TWIBS: Stonewall Monument Flags Removed, Then Returned
Trump admin officials pulled down Pride flags at the Stonewall National Monument. New Yorkers aren’t having it.
by Aly Gibbs
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s longest running column! Every Friday, Aly Gibbs digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
First they came for the transgenders, and I… well, no, I did say something! I’m always saying things. That’s my job. You know who probably didn’t say anything? Or, at least, nothing worth hearing? Those totally real, actual “LGB without the T” folks; queer men and women who were absolutely certain that they could hand over the trans community to far right conservatives as a sacrificial lamb, end the culture war against the whole community, and walk away unscathed.
Guess again, chump! They took down the fucking pride flags at Stonewall.
The Stonewall National Monument is a Lower Manhattan historic site that includes the Stonewall Inn, Christopher Park, and some nearby streets. It is where the Stonewall demonstrations began on June 28, 1969, and is widely considered the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. The monument itself was the first U.S. national monument dedicated to LGBTQ+ rights and history, and was designated by President Barack Obama on June 24, 2016.
Per Gay City News, who first reported this news, a National Parks Service spokesperson said, “Under government-wide guidance, including General Services Administration policy and Department of the Interior direction, only the US flag and other congressionally or departmentally authorized flags are flown on NPS-managed flagpoles, with limited exceptions. 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.”
Yeah, absolutely. The monument will be preserved and its history will be interpreted by… uh… ensuring that nobody can reference that history shorthand by propping a flag up. American flags and the POW/MIA flag are totally cool, but if you get a little too gay with it, somebody at NPS is gonna come along and ruin your day. NPS maintains a large number of national historic sites in the U.S., and they have decided that the federal government would not like to extend any “official sentiments” to the Stonewall National Monument.
In February of last year, we reported on the Trump administration’s scrubbing away references to trans people at the Stonewall National Monument. Riki Wilchins said, “It is safe to say that scrubbing history is not a sign of holding a winning hand … it displays the immediate, authoritarian power to censor—but it is not a move made out of confidence in one’s position. On the contrary, it is a move made out of fear of what knowledge can do, how it might spread and how seductive its truth is.”
A few weeks later, we reported that activist group The Transexual Menace had reformed in response. Speaking to Assigned Media Associate Editor Valorie Van-Dieman, Menace cofounder Denise Norris said, “They can erase us from federal databases, but they can’t erase us from our hearts.”
She was right then, and she’s still right now. Yesterday, New Yorkers reraised the flags in defiance of the Trump administration’s directives. I’m not a betting gal, but if I was, I’d put cold hard cash on those same New Yorkers refusing to let them take it down again.
We’re living in scary times, there’s no denying that. Terrible, bumbling fools are working hard to spread their bigotry as far and as wide as they possibly can. Remember this: We take care of one another, and we are loved too beyond our communities. They can persecute and oppress us via corrupt court systems as much as they want, but the genie is very much out of the bottle; queer and trans Americans are here to stay.
Aly Gibbs (She/They) is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
