NEW YORK — The Trump administration has stopped flying a rainbow flag at the Stonewall National Monument, angering activists who see the change as a symbolic swipe at the country's first national monument to LGBTQ+ history.
The multicolored flag, one of the world's most well known emblems of LGBTQ+ rights, was quietly removed in recent days from a flagpole on the National Park Service-run site, which centers on a tiny park in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. It's across the street from the Stonewall Inn, the gay bar where patrons' rebellion against a police raid helped catalyze the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement.
The park service said it's simply complying with recent guidance that clarifies longstanding flag policies and applies them consistently. A Jan. 21 park service memo largely restricts the agency to flying the flags of the United States, the Department of the Interior and the POW/MIA flag.
LGBTQ+ rights activists including Ann Northrop don't buy the explanation.
''It's just a disgusting slap in the face,'' she said by phone Tuesday as advocates and City Council members planned rallies, and some city and state officials vowed to raise the flag again.
One of them, Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal, called the removal ''petty and vindictive.''
''On one level, removing a flag seems extremely, I guess, pedestrian. But the symbolism of doing it here at Stonewall is what is so profoundly disappointing and frightening,'' said Hoylman-Sigal, a Democrat and the first openly LGBTQ+ person to hold his office. The National Parks Conservation Association, a parks advocacy group, also said the flag was part of the monument's history and should stay.
A rainbow flag still appears on a city-owned pole just outside the park, and smaller ones wave along its fence. But advocates fought for years to see the banner fly high every day on federal property, and they saw it as an important gesture of recognition when the flag first went up in 2019.
