The removal of a rainbow flag from the historic Stonewall site dedicated to LGBT+ rights in New York, due to rules adopted by the Trump administration, provoked outrage on Tuesday from the Democratic mayor and several organizations.
This withdrawal follows a January 21 memo from the National Park Service, the American agency responsible for managing this listed monument located in Manhattan, prohibiting the display of flags other than the American Star-Spangled Banner and the department’s insignia, with a few exceptions.
The Stonewall National Monument commemorates the riots that occurred in 1969 following a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, New York. The clashes, which lasted six days, are considered a founding event of the LGBT+ movement in the United States.
The Democratic mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, said he was “outraged” by the removal of the flag from the site, protected since 2016, which includes the bar as well as a park and surrounding streets. “New York is the birthplace of the modern LGBT+ rights movement, and no act of erasure will ever change, or silence, that history,” he wrote on X.
“It’s a slap in the face”
About 100 demonstrators, many draped in rainbow flags, gathered Tuesday evening in the park across from the Stonewall Inn to protest the flag’s removal.
“To remove something that means so much to us and to our community in front of a historic site like this is just a slap in the face,” says Jade Runk, 37, a member of the trans community, adding, “it’s a message that says: we don’t want you to exist.”
Aleksander Douglas, 29, agrees: “It is simply unacceptable behavior on the part of an autocratic government to erase a minority,” he denounces, brandishing a rainbow flag.
“The values of inclusion and freedom embodied by the pride flag cannot be erased,” a spokesperson for the LGBT+ rights association GLAAD also reacted to AFP.
“Trump is trying to stifle joy and pride”
Brandon Wolf, of the Human Rights Campaign association, for his part criticized in a press release the determination of the Trump administration “to try to stifle the joy and pride that Americans feel for their communities.”
Asked by AFP, the National Park Service did not respond.
Since his return to the White House a year ago, Donald Trump has put a stop to the progress of LGBT+ rights and particularly transgender people. In particular, he proclaimed from the day of his inauguration that there were only “two sexes, male and female” and a single “biological truth” and has since tried to limit access to gender transition treatments.
