On Thursday night, the National Park Service removed the words “transgender” and “queer” from the web pages of the Stonewall National Monument in New York City. The move, taken in the wake of Trump’s so-called “gender ideology” executive order, represented yet another step in the administration’s ongoing attempt to erase trans people from public life—and now, their own history. A 15-part video series about Stonewall Riots—a three-day uprising against anti-queer police harassment that occurred on the site in June 1969, which is widely celebrated as galvanizing the nascent gay rights movement—was also removed, and every use of “LGBTQ+” was lopped down to “LGB.”
Judging from the grammatically tortured sentences left behind, this culling was probably conducted by code; it looks as though someone ran a slightly more complicated version of Find + Delete across the site. Thousands of government websites presenting information running afoul of the right’s “anti-woke” crusade have been edited or taken down in just the first few weeks of the president’s tenure, raising alarm about not only the losses themselves, but the material impacts those changes portend for communities ranging from people with HIV, disabled people, those whose primary language is Spanish, and of course, queer people.
But the defacing—and that’s what it is—of the Stonewall Monument website has hit the LGBTQ community particularly hard, given the location’s venerated status. On Friday, hundreds gathered to protest the move, bearing signs like “No T? All Shade!” and “Can’t spell HIS-ORY without the T.” I was there myself, because as a queer historian, I know that the erasure of history, while it might seem unimportant in the moment, is in fact always a crucial step on the road to autocracy. Indeed, the specific case of “deleting” trans people from the record is an action with a deeply troubling, almost century-old precedent—one
About that record: Let’s be crystal clear that trans and gender nonconforming people were crucial to the Stonewall rebellion—as were lesbians and gay men, and even some straight people. But this truth has been hard won, for several reasons.
First, Stonewall lasted many nights (which is part of why it received more attention than earlier uprisings, like Compton’s Cafeteria or Cooper Do-Nuts). Each night, a broader community showed up. As Stonewall vet Jay Toole told me, “It was every form of human being, every shade of human being, every sexuality of human being, all coming together as one. It was just like, enough is e-fucking-nough.”