The owner of pioneering D.C. gay and lesbian bookstore Lambda Rising, Deacon Maccubbin, announced his impending retirement late last year. Since then, messages on the store’s Facebook page have estimated a final closing date of Jan. 17, just a couple weeks from now, and 35 years since it first opened. With emotions running high, it’s not difficult to understand why employees overseeing the final clearance push weren’t thrilled to discover Wednesday that the Connecticut Ave. storefront had been egged overnight.

“It’s just a childish prank,” said Lambda spokesperson Dan Mecredy, noting that no anti-gay or any other kind of message was included along with the eggs, which could still be seen splattered across the front windows this afternoon. In fact, Mecredy said, he had been hoping to get all the egg residue cleaned up before anyone even noticed, but the cold weather more or less froze the gunk on the windows for now.

The egging is hardly a fitting tribute to a store that paved the way for the widespread inclusion of GLBT sections in nearly every bookstore in America. As Maccubbin himself noted in his retirement announcement, Lambda Rising saw its share of much worse harassment in its early years (“phone harassment was an almost daily occurrence, bricks were hurled through windows, and police had to bring their bomb-sniffing dogs following some threats,” reads the press release,) but in a city that just easily passed a historic bill legalizing same-sex marriage, this sort of vandalism just seems ridiculous.