NEW YORK — Elected officials gathered at the Stonewall National Monument in Manhattan on Thursday to condemn a Trump administration directive that had led to the removal of the site’s rainbow Pride flag.
Officials said they would work with activists to reraise the flag later in the day, setting up a defiant response to the administration’s assault on diversity initiatives at a federal site honoring the LGBTQ+ rights movement.
“The most Stonewall thing that we could possibly do is put that flag back up ourselves instead of waiting for the president,” City Council member Chi Ossé, a co-chair of the council’s LGBTQ+ caucus, said at the news conference.
Brad Hoylman-Sigal, the Manhattan borough president, told reporters that the flag would go back up the flagpole at 4 p.m., “in the memory of those whose shoulders we stand on, who fought for LGBT equality and who pointed the direction forward for generations of queer Americans.”
The Pride flag was quietly removed from the monument in recent days, and its disappearance was met with outrage from elected officials and many New Yorkers. Julie Menin, the council speaker, criticized the secretive way the flag appeared to have been removed, saying it “was taken in the middle of the night.”
“There was no discussion,” she said Thursday. “There was no warning. It was taken.”
On Wednesday afternoon, federal employees raised an American flag on the pole where the Pride flag had once flown. State Sen. Erik Bottcher said he and other elected officials planned to raise the Pride flag alongside the U.S. flag, not in place of it.
“ What they’re trying to do is set us up to take down the American flag and pit the rainbow flag against the American flag,” he said. “We’re not going to do that, because the rainbow flag is completely compatible with the American flag, because our movement, the LGBTQ rights movement, is an American civil rights movement.”
The Pride flag was removed weeks after the Interior Department issued federal guidance that addressed the display of “nonagency” flags in the national park system, which includes a small park established in 2016 in front of the Stonewall Inn, the bar for which the federal monument is named.