NY officials raise rainbow flag at Stonewall in rebuke of Trump administration

NEW YORK (AP) — New York politicians defiantly raised a rainbow flag Thursday at the Stonewall National Monument amid a boisterous, cheering crowd, rebuking the Trump administration for removing the well-known symbol of pride from the LGBTQ+ 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?” 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 catalyze the modern LGBTQ+ 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’s complying with federal guidance on flags, including a Jan. 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 programs 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 Wednesday. “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, Gov. Kathy Hochul, U.S. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. 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 LGBTQ+ people’s place and visibility in the nation.

Soon after Trump, a Republican, returned to office last year, he took aim at diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in the U.S. government and beyond. In one such move, his Defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, renamed a Navy ship that had been named for Harvey Milk, a slain gay rights activist and San Francisco city official who served during the Korean War. The vessel is now named for Chief Petty Officer Oscar V. Peterson, a World War II sailor who received the Medal of Honor.

Trump’s administration also has scrutinized interpretive materials at national parks, museums and landmarks and sought to remove or alter descriptions that the government says are “divisive or partisan” or “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”

The park service has not answered specific questions about the Stonewall site and the flag policy, including whether any flags were removed from other parks.