With just one day's notice, hundreds gathered at Christopher Park Friday to protest the Stonewall National Monument Website's erasure of Transgender and Queer history.
The Stonewall Inn, a tavern on Christopher Street, has long been considered the cradle of LGBTQI activism since a police raid there in 1969 ignited riots that helped galvanize a long-marginalized population into a force for political and social change.
The 7.7-acre national monument — which includes the bar, Christopher Park across the street, was established under President Barack Obama in 2016, and applauded by the National Park Service Office of Communications in a press release.
On Wednesday, according to a version of the Park Service website saved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the introductory text on the monument’s main page said: “Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ+) person was illegal.”Who is Marsha P Johnson, and why is Trump so afraid of her?
By Thursday afternoon, the word “transgender” and the letter T in the abbreviation had been removed from the page. By Thursday evening, the word “queer” and “Q+” had also been removed from the website.
There are no congratulatory press releases from the public affairs office celebrating the unconscionable erasure of transgender history. Thursday a park ranger on duty at the Stonewall Monument told the NY Times she just found out about it.
The Park Service’s public affairs department told the NY Times that the agency had deleted mentions of transgender and queer people on the website to satisfy an executive order signed by President Trump.
