After their home was vandalized with anti-LGBTQ+ graffiti, a family in Yorkton, Saskatchewan, turned the hateful message into one of love and pride.

As Becky Willems told CTV News, she woke up on the morning of August 11 to a text from her son, Sam, who found the words “family of f**s” spraypainted on their garage door as he left for work.

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“That’s what I woke up to,” Willems recalled.

Willems reported the vandalization to police, who are investigating the incident.

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Yorkton Mayor Aaron Kienle told CTV News that it was “disappointing” to see hateful defacement like this happen in his community.

“It is disappointing from my place as mayor, and I think for most of the residents of our community, if not all the residents of our community,” Kienle said.

Willems said her daughter and one of the family’s neighbors were particularly upset by the words. When her neighbor sees messages of hate, she explained, “Even if it’s not targeted at her, it hurts her. The words are so ugly, and what was done was so ugly, that it’s hurtful to everybody.”

But that same neighbor suggested the family turn the graffiti into something positive. The Willemses painted over the anti-gay slur and added hearts and rainbows so that the message on their garage door now reads “Proud family of 2SLGBTQ+.”

“The idea wasn’t to fight fire with fire, but to respond to their negativity with positivity, because then you refuse to give them the reaction that they want,” Sam explained. “Then it’s honestly the best revenge.”

Sam added that the community’s response to the hateful message has changed how he feels about living in a small town.

“I’ve always felt pretty isolated, and it’s just kind of like me and my family, and my friends, and those are my people,” he said. “It was just a lot of people came to me, like more than I expected it and to be as upset as they were, it made me feel like a part of a community that actually cared about me and understood me.”

Similarly, Willems noted that the current political climate both in Canada and around the world can leave LGBTQ+ people feeling “outnumbered… attacked and judged.” But, she said, “That’s not how we felt that day, which is surprising because we started it off with this kind of ugliness.”

“We are proud of who we are, we’re proud of ourselves as a family and we’re proud of the 2SLGBTQ+ people in our family, in our community, and within our friends,” Willems told CTV News. “The person that did this, is the person that should feel ashamed and small and ugly, not us.”

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