New York politicians raised a rainbow pride flag at the Stonewall National Monument on Thursday, staging what they described as a rebuke of the Trump administration’s decision to remove the symbol from the LGBTQ+ landmark, the Associated Press reported. Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal joined in raising the flag near an existing American flag in a small Greenwich Village park that was packed with more than 100 people.
Hoylman-Sigal said the event was about restoring what he described as the pride symbol’s appropriate place at the Stonewall site. “We did it,” Hoylman-Sigal said after helping raise the flag, according to the report, and many in the crowd chanted “Raise it Up!” As he addressed the crowd, Hoylman-Sigal said the flag should be flown “steps from Stonewall monument,” adding, “So we put it back.”
The Stonewall National Monument is across the street from the Stonewall Inn, the gay bar where a 1969 police raid sparked an uprising that helped catalyze the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. After President Barack Obama created the monument in 2016, advocates sought a daily Pride flag on federal land, and the AP reported that advocates eventually secured the flag’s display for several years on a flagpole in the park at the heart of the monument.
The AP said the pride flag’s initial placement was short-lived when activists took it down and raised it again after complaining that it was flying lower on a separate pole. The activists later placed the rainbow and American flags so they would fly together on the same rope, with both flags visible in the chilly breeze. Jay W. Walker, one of the activists involved in securing the pride flag’s eventual placement, said advocates would restore it again if the park service pulls it down, adding, “We will keep doing this,” and saying, “Our community is not going to stand for our park, our flagpole, to be disrespected by the Trump administration.”
The National Park Service has said it is complying with federal guidance on which flags it can display, including a Jan. 21 memo, the AP reported. The memo largely restricts the agency to flags of the United States, the Department of the Interior and POW/MIA recognition, while also allowing exceptions that include providing “historical context.” The AP reported that the park service had not answered specific questions about the Stonewall site and the flag policy, including whether any flags were removed from other parks.
The Interior Department dismissed Thursday’s flag-raising as a “political stunt.” In a prepared statement, the department said the event showed officials were “utterly incompetent and misaligned” with the city’s problems, according to the Associated Press. The AP also said activists viewed the removal of the pride flag as a deliberate insult and pointed to other recent changes at the monument they found objectionable, including eliminating many references to transgender people.
Ken Kidd, who helped aid early efforts to install the Pride flag permanently, characterized the removal as an effort to erase LGBTQ identity symbols. In an interview Wednesday, Kidd said the Trump administration was “literally stealing our pride, or attempting to,” and called it “a form of identity theft,” adding that it was “truly trying to take away those symbols of what we stand for — those symbols of our history, those symbols of our progress, those symbols of our future.”
In addition to Hoylman-Sigal, the flag-raising drew complaints from New York Democratic leaders including Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Gov. Kathy Hochul, U.S. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. The AP reported that a rainbow flag still appears on a city-owned pole just outside the park, and smaller flags wave along the monument’s fence where a local volunteer maintains them.
As covered by MSI previously, the Trump administration’s action removing the pride flag from the Stonewall National Monument helped set off a renewed round of disputes about how LGBTQ history and symbolism are treated on federal land. MSI previously reported that the Trump administration removed the rainbow flag from the Stonewall National Monument