Trump administration takes down a rainbow flag at the Stonewall National Monument

NEW YORK (AP) — 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 planned a rally 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.

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.

“That’s why we have those flag-raisings — because we wanted the national sanction to make it a national park,” said Northrop, who co-hosts a weekly cable news program called “GAY USA.” She spoke at a flag-related ceremony at the monument in 2017.

The flag is the latest point of contention between LGBTQ+ activists and President Donald Trump’s administrations over the Stonewall monument, which Democratic former President Barack Obama created in 2016. Activists were irritated when, during the Republican Trump’s first administration, the park service kept a bureaucratic distance from the raising of the rainbow flag on the city’s pole.

Then, soon after Trump returned to office last year and declared that his administration would recognize only two genders, the government scrubbed verbal references to transgender people from the park service website for the Stonewall monument.

Meanwhile the Trump administration has more broadly reviewed interpretive materials at national parks, museums and landmarks and endeavored to remove or alter descriptions that in the government’s view “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”

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

“Stonewall National Monument continues to preserve and interpret the site’s historic significance through exhibits and programs,” the agency said in a statement.

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Associated Press writers Matthew Daly in Washington and Ted Shaffrey in New York contributed.