Last Friday, the staff of the magazine Our Lives, a Madison-based publication focusing on the city’s LGBTQ+ community, arrived at their office to discover a rock had been thrown through the glass door.
Nothing had been stolen and there were no signs that anyone attempted to enter the office, which led the magazine’s publisher Patrick Farabaugh to suspect they had been subjected to targeted vandalism.
“There’s no way you can say that this is random,” Farabaugh said. “I can’t find any scenario that would play out where this wasn’t someone putting in effort to target us.”
Our Lives does not publish the address of its office in its print copies or on their website, mostly to prevent vandalisms such as this from occurring. “I’m very intentional about not publishing our address,” Farabaugh said. “It’s not convenient to access our office.”
The incident was not the first time Our Lives had been the victim of vandalism, Farabaugh noted. Their sidewalk distribution boxes are often defaced, stuffed full of trash or stolen. However, this is the first time that the magazine’s office had been vandalized in such a manner — he recalled a previous incident in which someone had taped pro-Trump papers to the office’s door.
Farabaugh believes the magazine was targeted purely out of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment, not as retribution for a particular article appearing in the magazine. He said since the magazine does not publish investigative content that exposes “dark secrets,” an attack is most likely played out because of their mere existence.
Although overwhelmed with the amount of support they have received from the community following the vandalism, Our Lives staff are not completely reassured that something similar will never happen again.
“I’m not foreseeing it going away anytime soon. In fact, almost the opposite. I’m almost expecting it to get worse,” Farabaugh said. “We are working in a community that is often targeted by … weaponized rhetoric by one of the major political parties.” Despite this, he believes that the type of people responsible for the vandalism are now a “fringe minority.”
Our Lives’ office now has a new door and the staff has renewed determination to continue with their work.
“I don’t think they were successful in intimidating us. I don’t feel intimidated,” Farabaugh said. “You gotta shake it off and keep going.”
