There are places in America that are more than addresses on a map. They are turning points. They are proof. They are promises.
Stonewall National Monument is one of those places. It’s here LGBTQ+ New Yorkers fought back against humiliation and harassment and refused to accept a world that demanded their silence. The Stonewall Uprising was not symbolic. It was survival. It was courage under pressure. It was the spark that helped ignite the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement around the world.
That’s why Stonewall is sacred ground.
The recent decision to remove the Pride flag from Stonewall National Monument should not be treated like a small procedural matter. It’s a message. It tells LGBTQ+ people that even at the site where their liberation story is told, their visibility can be narrowed, managed, or erased. It suggests that LGBTQ+ history can be edited when it becomes politically inconvenient.
That is unacceptable.
The National Park Service has an extraordinary responsibility. It must preserve and interpret our nation’s history honestly. That responsibility isn’t imited to the comfortable chapters—and it does not end when the truth of a place conflicts with someone’s politics.
Stonewall exists as a national monument precisely because LGBTQ+ people were targeted by laws, by policing, and by a culture that insisted they live in the shadows. The monument commemorates resistance to that cruelty. If we cannot acknowledge that openly and visibly at Stonewall, then we aren’t reserving history. We are distorting it.
A Pride flag at Stonewall is not a partisan banner. It’s a historically grounded symbol of the people who made that history. It’s a marker of belonging. It tells every visitor, from every state and every country, that this site is not abstract. This happened here, to real people, and it changed the direction of American civil rights.
Removing the Pride flag changes what visitors understand Stonewall to be. It flattens a civil rights monument into a generic tourist stop. It blurs the very reason it exists.
And the impact of that decision reaches far beyond the park gates.
When a Pride flag comes down at the most iconic site of LGBTQ+ liberation, it doesn’t read as administrative to people who are watching their rights debated like a talking point. It lands as a warning. It tells LGBTQ+ Americans that their dignity is conditional. It can be recognized when it’s convenient, and withdrawn when it’s not.
It also tells the people who traffic in bullying and exclusion that they can push institutions into silence. It tells them they can pressure public spaces into erasing LGBTQ+ identity, even at Stonewall.
That is not what a national monument should ever signal.
We should be honest. LGBTQ+ people do not need to be told to be quieter. They need institutions that are brave enough to be clear. Stonewall is not about quiet compliance—Stonewall happened because people refused to be quiet.
That matters today, not because we are relitigating the past, but because the same impulse that led to harassment then is still with us now. It’s dressed up in different language. It travels through different channels. It jaims for the same outcome. It seeks to make LGBTQ+ people less visible, less protected, less equal.
Public institutions have a choice in moments like this. They can act like this is a minor detail and let history be slowly edited down. Or they can stand for what their mission actually requires. Here’s what that means: truth, dignity, and fidelity to the purpose of the place they are charged with protecting.
Restore the Pride flag at Stonewall National Monument immediately.
Then back it up with clarity. The National Park Service and the Department of the Interior should affirm publicly that LGBTQ+ symbols and interpretation at Stonewall are consistent with the monument’s historic purpose. They should also make clear that political pressure will not dictate how Stonewall is presented or whose history is honored there.
Because if Stonewall cannot visibly honor the community it commemorates, then the monument is being stripped of its meaning.
Stonewall is sacred ground. The Pride flag belongs there. Put it back, and make it clear that Stonewall will not be edited to make bigotry more comfortable.
