New York Leaders Vow to Fight Trump Over Removed Pride Flag at LGBT Monument

New York officials plan to re-raise a rainbow Pride flag at the Stonewall National Monument in Manhattan after the Trump Administration removed it in recent days from the site known for kickstarting the modern LGBT rights movement. Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal, an openly gay Democrat, posted a video on X on Tuesday evening, showing where the flag was supposed to be and saying, “Our community is not going to stand by idly as the Trump Administration tries to erase our history.” Hoylman-Sigal said that he and other officials would reinstall the flag at the monument at 4 p.m. Thursday. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, also a Democrat, similarly said he was “outraged” over the flag’s removal. “New York is the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, and no act of erasure will ever change, or silence, that history,” Mamdani posted on social media. “Our city has a duty not just to honor this legacy, but to live up to it.” Julie Menin, speaker of the city council, and other councilmembers wrote a letter to the acting director of the National Park Service, the federal agency overseeing monuments, on Tuesday to express “extreme concern” over the flag’s removal from what they said was “sacred ground in the history of civil rights” and to demand the flag’s immediate return. Governor Kathy Hochul, also a Democrat, in a post on X criticized the Trump Administration for first diminishing transgender history from the monument—last year, the National Park Service’s website pages on Stonewall omitted references to transgender and queer individuals and even shortened the acronym to LGB to refer to the community—and then, removing the Pride flag. “I will not let this Administration rollback the rights we fought so hard for,” Hochul said. Other Democratic lawmakers from New York also slammed the flag’s removal: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer condemned the “deeply outrageous action” and said it “must be reversed right now,” and Rep. Jerry Nadler, who advocated for federal recognition of the site before former President Barack Obama designated it a national monument in 2016, called the move another “disgusting example of the Trump Administration’s effort to erase the LGBTQ+ community” and added that he “will fight to see that the Pride flag is raised again.”  Demonstrators also protested Tuesday evening at the park. “My business partners and I bought that bar 20 years ago so something like this would never happen,” said Stacy Lentz, co-owner of the Stonewall Inn. “Taking that flag down is an attempt to erase a part of the American struggle and the American story that LGBTQ folks did to make sure that we have equality.” Pride flags at the Stonewall Inn itself—a gay bar that became a symbol of LGBT resistance after an early morning police raid in June 1969 prompted riots against authorities in protest of anti-LGBT discrimination—remain up, but the symbol was removed from the national monument site across the street, which was first reported by Gay City News. In a statement, the Department of the Interior, the National Park Service’s parent agency, said that “under government-wide guidance, including General Services Administration policy and Department of the Interior direction, only the U.S. flag and other congressionally or departmentally authorized flags are flown on NPS-managed flagpoles, with limited exceptions. Any changes to flag displays are made to ensure consistency with that guidance.”  The guidance stems from a Jan. 21 department memo stating that “only the U.S. Flag, flags of the DOI, and the POW/MIA flag will be flown by the NPS” in spaces the National Park Service manages. But the memo provides some exemptions, including flags that “provide historical context,” those that are “part of historic reenactments or living history programs,” among others. TIME did not receive an immediate response from the Interior Department on how it would respond to local officials re-raising the flag. The changes to the Stonewall Monument come as the Administration has made significant changes to national parks as well as to curb what it views as diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts across the government. During Trump’s first term in 2017, the Interior Department actually denied that a flagpole near the national monument was on federal land and did not participate in a flag-raising ceremony for the Pride flag. The city instead flew its own Pride flag there, which still remains in place, ABC News reported. During the Biden Administration in 2022, a new federal flagpole was installed at the site and the Pride flag that has since been taken down was officially raised on it.