Rainbow flag raised at Stonewall monument in New York in defiance of Trump
The flag’s earlier removal drew complaints from a series of New York’s Democratic officials.
New York politicians have defiantly raised a rainbow flag at the Stonewall National Monument, rebuking the Trump administration for removing the well-known symbol of pride from the LGBT+ landmark.
“We did it,” said Manhattan Borough president Brad Hoylman-Sigal after helping raise the flag near an existing American flag in a tiny Greenwich Village park jammed with more than a hundred people.
Many onlookers chanted “Raise it Up!”.
“If you can’t fly a pride flag steps from Stonewall, at the National monument for LGBTQ liberation, where can you fly it?” Mr Hoyman-Sigal asked. “So we put it back.”
Until a few days ago, the flag had flown for several years on a flagpole in the park at the heart of the National Park Service-run site.
The park is across the street from the Stonewall Inn, the gay bar where a 1969 police raid sparked an uprising and helped catalyse the modern LGBT+ rights movement.
The initial rainbow flag-raising, on a pole brought to the park, was short-lived.
Activists, annoyed that the rainbow flag was relegated to a separate pole, promptly took it down and raised it again on the same pole as the American flag, leaving the two flags on the same rope billowing in the chilly breeze.
The park service has said it is complying with federal guidance on flags, including a January 21 park service memo that largely restricts the agency to displaying those of the United States, the Department of the Interior and POW/MIA recognition, with exceptions that include providing “historical context”.
In a statement earlier this week, the park service said that exhibits and programmes still speak to the monument’s history.
But activists who had pressed for the flag display consider its removal a deliberate insult that compounds other recent changes that they find objectionable and ominous, such as eliminating many references to transgender people at the monument.
“The new Trump administration is literally stealing our pride, or attempting to,” Ken Kidd, who aided early efforts to get the flag installed permanently, said in an interview.
“It is a form of identity theft, where they are 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.”
The flag’s removal also drew complaints from a series of New York’s Democratic officials, including Mayor Zohran Mamdani, governor Kathy Hochul, US Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.
A rainbow flag still appears on a city-owned pole just outside the park, and smaller ones wave along its fence, where a local volunteer maintains them.
After Democratic former president Barack Obama created the Stonewall monument in 2016, advocates yearned to see the Pride flag fly daily on federal land. When it finally happened some years later, they saw the display as an acknowledgment of LGBT+ people’s place and visibility in the nation.
