She Was Making a Sandwich. Then a Brick Came Through the Window.

Above: Club NYX, Reguliersdwarsstraat 42, on 14 April 2019. Photograph by Paul2, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. The queer night RARA AVIS played in this building on Saturday. This is not a photograph of this weekend.

Shortly before ten on Wednesday night, Gerben Sterringa heard a bang from the front bedroom of his house on the Amstelkade. His thirteen-year-old daughter was in the kitchen, making sandwiches. The brick that came through the double glazing crossed the room where, half an hour later, she would have been in bed. He told Het Parool it could have been fatal. She spent the night in her parents’ room.

Above the front door, a pride flag had hung for years. On the wall beside it, someone left a death threat in spray paint. The flag is down.

That was the opening night of the thirtieth Amsterdam Dance Event. By Sunday the city was still inside it: a programme the organization has put at more than 3,600 artists and more than 300 venues, and a crowd its spokesperson has compared with last year’s record of 600,000 visits, people in from more than 150 countries. A couple of kilometers from Reguliersdwarsstraat, where the queer rooms were opening, a family was deciding that a flag was no longer safe to fly over a child’s bed.

The flag they had bolted to the wall

Police place the attack at about 22:00 on 21 October. In their public statement they describe a brick through a window and a hateful text aimed at the residents, sprayed, they believe, between 21:30 and 22:00. Officers from Roze in Blauw, the police network that handles anti-LGBTQ cases, are on the inquiry. Anyone who was on the Amstelkade between 21:00 and 22:00, and anyone holding camera or dashcam footage, is asked to call 0800-6070, or 0800-7000 to stay anonymous, and to quote case number 2026281227. The appeal is still open.

Sterringa, a general practitioner, fifty, told Het Parool the bang was closer to 21:45. Earlier that evening the neighbors’ bench had been knocked over. He set it upright. He thought it was vandals, or people who had been drinking. When he got outside after the brick, the street was empty. On the low wall he found the paint. Het Parool and AT5 both printed the sentence: “Drop dead xxx gay! I kill gay.” AT5 reported that police were treating it as anti-LGBTQ violence.

It was not the first visit. Early in October, he said, the same wall had carried the words “gay cancer.” The flag had already been taken once and damaged once. The family had fastened it with a length of vacuum-cleaner tube so that it could not be pulled down. After Wednesday they took it down themselves.

I didn’t want to let myself be dominated by the fear they instill. But that is your daughter sleeping there. You don’t know what would have happened if she had been in bed.

His wife said it was dangerous. The officers, he told the paper, said the family should be proud, and also understood. “To us, it’s a kind of peace flag,” Sterringa said. “Why would anyone be against that?” He and his wife had hung it a few years ago after hearing of people beaten, and killed, because of who they were. He was angry, he said, that this was now Amsterdam, “a society that has always been so tolerant and proud of it.” A flag, he added, should not be necessary. The brick is the argument that it still is.

The daughter is not named in the reporting. She is not named here. The family’s photographs of the glass are not republished. What is public is the police appeal, the father’s account, and a flag that came indoors because a child sleeps on the street side of the house.

October, when the rainbow became a dispute

Banners of the City of Amsterdam during Pride, photographed in 2019: vrijheid, jezelf zijn, liefde. Photograph by Pal Carajo Te Bote y Decolonize, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. These are the city’s words. They are not the doorway on the Amstelkade.

The brick did not land in a quiet month.

On 9 October, Purple Friday, COC — the Dutch LGBTQ organization — counted at least 249 Amsterdam schools that had asked for its lesson packs: 185 primary schools, 47 secondary schools and 17 vocational colleges. Two fewer than last year in the city. Across the country the number rose to 3,130, which COC called a record, from 2,980 the year before. Het Parool’s account of the day carried the explanation schools were giving for trying harder: the climate is hardening. A day later the same paper ran five queer Amsterdammers on what that climate is like on an ordinary pavement. The line in the headline was not about a weapon. It was about an audience. The worst of it, one of them said, was that the whole street stood and watched.

In the same borough, Amsterdam-Zuid, a second argument about being seen has been running since the middle of the month, on the Churchilllaan. The residents’ group Churchill Pride holds a one-year trial permit from Stadsdeel Zuid, and a subsidy already granted, for a PridePad: a hundred rainbow stickers along the median, one every twenty-five meters, each with a QR code that plays a story from queer neighbors. Willemijn van Drie, one of the people behind it, told AT5 that flags are not enough. Last year the Rivierenbuurt hung 820 of them. In 2023, after eighteen were destroyed, more households put one out. Then Pride ends, she said, and almost every flag goes back inside.

A counter-flyer went through nearly all 796 addresses on the street. The gist, as Het Parool reported it: stickers on your pavement, and nobody asked. The people who sent it said they had nothing against the queer community and did not want a fight. The path was simply too much. They claimed more than a hundred emails. They would not give their names. The borough told AT5 it had more than ten formal objections, and that a hearing would follow. Van Drie’s reply was the sentence the Amstelkade flag had been making in cloth. Discrimination, she said, has risen far enough that you have to stay visible all year. A path built to connect a street has, for the moment, split it.

The largest dance week in the world, still open

ADE’s own notes on the anniversary are a story about scale. In 1996, the organization says, it was about three hundred professional delegates and three rooms at night. The edition that opened on Wednesday was announced on 6 October as 3,600 artists across more than three hundred venues, from the conference to churches, museums and clubs. A spokesperson told AD to expect an audience comparable to 2025, when ADE counted a record 600,000 visits, from more than 150 countries, spread over more than 1,300 events. Sunday is the last day. The final count is not in. The headline number is a forecast, not a turnstile.

The city has been running the weekend as a way of getting people home, not only of getting them in. NL Times reported the “Celebrate Safe” campaign, awareness crews on the floor at DGTL and Awakenings, pairs of cycling buddies on the dark stretch between the NDSM quay and the ferry, and a “Goodbye Host” at Awakenings with a charger, so nobody leaves with a dead phone. Metro lines 52 and 54 ran until 2 a.m. on Friday and Saturday. Ferries to Buiksloterweg and NDSM stayed up through the night. The clocks went back in the small hours of Sunday, and the night buses were extended with them.

None of that apparatus is about the Amstelkade. The city has also been on alert since the killing of Hajar, twenty-nine, who went missing on 4 October while cycling with a man she did not know. Her body was found on 16 October in a suitcase on the Amsteldijk. A suspect is in custody. The two crimes share a river and a month. They do not share a suspect, a motive, or a story, and they should not be pressed into one. They are why “getting home” has been said out loud at a dance festival.

The doors that were still marked

Inside the programme, the queer nights did not step aside for any of this. They ran on the same clock.

On Saturday, RARA AVIS was back at Club NYX, Reguliersdwarsstraat 42, from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. ADE’s listing calls it the colorful antidote to the dark end of techno: three rooms, queer DJs, a floor for people dressed as an office would not allow. Alice Olsthoorn played back to back with TEKNA. DJ SEXSTASY and Spikey Lee were on the bill. The building has been a gay club since 2012. The street under it is the one this city has used for that nightlife since the 1990s. On Sunday, Blend XL — the LGBTQIA+ room at number 44 — listed a True House tribute to DJ Romain from 5 p.m. to midnight, one of ten ADE bookings at that address across the five days. Reguliers.net, which keeps the street’s programme, also describes a Gay Dance Event threaded through venues including Blend: a strand started in 2008 by Benjamin Aillery and Elliott Matos, with an explicit line against homophobia, racism and gender discrimination.

Out in Westpoort, in a former bookbindery on the Humberweg, Club RAUM’s SPIELRAUM is in the middle of fifty-five hours. Winq reported that it began Friday at 11 p.m. and runs through Monday; that the advance tickets sold out; that the door is still selling while there is room; that there is no re-entry; and that the door closes between 5 and 8 on Saturday and Sunday mornings. There is an awareness team. Phones stay in pockets. No photos, no video. One of the founders, Sven Bijma, is also on an ADE Pro panel this week whose title the organization printed without a wink: “Why Humans Still Need Dancefloors,” with Eris Drew and the researcher Alice O’Grady.

A dance floor is a place the city has agreed to mark. A flag over a bedroom is the same claim, smaller, and easier to reach with a brick. When the flag comes in, the floor is what a stranger can still find on a map.

What is still on the map tonight

Vibra’s Amsterdam calendar is that map after the conference passes come off. It keeps Club NYX, Blend XL and the rest of Reguliersdwarsstraat on the same page as the nights members actually throw, and it leaves De Trut where the listing has it: a DIY queer room on Sundays, with no need of a thirtieth anniversary to justify the door. The reason for writing the rooms down is the reason Van Drie gave for a sticker path in October. Visibility that depends on a festival weekend is visibility with a closing time.

On Sunday, as the last ADE trains run and the ferries keep the night schedule, the pride flag on the Amstelkade is indoors. Police still want the hour between nine and ten. On Reguliersdwarsstraat the doors open again. Both of those facts are the news. Only one of them was built to be photographed.

How this was reported

Vibra did not interview the family. The scene on the Amstelkade is taken from the police statement of 22 October and from Gerben Sterringa’s account to Het Parool, confirmed in its main points by AT5. The Purple Friday figures are COC’s, as reported by Het Parool. The Churchilllaan dispute is from AT5 and Het Parool. The scale of ADE is from the organization’s release of 6 October 2026 and from a spokesperson quoted by AD; the 600,000 is last year’s official total, not a finished count for this weekend. The safety measures are from NL Times and from GVB’s extra timetable. The queer programme is from ADE’s own page for RARA AVIS, from Blend’s ADE schedule, from Reguliers.net and from Winq. Nothing here is a photograph of the broken window. The pictures are real, older, and labeled with the date they were taken.