On the train to and from work, Mary Wright will often read a copy of the Washington Blade that she picks up from one of its street boxes. But when she started reading the local LGBT newspaper on Sunday evening, something unexpected fell out: a “weird little comic” book with a little child holding a teddy bear and a blanket on the cover.

Wright, an artist and videographer working to bring back the D.C. Dyke March, began reading it, and “it kept getting more and more horrific,” she says, filled with anti-gay rhetoric that claims all LGBT people are the victims of assault who “have their hearts hardened from God,” as Wright describes it. “I had the sick realization that this is a homophobic thing for me targeted in my own community newspaper.”

She posted the “Home Alone” comic on her Instagram, and friends identified it as one produced by Chick Publications, a California-based company that produces cartoon gospel messages. Indeed, the company sells the comics (described as an “emotional message against homosexuality and child abuse”) for $0.17 on its website, along with other comics that promise to share the “secrets the Jesuits don’t want you to know,” why rock music “should have no place in a Christian’s life,” and more.

While newspapers often offer pamphlets or handouts as options for advertisers, Chick Publications did not advertise in the Washington Blade, according to Lynne Browne, the Blade’s publisher. “We have never received any money from Chick Publications,” she says.

While Browne hasn’t heard complaints about the Chick comic specifically, she isn’t surprised to hear about it. “It’s really not tough to walk up to a Blade box and throw things in,” says Browne. “I clean them all the time—a lot of a banana peels, a lot of beer cans, and occasionally hate stuff … We fight this kind of thing all the time.”

She says that issues aren’t limited to people slipping items into Blade editions. “Protesters often stand at Blade boxes and follow people down the street,” she says. “Blade readers see people dumping Blades, and our distribution team has experienced harassment. This is a much bigger issue for us, and it’s constant.”

Because the Blade is a free newspaper, people can take however many they’d like. Browne has advocated in the past for a law that would criminalize the act of taking the whole stack so that others can’t read it. Indeed, the “Criminal Penalties for the Theft of Newspapers Act” was introduced at the D.C. Council in 2014, after “newspaper publishers have reported an ongoing problem of vandalism and theft of all the newspapers from newspaper distribution boxes,” according to a letter from then-Mayor Vincent Gray. The bill never made it out of committee.

Browne says that all the city’s free publications that have newspaper boxes for distribution face some of the same scourges, like street construction and vandalism. But the Blade being an LGBT paper subjects it to some “religious fervor,” she notes.

Wright says that she’ll now be on the lookout for such messages. “I’m definitely going to be more cautious when I pick up another copy of the Blade, which is such a bummer because I want to support queer publications.”