Man fired for anti-LGBTQ tirade starts year-long battle against tiny library Pride display

LGBT books at Powell’s Books, Portland, Oregon, 2016
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Last year, John Labriola lost his job with Miami-Dade County in Florida when he wrote a screed calling gay and transgender people “abominations” and used slurs.

Months after getting fired, he saw a small Pride display at a Citrus County library. It was a metal cart with three shelves that had a few books LGBTQ people might be interested in and some rainbow stars and hearts taped to it.

Related: A Christian conservative burned four LGBTQ library books to protest equality

And that’s when Labriola started a year-long crusade against the library that involved getting numerous conservatives in the community appointed to the library’s advisory board to stop “LGBT indoctrination in the libraries” and to warn people about “the dangers of those lifestyles.”

He started making petitions and writing blog posts on his site, the Citrus Crusader. He attended county commission meetings, trying to get the library to be forced to remove the display.

“Citrus County’s libraries have been peddling LGBT propaganda during the month of June in celebration of ‘Gay Pride Month,’ with rainbow flag displays featuring books and slogans promoting homosexuality and gender dysphoria,” a January 2022 blog post by Labriola reads. A guest post on the blog says it’s a “warning from…

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