A protest is set for Tuesday afternoon at the Stonewall National Monument in New York City after the Trump administration removed the LGBTQ+ Pride flag from the site. That decision has drawn swift backlash from LGBTQ+ advocates, New York officials, and national civil rights groups who say the move is part of a broader effort to narrow how queer history is told on federal land.

By late Tuesday afternoon, Christopher Park is expected to fill with people who know exactly why they’re there. The gathering, advertised as a community rally to defend “our flag, our park, our history,” was organized after the Pride flag was removed from the Stonewall National Monument, a decision that has turned a quiet patch of Greenwich Village into the latest front line in a national fight over memory, power, and who gets to decide what U.S. history looks like.

The protest, set for 5 p.m., is meant as both a rebuttal and a reminder: a rebuttal to what activists see as an attempt to strip one of the most visible symbols of queer identity from the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, and a reminder that Stonewall has never been a place where history stays politely on the page.

The Advocate learned Monday afternoon that the Pride flag flying at the monument had been taken down. The change itself was almost antiseptic with no ceremony, no announcement, no crowd. But on Christopher Street, where history has always arrived with noise and argument, the absence landed like a provocation.

The birthplace of a movement, and a missing symbol

Stonewall is not just a landmark. It is a fault line. In June 1969, patrons of the Stonewall Inn fought back against a police raid, setting off days of unrest that helped ignite the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. The park near the bar, now overseen by the National Park Service, was designated a national monument in 2016. Over time, the Pride flag there became a kind of visual shorthand, not just a marker of identity, but a declaration that this place, of all places, belongs to the community that made it.

The Trump administration claims that the flag’s removal is a bureaucratic matter.

In a statement to The Advocate, the office of U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the move reflects long-standing federal rules governing which flags may fly on government property.

“The policy governing flag displays on federal property has been in place for decades. 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,” the statement said. “Any changes to flag displays are made to ensure consistency with that guidance. Stonewall National Monument continues to preserve and interpret the site’s historic significance through exhibits and programs.”

The White House push to reshape public history

On the day of his inauguration in January 2025, Trump issued an executive order that effectively erased transgender and nonbinary people from federal recognition. Then, in March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The order argues that the nation’s story has been “distorted” by what it calls “ideology” and directs federal agencies to review monuments, memorials, museums, and exhibits to ensure they reflect a more “patriotic” and “unifying” account of the past. It frames recent efforts to broaden historical narratives, particularly around race, gender, and sexuality, not as overdue corrections, but as political intrusions into public memory.

The order tasks agencies with rooting out what it describes as “divisive” or “improper” ideological content and replacing it with interpretations that emphasize national pride and cohesion.

A pattern of erasure at Stonewall

For LGBTQ+ advocates, Stonewall, already a site whose meaning has long been contested, quickly became an obvious pressure point.

In February 2025, the National Park Service quietly removed references to transgender and queer people from the official Stonewall National Monument website, replacing “LGBTQ+” with “LGB” and scrubbing language that explicitly acknowledged transgender figures in the uprising. The change triggered protests and condemnation from activists and Democratic lawmakers, who said it erased the contributions of trans New Yorkers widely recognized by historians as central to the events of 1969.

Around the same time, advocates raised alarms that bisexual and pansexual identities were absent from the monument’s federal record, despite decades of scholarship and oral history affirming their presence in the movement’s early days. To critics, these omissions were not random. They looked like a pattern: a version of Stonewall that kept getting narrower, simpler, and more politically convenient.

Those disputes now feel like the prelude to something larger.

“This is a deliberate act of erasure. This is a cowardly attempt to rewrite history and intimidate LGBTQ+ people,” said New York state Sen. Erik Bottcher, who is gay and represents the district that includes the Stonewall area. “Stonewall is where we fought back, and we are not going backwards. We will not be erased, we will not be silenced, and the Pride flag will fly again at the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement.”

The office of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani did not immediately respond to The Advocate’s request for comment.

Speaker of the New York City Council, Julie Menin, told The Advocate in a statement that the area is “sacred ground.” 

“It is the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, and the removal of the Pride flag from the Stonewall National Monument is a deliberate and cowardly attempt to erase that history,” Menin said. “This is an attack on LGBTQ+ New Yorkers, and we will not stand for it. Our history will not be rewritten, and our rights will not be rolled back.”

National groups respond: ‘These colors don’t run’

Human Rights Campaign National Press Secretary Brandon Wolf described the flag’s removal as the latest chapter in a longer campaign against LGBTQ+ visibility.

“Bad news for the Trump administration: these colors don’t run. The Stonewall Inn & Visitors Centers are still privately owned, their flags are still flying high, and that community is still just as queer today as it was yesterday,” Wolf said in a statement. “While their policy agenda throws the country into chaos, the Trump administration is obsessed with trying to suffocate the joy and pride that Americans have for their communities. For over a year, they’ve been on a witch hunt, targeting rainbow crosswalks, pride flags, Black Lives Matter murals, and throwing a tantrum about a Super Bowl performance they couldn’t control. But they will fail.”

GLAAD struck a similar note of defiance, but widened the lens.

“The values of inclusion and freedom represented by the Pride flag cannot be erased,” a GLAAD spokesperson said. “The Pride flag and the Stonewall National Monument both exist to commemorate the courage, resilience, and beautiful diversity of our community. Attempts to censor and diminish visibility are tactics that LGBTQ Americans overcame decades ago, and we will continue to defeat [them] long after these mean-spirited and un-American moves by the Administration have been forgotten. The Pride flag will fly again.”

GLAAD also pointed to what it described as a sustained, documented pattern. Its Trump Accountability Tracker counts at least 439 attacks in policy, proposals, and rhetoric related to LGBTQ+ people and rights, and the organization said it is preparing to add another 23 entries, one of them tied directly to the current dispute.

Among them: a January 27 directive ordering 16 national parks to remove dozens of signs and displays related to climate change, environmental protection, and settlers’ mistreatment of Native Americans as part of a renewed push to implement the administration’s history order.

Stonewall Inn co-owner: ‘You can’t rely on the government to tell our story’

Across the street from the federally managed monument sits the privately owned Stonewall Inn, where Pride flags continue to fly. The contrast between government-regulated space and community-held ground has become its own quiet argument about who controls history and how it’s allowed to appear in public.

In an interview with The Advocate on Tuesday, Stacy Lentz, co-owner of the Stonewall Inn and co-founder and CEO of the Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative, said the flag’s removal only underscores why LGBTQ+ history cannot be left solely in the hands of federal institutions.

“It really is about how history is being treated under this current administration at federal sites,” Lentz said. She pointed to last year’s changes to the monument’s federal webpages as part of the same trajectory. “Historically, LGBTQ+ communities have learned not to assume the government will tell our story fully or accurately without oversight. That’s not rhetoric. That’s lived experience.”

From the administration’s perspective, the Pride flag is a display that falls outside existing guidance. But Lentz argued that at Stonewall, the flag is not simply political.

“At the birthplace of the LGBTQ rights movement, the Pride flag isn’t just a political symbol,” she said. “It’s a historical one. Its absence raises real questions about how decisions are being made and how histories are being told.”

Lents added, “Stonewall taught us that our history doesn’t survive unless we defend it. The bar has stayed alive because the community chose not to outsource its story to the government.”

‘They’re taking apart our history piece by piece’

Cathy Renna, communications director for the National LGBTQ Task Force, said assurances from the Trump administration about continued exhibits offer little comfort at a site that is, first and foremost, a public park, not a museum gallery.

“They’re taking apart our history piece by piece,” Renna told The Advocate in an interview. When references to transgender people were removed from the monument’s website last year, she recalled, activists organized a protest that drew about a thousand people within 24 hours. She expects a similar response now, and said organizers are already discussing both visible demonstrations and the possibility of putting a rainbow flag back up through community action.

For people looking for what to do next, Renna urged support for community institutions like the Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative and the nearby visitor center, which she described as places still telling the full, complicated story of what happened in 1969, unlike what she called the “drip, drip erasure” unfolding across the street.