(AFP) – The removal of an LGBTQ rainbow pride flag from the Stonewall national monument in New York after new rules issued by the Trump administration sparked an outcry and planned protests on Tuesday. The removal of a large rainbow flag from the monument followed a January 21 memo from the federally run National Park Service responsible for the heritage site in downtown Manhattan. It banned the flying of flags other than the US national banner and the Department of the Interior’s colors, with limited exceptions. A protest was planned for later Tuesday under the slogan “Hands off our flag.”
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he was “outraged by the removal of the Rainbow Pride Flag from Stonewall National 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.
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. 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 “first the Trump Administration worked to erase transgender history from the Stonewall Monument and now they have secretly removed the pride flag — a shameful attempt to erase our LGBTQ history.” “I will not let this administration roll back the rights we fought so hard for,” she said on her X account. The National Park Service did not respond to an AFP request for comment. Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal told local media he would reraise the flag at the site on Thursday.
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