Librarian gets massive payday after firing for refusal to yank LGBTQ books off shelves

A librarian fired by county officials in Campbell County, Wyoming, for refusing to remove LGBTQ books from shelves got the last laugh with a $700,000 settlement.

According to The New York Times, "Terri Lesley, the former director of the Campbell County Public Library in Gillette, Wyo., filed a federal lawsuit in April for defamation and the violation of her civil rights against the county, its board of commissioners, the library board and individual members of both government boards. The lawsuit accused them of violating her First Amendment right to free speech, and of firing Ms. Lesley in a retaliatory and discriminatory way."

These kinds of battles are playing out all over the country, with Republican officials pushing for greater control over the content in libraries, and even sometimes private bookstores, with an eye for censoring LGBTQ content from younger people.

Lesley has been working in the public library system since 1996 and was director for over a decade.

The controversy initially began in June 2021, when the Gilette library highlighted LGBTQ themed books to honor Pride Month. Before long, activists filed challenges against 25 books, including Juno Dawson's “This Book is Gay,” Anna Fiske's “How Do You Make a Baby,” Nadya Okamoto's “Period Power,” Hannah Witton's “Doing It,” Corey Silverberg's “Sex is a Funny Word,” and Andrew Smiler's “Dating and Sex: A Guide for the 21st Century Teen Boy.”

Lesley fiercely resisted calls to remove the books or place them in the adult section, saying, “If you segregate these books, say, in the adult section, and you’re teenager, and you go to try to find something on a topic and that book isn’t there, you won’t discover it. That is a form of censorship.”

After months of disputes, the library board fired her — but despite Gillette being one of the most conservative areas of a state that backed President Donald Trump by almost 50 points, hundreds of people swarmed the library board meeting to support her.

“I don’t regret standing up for the First Amendment in any way,” Lesley said of the conclusion of her lawsuit in hindsight, “but it was kind of a brutal process to experience it, to have it be such a contentious issue, and for it to be across the country and be called things like a ‘pedophile’ or a ‘child groomer.’ Those things were all very hard to experience.”