The removal of an LGBTQ rainbow pride flag from the United States’ most prominent gay monument after new rules issued by the Trump administration sparked an outcry and a noisy protest on Tuesday.
The removal of a large rainbow flag from the Stonewall National Monument in New York followed a January 21 memo from the federally run National Park Service responsible for the heritage site.
It banned the flying of flags other than the US national banner and the Department of the Interior’s colors, with limited exceptions.
About 100 noisy demonstrators, many draped in LGBTQ flags, gathered in a park opposite Stonewall in downtown Manhattan with attendees decrying the move as a “slap in the face” for the community.
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he was “outraged” by the removal of the rainbow pride flag from the monument.
“New York is the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, and no act of erasure will ever change, or silence, that history,” he wrote on X.
The Stonewall national monument memorializes the eponymous Stonewall Uprising of 1969, when LGBTQ New Yorkers rose up against discriminatory policies and oppression.
A police raid of the small Greenwich Village gay bar ignited six days of rioting that birthed the modern US gay rights movement, later extended to transgender and non-binary people, who do not identify as male or female.
– ‘Unconscionable behavior’ –
Trump regularly criticized transgender people and what he termed “gender ideology extremism” while on the campaign trail, and days after returning to office he signed an executive order declaring only two official genders in the United States, male and female.
A month later, the National Park Service scrubbed references to transgender and queer people from the website of the monument, with other government departments implementing similar purges.
“To have somebody take down something that is so meaningful to us and to our community outside a historic site like that is basically a slap in the face,” said trans community organizer Jade Runk, 37, who used cable ties to fasten LGBTQ flags to railings in Christopher Park opposite Stonewall.
“It’s a message saying ‘we don’t want you to exist’.”
The area around the Stonewall monument, including the adjacent, privately run Stonewall Inn, is still adorned with many bright LGBTQ flags, as well as banners representing the trans community.
New York state Governor Kathy Hochul said that she would “not let this administration roll back the rights we fought so hard for.”
The National Park Service did not respond to an AFP request for comment.
LGBTQ campaign group GLAAD said “attempts to censor and diminish visibility are tactics that LGBTQ Americans overcame decades ago, and we will continue to defeat.”
Gay history archivist Alec Douglas, 29, told AFP that “we’ve seen this movie before.”
“It’s just unconscionable behavior from an autocratic government to erase a minority,” said Douglas, holding up a rainbow flag from a 1994 pride march signed by the banner’s original designer, Gilbert Baker.
Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal told local media he would reraise the flag at the site on Thursday.
One protester angrily shouted “Let’s do it now. What are we waiting for?”
