By Piper Hudspeth Blackburn, CNN
(CNN) — The Trump administration has removed an LGBTQ Pride flag from the Stonewall National Monument in New York City, the United States’ first national monument to LGBTQ rights, following a directive restricting what kinds of flags can be flown on National Park sites.
The removal is the latest change to the monument, as the administration moves to alter what is on display at national parks across the country and impose President Donald Trump’s views on other US cultural and historical institutions.
According to a National Park Service memorandum, the agency prohibits “non-agency flags and pennants” that are not the US flag or the Interior Department flag. NPS acting Director Jessica Bowron signed the directive in January, and there are exceptions for historical flags, military flags, or flags of federally recognized Tribal nations within the parks.
CNN has reached out to the Interior Department and NPS, as well as a co-owner of the Stonewall Inn, for comment.
Gay City News first reported the Pride flag’s removal.
In February 2025, NPS removed references to transgender and queer people on its web page for the Stonewall monument, which consists of the area around the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village.
The iconic gay bar is widely viewed as the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ rights movement in the US: It was the site of a 1969 police raid that sparked a fierce backlash from its patrons and led to days of protests and skirmishes between LGBTQ rioters and police. Former President Barack Obama designated the monument in 2016 during his second term.
Local leaders have slammed the administration’s move, with NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani saying he was “outraged” by the removal. “New York is the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, and no act of erasure will ever change, or silence, that history,” he said in a post to X on Tuesday.
Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal told CNN, “It’s part of the Trump administration’s attempt to reshape the Park Service in a manner that conforms with his right-wing base of support, excluding minority groups and LGBTQ people.”
Hoylman-Sigal said he was working to raise the flag again at the site of the federal monument on Thursday, despite the new federal guidance.
“We’re just going to try to fly it again. It may be taken down. We may be blocked from even doing so, there may be federal officers preventing us, but we certainly are going to try in the spirit of stonewall,” he added.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York called the flag’s removal “deeply outrageous,” adding in a post on X, “If there’s one thing I know about this latest attempt to rewrite history, stoke division and discrimination, and erase our community pride it’s this: that flag will return. New Yorkers will see to it.”
Crackdown on cultural institutions
The NPS memo is the latest action in the Trump administration’s sweeping efforts to purge cultural institutions of materials that conflict with the president’s political directives — and expunge references to trans and nonbinary people across federal agencies.
Trump issued a directive at the start of his second term that the federal government only recognize two genders: male and female. Since then, agencies including the State Department and CDC have truncated the “LGBTQ+” acronym to simply “LGB”; erased references to trans, queer and intersex people; and removed web pages and data sets relating to the groups.
Last October, FBI Director Kash Patel fired a longtime bureau employee who displayed a Pride flag in his workspace during a past assignment, CNN previously reported.
In notifying the individual of their dismissal, Patel did not specifically mention the Pride flag by name but said the agent trainee was being summarily dismissed for past “poor judgment” and “an inappropriate display of political signage,” sources previously told CNN.
The move also comes as the Trump administration has more broadly removed NPS materials focused on diversity.
In January, NPS removed a long-standing exhibit on slavery in Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park, prompting the city to sue the administration.
The exhibit, located at the President’s House Site where Presidents George Washington and John Adams lived, features displays honoring individuals enslaved by Washington and a historical timeline of American slavery.
And last year, the American Battle Monuments Commission, a small, little-known federal agency, took down a cemetery display in the Netherlands that commemorated the contributions of African American WWII soldiers and highlighted the discrimination they faced.
CNN’s Gloria Pazmino and Elizabeth Wolfe contributed to this report.
The-CNN-Wire
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