device that will try to stimulate them,” says Dr Benjamin Metcalfe at the University of Bath, who is studying how the body responds to electrical vagus nerve stimulation. “The other reason they’re attractive is because they connect to so many different organ systems. There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that vagus nerve stimulation will treat a wide range of diseases and disorders – everything from rheumatoid arthritis through to depression and alcoholism.”
In 2016, Tracey and his colleagues published the results of a study of 18 patients with rheumatoid arthritis – an autoimmune condition that causes pain, swelling and stiffness in joints – who were still experiencing symptoms despite taking immunosuppressive drugs. The patients were fitted with a vagus nerve stimulator that was used to target the fibres in their necks that are thought to control immune activity in the spleen. This led to an improvement in their symptoms and was associated with reduced levels of tumor necrosis factor, an inflammatory protein that is a leading target of drugs for rheumatoid arthritis.
Preliminary data also suggests that the technology might be effective in patients with Crohn’s disease, another inflammatory condition, which affects the digestive system.
In all of the medical conditions discussed so far, the device is implanted into the patient’s neck, where it provides regular bursts of stimulation, with different frequencies blocking or activating different nerve fibres. Although this is relatively safe, some patients do experience side effects such as fatigue or headaches.
But there may be alternative ways of stimulating the vagus nerve. Prof Chris Toumazou at Imperial College London and his colleagues are investigating whether a microstimulator could be attached to a specific branch of the vagus nerve that tells the brain when the stomach is full or empty. This idea stems from the discovery that the hormones controlling appetite communicate with the brain via the vagus nerve. Cut the nerve, and these hunger signals no longer get through.
The team has been working on a device that could eavesdrop on this chemical chatter, and send an electrical signal to the brain in response to the release of hunger hormones by an empty stomach. “The device will be able to send an opposite signal to the brain to say: ‘No, you’re full,’” Toumazou says. “We’re not completely cutting those signals off, but controlling them, which could be a much better means of obesity control than a stomach bypass.”
The device that I’ve been clipping to my ear, called a Nurosym, could provide an alternative means of stimulating the vagus nerve, and, unlike implanted stimulators, does not require surgery.
As well as organs and structures in the chest and abdomen, there’s a branch of the vagus nerve that terminates at the outer ear, known as the auricular branch.
“It projects to the brainstem and then to different regions of the brain, and that leads to vagal signalling that projects down to the heart and other organs,” says Nathan Dundovic, co-founder of London-based neurotechnology company Parasym, which develops and manufactures the Nurosym device.
Although this is primarily a medical device designed for patients with chronic health conditionsthat affect involuntary processes such as heart rate or digestion, Dundovic believes that healthy individuals like me may also benefit from auricular stimulation – albeit to a lesser extent.
Many of the company’s employees use the device to promote relaxation and sleep, and to potentially reap some of the cognitive enhancing effects that early clinical studies have hinted at – such as improvements in short-term memory.
Clipping the device to my tragus, the fleshy chunk of cartilage in front of my ear, I feel a gentle pulsating prickle when it is switched on. I can’t claim to have been transformed into a hyperefficient, calmer version of myself – yet – but I’m willing to persist and see.
Not everyone is convinced that this kind of auricular vagus nerve stimulation will be clinically effective. “Because the vagus connects to so many different organ systems, it can still be a challenge sometimes to make sure that we are only stimulating the right part of the nerve,” says Metcalfe. “The idea that you can place electrodes completely outside the body and still selectively stimulate nerve fibres, I find that very hard to believe.”
However, Parasym’s device is currently being tested in trials for various heart and brain-related disorders, including postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (Pots) – a condition characterised by an abnormal increase in heart rate upon standing – and long Covid, by reputable research institutions across North America and Europe.
The idea that auricular stimulation could benefit long Covid patients is being investigated by other teams as well. Already, there is some evidence to suggest that it may help to alleviate the fatigue associated with an autoimmune disease called Sjögren’s Syndrome.
Encouraged by such findings, Dr Mark Baker at Newcastle University is now exploring whether it could also benefit patients with post-Covid fatigue.
An earlier study identified abnormalities in several areas of the nervous system – including an imbalance in the part that regulates involuntary physiological processes. “It looks a little bit like an under-functioning vagus nerve,” says Baker.
It is early days, but if researchers can find an effective way to tap into the vagus nerve – be it surgically, or through the skin – the benefits could be great.
The word vagus derives from the Latin for “wandering” – a nod to the complex and meandering path it takes through the body, and the diversity of physiological processes under its influence. Rather than popping a pill to alleviate illness, perhaps someday it will be possible to breathe, hum or zap our way to better health.
went abroad … They knew every movement, what I was doing, where I was.”
In the year after the coup, more than 750 people, many of them affiliated with Pheu Thai, as well as activists and journalists, were summoned by the junta.
Srettha has spoken in support of LGBT rights and has often shared his views on economic issues on social media. During the crackdowns on monarchy reform protesters in 2020, he urged Unicef to call on the government not to use violence against young demonstrators.
Srettha has previously said he will not seek to change the lese-majesty law, under which criticising the monarchy can lead to a jail term of up to 15 years in prison.
Srettha generally avoided the leadership debates during election campaigning, and analysts say it was ultimately the Shinawatra brand, which still has strong support in areas of the north and north-east, that enabled his party to be runner-up in May’s election.
Srettha has said he will focus on improving people’s livelihoods. “I will try my best to fulfil my duties … I will lift up the wellbeing of all Thai people,” he said on Tuesday.
On the social media site X, previously known as Twitter, many voiced their opposition to his leadership. “NotMyPM” trended, and people shared images of Pita Limjaroenrat, the leader of Move Forward.