New York officials are planning to reinstall a rainbow Pride flag at the Stonewall National Monument in Manhattan after the Trump Administration removed it earlier this week from the site considered the birthplace of the modern LGBT rights movement. The removal has sparked outrage from elected officials and activists alike.
Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal, an openly gay Democrat, posted a video on X Tuesday evening showing the empty flagpole and stating, “Our community is not going to stand by idly as the Trump Administration tries to erase our history.” Hoylman-Sigal announced plans to reinstall the flag at 4 p.m. Thursday.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, also a Democrat, echoed Hoylman-Sigal’s sentiments, calling the removal “outraged.” “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 demanding the flag’s immediate return, expressing “extreme concern” over its removal from what they described as “sacred ground in the history of civil rights.”
Governor Kathy Hochul, also a Democrat, criticized the Trump Administration for what she characterized as a pattern of diminishing LGBTQ+ history at the monument. She pointed to last year’s changes to the National Park Service’s website pages on Stonewall, which omitted references to transgender and queer individuals and shortened the community acronym to LGB. “I will not let this Administration rollback the rights we fought so hard for,” Hochul said.
Other Democratic lawmakers joined the chorus of condemnation. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer condemned the removal as a “deeply outrageous action” and called for it to be reversed. Rep. Jerry Nadler, who advocated for federal recognition of the site before its designation as a national monument by former President Barack Obama in 2016, called the move “another disgusting example of the Trump Administration’s effort to erase the LGBTQ+ community.”
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, referring to the historic gay bar that became a symbol of LGBT resistance after a 1969 police raid sparked days of protests. While Pride flags continue to fly at the Stonewall Inn itself, the symbol was removed from the adjacent national monument site.
The Department of the Interior, the National Park Service’s parent agency, issued a statement explaining that the removal was consistent with government-wide guidance. According to the statement, only the U.S. Flag and flags authorized by Congress or the Department of the Interior are permitted on NPS-managed flagpoles, with limited exceptions. The guidance stems from a Jan. 21 department memo outlining these restrictions. The memo does allow for exceptions for flags that “provide historical context” or are used in historical reenactments.
In response to the planned re-raising of the flag, the Interior Department stated in an email to TIME: “While Mayor Mamdani and his City Council are trying to distract from their recent failures, it would be a better use of their time to get the trash buildup off city streets and work to get the power back on for the people of New York City.”
The changes at the Stonewall Monument are part of a broader pattern of changes to national parks and diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts under the Trump Administration. In 2017, the Interior Department denied that a flagpole near the monument was on federal land and did not participate in a Pride flag-raising ceremony, with the city flying its own flag instead. A federal flagpole was installed at the site in 2022 during the Biden Administration, and the flag that was recently removed was officially raised.
