#flagpole

Portly Plumber Be Saving Princesses for +40 Years! by Mast3r-Rainb0w

On Tuesday the Trump administration removed the Pride flag from the Stonewall National Monument in New York City. Stonewall is where the gay rights movement began in the US in 1969.

NYC's Democratic Mayor Zohran Mamdani expressed outrage. NYC City Council Speaker Julie Menin and NY Governor Kathy Hochul condemned the move.

NYC officials vowed to re-raise the flag or (possibly) circumvent the ban in some other way.

New York officials plan to re-raise a rainbow Pride flag at the Stonewall National Monument in Manhattan after the Trump Administration removed it in recent days from the site known for kickstarting the modern LGBT rights movement. Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal, an openly gay Democrat, posted a video on X on Tuesday evening, showing where the flag was supposed to be and saying, “Our community is not going to stand by idly as the Trump Administration tries to erase our history.” Hoylman-Sigal said that he and other officials would reinstall the flag at the monument at 4 p.m. Thursday. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, also a Democrat, similarly said he was “outraged” over the flag’s removal. “New York is the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, and no act of erasure will ever change, or silence, that history,” Mamdani posted on social media. “Our city has a duty not just to honor this legacy, but to live up to it.” Julie Menin, speaker of the city council, and other councilmembers wrote a letter to the acting director of the National Park Service, the federal agency overseeing monuments, on Tuesday to express “extreme concern” over the flag’s removal from what they said was “sacred ground in the history of civil rights” and to demand the flag’s immediate return. Governor Kathy Hochul, also a Democrat, in a post on X criticized the Trump Administration for first diminishing transgender history from the monument—last year, the National Park Service’s website pages on Stonewall omitted references to transgender and queer individuals and even shortened the acronym to LGB to refer to the community—and then, removing the Pride flag. “I will not let this Administration rollback the rights we fought so hard for,” Hochul said. [ ... ] The guidance stems from a Jan. 21 department memo stating that “only the U.S. Flag, flags of the DOI, and the POW/MIA flag will be flown by the NPS” in spaces the National Park Service manages. But the memo provides some exemptions, including flags that “provide historical context,” those that are “part of historic reenactments or living history programs,” among others. TIME did not receive an immediate response from the Interior Department on how it would respond to local officials re-raising the flag.