A student at a conservative Midwestern college says he started getting homophobic threats after he hung a rainbow flag on his dorm room door.

Reddit user RussianSkunk hung the flag on his door the day after the presidential election. Not to make a political statement, he says, but just "to improve my mood by decorating a bit."

After he put it up, though, someone wrote "kill yourself, faggot" on his dry-erase board.

"While there are plenty of cowboy boots, Confederate flags and MAGA hats around here, I didn't expect anyone to take offense to my display of LGBT pride," he confessed.

In the past some people have drawn penises, swastikas and swear words on his board, but RussianSkunk dismissed them as "chuckleheads."

"It was unpleasant, but no different from anything I hear on Xbox Live or half the Internet," he said of the latest insult. "So I took a couple of pictures and erased it."

He posted a photo of the threat on Facebook, where it was seen by his school's Gender and Sexuality Alliance. After some students expressed their support, things soon returned to normal.

A week later, though, he received another message.

Once again, he took a picture and then erased the message. After returning from class an hour later, he found both the wipe board and flag on the ground, with a new slur scrawled on the board. (RussianSkunk explains that he often draws flags on his board and asks people to guess what country their from.)

This time, RussianSkunk reported the incident to his floor adviser, who, in turn, notified local police. The GSA again shared the news—and, this time, his college newspaper ran an article about it.

The university asked him to stop posting about the slurs on Facebook because, he claimed, it was "afraid of bad PR and losing donations." By that point, newspapers from across the state were reporting on the incidents.

"I was kind of panicked, because I didn't think anyone would even care about some dumb messages on my door," he wrote. "We know that this sort of thing happens to the LGBT community all the time, bigotry is nothing new. I was mainly worried about the school getting upset at me for drawing attention to them."

Overall, in fact, he seemed more concerned about making a scene than for his own safety. (The reddit thread was titled, "I caused a mess by hanging up a rainbow flag.")

In spite of the school's desire to cover up the matter, RussianSkunk says he received an outpouring of support from students, professors and staff. One of the most moving came from an unexpected source: a classmate who voted for Donald Trump.

"I wanted to reach out to you because, as a member of the human race, I'm disgusted by the way you were treated," the Trump supporter wrote in a letter. "I may hold very different political beliefs than you, but I still respect you greatly. As a person, I love you."

RussianSkunk ends his post by saying that, even in a rural environment where homophobia is all-too-commonplace, “there are still plenty of people willing to speak out against it.”