Anti-LGBTQ Activist Wants Flagler Library System to Stop Paying $173 Membership to American Library Association

The Flagler County library system is hoping to fend off an attempt by a South Florida activist opposed to LGBTQ equality to sever library staff memberships in the American Library Association and its affiliates, though currently that entire cost amounts to $173. It is the latest flare-up of an ongoing push by the far right in schools and libraries to restrict or ban LGBTQ-related materials, themes or associations, particularly in connection with children’s access or programs, though in this case the connection–if there is one–is tenuous.




“I’m hopeful our commission will not take this seriously and do as he’s requested. We’ll see,” Holly Albanese director of the Flagler County Public Library and a member o the executive board of the Florida Library Association, said this evening. “The commission has always supported the library, they’re readers, they’re supporters and what they’ve always said–they don’t want to censor. I trust in that.” But Albanese was worried by an end-run by the activist, whose method has been successful in several counties.

In 2021 John Labriola was a $70,000-a-year media aide for the Miam-Dade County Commission. He wrote an opinion article in a South Florida newsletter, vilifying LGBTQ people in hateful language, drawing a reprimand for “conduct unbecoming” by his employer, and a public reprimand by the chair of the commission, who told him that “you made several inflammatory and insulting statements that are offensive to the community we both serve.”

Labriola has since joined a South Florida organization called the Christian Family Coalition and has been crusading to have Florida’s public libraries end their ties with the American Library Association or the Florida Library Association, which he called “filthy” in an interview today, because the ALA president is a “self-declared Marxist-lesbian.” He’s been successful, getting a dozen counties to do just that, though the way he makes his case is not always accurate or fair.

On Dec. 1, Flagler County Public Library Director Holly Albanese got a public record request from Labriola for budget figures in the last two years for membership dues to the ALA and its affiliates. The library has one individual, not institutional, membership to the ALA, costing $155 last year and $173 this year, and had two individual memberships to the Florida Library Association last year, costing $285. So the library itself is not a member: its director and sometimes an assistant director are. The Library system has budgeted more money for memberships, but hasn’t spent it.




All professional government departments, from HR to purchasing to legal, have their own memberships to associations, just as do professionals and trades workers in the private sector, from physicians to accountants to plumbers: it’s how they stay current in their field. The library associations promote intellectual freedom and equal access to books, advocate on behalf of libraries for adequate funding, provide training to librarians and help with grants, among many other priorities. Membership fees provide a slew of additional benefits, from discounts to professional development (or training) to webinars, networking with librarians across the country–and the world–publications and so on.

Promoting an ideology, whether Marxism or capitalism, or “promoting” drag queen story hour, is not on the ALA’s list of goals, nor has the Flagler County Public Library system held anything like drag queen story hour, nor have any events at the library been associated with ideological promotion of any sort.

Labriola concedes: “It’s not about what’s happening in Flagler. It’s about what the Library association is doing nationally and their agenda.” But even that “agenda” is largely focused on advocacy, intellectual freedom and professional development.

The ALA’s president, Emily Drabinski, once briefly described herself as a “Marxist lesbian” (in a tweet since deleted). She was also recorded suggesting that  libraries could be sites for “socialist organizing,” and, like all her predecessors, she supports broad and free access to library materials as locally curated by local professionals, who apply local standards to their methods.




Since then, the purpose and mission of the ALA has been inaccurately reduced to Drabinski’s errant and decontextualized words in an ongoing subset of the culture wars. Florida is among several conservative states that have severed ties with the ALA. Labriola represents a more localized version of the effort: his public record requests are the first step to pressuring local commissioners to cut those budget items.

After getting the dollar figures from Flagler County, he sent an email to the five county commissioners–what appears to be a form letter slightly changed to reflect Flagler figures–claiming that the ALA’s agenda is “sexualizing children” and “aggressively pushes alternative sexual lifestyles and ‘gender fluidity’ themes on children” (claims the ALA disputes as simplistic and reductive) and calling on the commissioners to end what amounts to a $173 line item for an ALA membership.

“It has come to my attention that the BOCC are asking questions about this and my concern is that this while not on the agenda for tonight it will come up and they will make a decision to defund our professional memberships,” Albanese wrote her Board of Trustees before dawn this morning, alerting them to be prepared to address the matter, if that proves necessary.  That meeting is this evening. Albanese cut short her vacation to be there and address questions, should they arise.

In an interview today, Labriola did not seem aware of what programs, what books and what displays are presented at the Flagler libraries in Palm Coast and Bunnell, but found those details irrelevant.




“ALA is well-known for promoting drag queen story hour, and they also promote books through their rainbow reading list that have gender ideology themes pushed on young children, so there’s no reason why that association should continue to get taxpayers’ funding,” Labriola said, somewhat mischaracterizing acceptance, literacy and diversity efforts as “gender ideology.” He said that “when county commissioners become aware of that, because a lot of times they don’t know about minutia in the budget, they pretty much almost universally want to end that affiliation with the ALA and its affiliates and subsidiaries.”

Asked repeatedly how the ALA resident’s own beliefs have anything to do with the ALA or Flagler County libraries, Labriola at first said it was irrelevant, then lost his temper and made analogies with taxpayer funding of the Communist Party or Nazis, before insulting the reporter and hanging up. (According to a Miami Herald review of his personnel file, Labriola before his firing “had not received any other disciplinary action, aside from verbal counseling and a written warning in March 2020 for three separate incidents where he raised his voice, used expletives and other offensive language at another colleague.”)

Jim Ulsamer, the long-time chairman of the Flagler County Library Board of Trustees, wrote commissioners today in hopes of putting the library’s membership costs in context: there is little connection between Labriola’s claims and what the ALA does every day.

“It’s a whole big leap to get into the ideological arena on something like this,” Ulsamer said. “That’s why I suggested: don’t jump into anything, be deliberative, you’ve got an experienced librarian, you’ve got a board of trustees that’s seemed to work out this kind of issue in the past.”




The Department of State in October announced it will “not allow grant project activities associated” with the American Library Association and its affiliates this year, including state chapters, according to Politico. That appears to limit the restrictions to grants, though Albanese has asked for legal clarification about the rule (she has not yet received a response. The last time the local library system got an ALA grant was in 2009, a $2,500 award “for our passport service for innovation in creating an alternative revenue source. This award came with a beautiful gold framed certificate that hangs in the library.” The award was highlighted in the ALA magazine.)

The library is expecting a $500,000 state grant to help defray the cost of the new South Side Library in Bunnell, and is in line for a $4 million grant from the state’s Office of Broadband. Albanese doesn’t want to risk those grants over peripheral issues.

But even if the commission were to order an end to ALA membership funding, at least from taxpayer dollars, the library has a plan:” the Friends of the Library, the non-profit support arm of the system, would pick up the cost, so Labriola’s effort would be a nuisance, but not quite a success: librarians would still be members of th ALA.

Albanese, who witnessed the Flagler County School Board’s book-banning spree last year and the year before, has no illusions about where Labriola is coming from. “This all stems from the idea of book banning and the LGBTQ community,” with the majority of bans focused on LGBTQ and minority topics, she said. “Any time you start banning books, that’s a really slippery slope that you go down, and we as librarians don’t want to infringe on anybody’s right to read, to view. Their First Amendment rights are really important to us. This is a really critical time in this country. If we continue on this path there’s a potential that public libraries may disappear as we know them. I don’t want to go down that slippery slope. Before you know it, we’ve stripped the collection of really important works. I mean, this is what that book 1984 is talking about.”