Trump sparked fury like no other when he removed Stonewall’s Pride flag. Here’s why it hit so hard.
It was an “all hands on deck” situation. That’s how Lambda Legal fellow Nephetari Smith described it. The Trump administration’s abrupt removal of the rainbow flag from the Stonewall National Monument in February – under the guise of adhering to “government-wide guidance” – sparked a frenzy of activity within the civil rights organization as activists, politicians, and nonprofits across the country demanded action. Within a week, an expert team of Lambda Legal attorneys had filed a lawsuit demanding the restoration of the flag. After only two months of litigation, they won. And now, only two months later, Lambda Legal has already released a video series on the journey. Every day at LGBTQ Nation, we write about horrific actions taken by this administration to silence and erase LGBTQ+ people. These acts continue to cause tremendous physical and emotional harm, yet it has been years since we’ve seen the wrath of the LGBTQ+ community burn so brightly as the day that flag came down. The move seemed to cut through Donald Trump’s barrage of rash actions that constantly overwhelm our news feeds, inspiring a collective outrage like none other. Never have I received more emailed statements in a single day, and it felt like a long time since any of us had seen activists and politicians this riled up. Related Vandals tore their Pride flag in two. Activists turned it into a surprising symbol of resilience. What was it about that particular move that struck such a nerve? Insights for the LGBTQ+ community Subscribe to our briefing for insights into how politics impacts the LGBTQ+ community and more. Subscribe to our Newsletter today Of course, progressive activists, politicians, and organizations have relentlessly fought back against Trump’s many anti-LGBTQ+ policies, refusing to let his “flood the zone” strategy wear them down. Their grit has led to some critical wins for LGBTQ+ people and has sent a clear message to the administration that no matter how barbaric his and his party’s attempts to erase us become, we’re not going anywhere. But among the battles against gender-affirming care bans, Don’t Say Gay laws, forced outing policies, and bathroom bans, something felt different about the fight to return the Pride flag to Stonewall. It was more emotional, more rage-filled, more mobilizing. Our whole team felt it. “We can’t have our one flag at our one monument on our one flagpole? It was like, enough.”Steven Love Menendez That rainbow emblem, understood around the world as a symbol of belonging, holds an almost incomprehensible level of power for an inanimate object. It’s why activists fight so hard to fly it, and right-wingers fight so hard to ban it from public spaces. Its weight is undeniable. Its presence or absence, addition or removal, can change the entire aura of a place. The flag “serves as a beacon of hope and light for people that are still struggling,” Stonewall flag caretaker Steven Love Menendez, who has devoted the past decade to fighting for a permanent Pride flag installation at Stonewall, told LGBTQ Nation. “It lets them know that there’s a community of people behind them that has their backs.” Symbolically costly After elected officials raised a Pride flag on a temporary flagpole, activists raise the flag on the permanent flagpole at the Stonewall National Monument in New York City Feb. 12, 2026. Thousands gathered at the monument to see the flag raised after President Donald Trump had ordered the flag to be removed in February. | © Seth Harrison/The Journal News / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images Smith knew immediately she wanted to be involved in the lawsuit. As a New Yorker, she has long felt a deep connection to the place that launched the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. She remembers how meaningful it felt to visit the Stonewall Inn during her college years, when she was still coming to terms with her queer identity. “I remember having a conversation with this queer person I met who was 65 or 70, and at 21, I’m the only queer person in my family. I just remember being so floored meeting someone who had been queer for so long and was so unashamed and had this comfort with their own identity.” Only a year out of law school, she described how “amazing” it felt to work on something so historic alongside a team that is “deeply connected to what is happening and responding to it so quickly and expertly.” The older, more experienced attorneys involved in the case, she explained, had strong ties to activists in the community, which “facilitated being able to work so quickly and so efficiently.” “In addition to, of course, the law just being very much on our side.” But Trump and his cronies have never been all too concerned about the rule of law. Yet, the administration caved quickly. Perhaps Trump officials could not have anticipated the potency of the fury. Perhaps for once, they actually accepted they had made a mistake. “The irony is quite unbearable. You’re removing a symbol of queer resistance from the site that exists because queer people were persecuted by the state.”Callum Blades Callum Blades, a lecturer in political psychology at Bournemouth University who studies the emotional significance of flags, told LGBTQ Nation that some symbols hold so much cultural weight that nothing can penetrate their power. “There are symbols that become too embedded in the broader cultural sphere to be demonized,” Blades explained. “There’s 50 years of cultural history behind [Stonewall]… and it appears in mainstream films, history books, and is recognized quite globally.” The administration’s decision to settle, Blades posited, “might tell us the limits” of its anti-LGBTQ+ fearmongering strategy. “It was too symbolically costly,” he said. “The Stonewall monument, it does occupy that different cultural position… The imagery of a Pride flag being physically removed from that location is always going to generate media coverage that even people who are sympathetic to Trump might find uncomfortable.” “The irony is quite unbearable,” he continued. “You’re removing a symbol of queer resistance from the site that exists because queer people were persecuted by the state. I think people felt that instinctively… It demonstrated in quite a concrete way that history being commemorated at that monument isn’t considered settled or safe by this administration.” Smith emphasized that the removal of the flag was a clear symbol of the administration’s quest to erase LGBTQ+ people from the American story. “To see that symbolically,” she said, “gives an additional visual cue to what is going on.” Menendez sees it as “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” “Like, we can’t have our one flag at our one monument on our one flagpole?” he told LGBTQ Nation. “It was like, enough.” A halfway win Thousands watch as the Pride flag is raised at the Stonewall National Monument in New York City Feb. 12, 2026. Local officials and activists raised the flag after President Donald Trump had ordered the flag to be removed in February | © Seth Harrison/The Journal News / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images After President Barack Obama designated Stonewall as a national monument in 2016, Menendez contacted the superintendent of national monuments and proposed doing a Pride Month flag installation involving 250 flags around the park. He has spearheaded that project on a volunteer basis ever since. For a long time, he’d also install a temporary flagpole bearing the Pride flag, but permits allowed it to remain only for Pride Month. “This is our landmark. This is the heart and soul of the movement where it all began.”Steven Love Menendez “I immediately saw how much people loved it, would take pictures with it. It was a meaningful symbol for them… So each year when I did the flag installation around the park for Pride Month, I would ask to keep up that flagpole inside, and every year the answer was no. But bearing in mind that those four years were the first Trump administration… Then when the Biden administration was coming in… suddenly the answer was yes.” “The pole has two little side flags where you can put smaller ones,” he explained, “and we would put trans, two-spirit, and just rotate different flags in the community so that everyone felt represented, everyone felt seen, and that’s how the flagpole was functioning during the four years of the Biden administration.” Then Trump returned to the Oval Office. First, his administration removed all references to trans people from the Stonewall Monument’s website. Then, officials banned the Progress and trans Pride flags from flying in the park. And finally, the administration removed the traditional rainbow flag. Lambda Legal’s lawsuit focused narrowly on convincing the courts to return the six-striped rainbow flag, which Menendez says now flies in the park beneath an American flag, as the settlement required. Menendez called it a “halfway” victory. “This is our landmark. This is the heart and soul of the movement where it all began… We should show different iterations of flags, we should make everyone feel represented… I feel like in the lawsuit they should have fought for us to have the freedom to fly whatever flags we want inside.” Flags, Smith explained, “carry enormous emotional weight for people’ and send a message “about who belongs, who is seen, and whose history is considered legitimate.” “Maybe the reason behind the public outcry was that removal was saying the opposite, that this history is contestable.” And with so many variations of Pride flags still banned, Menendez believes that message continues to be sent about the most marginalized members of the LGBTQ+ community. Smith, in fact, believes there’s a reason that the outcry was not quite as loud when, in 2025, the National Park Service banned the Trans and Progress Pride flags from the monument’s Pride Month display (something Menendez has circumvented this year by discovering that the fence around the park is actually city-owned and thus he can attach the flags to it). View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Queer Review (@thequeerreview) “Trans rights have been attacked relentlessly with very little political blowback within the coalition that Trump needs to maintain,” he said. “I think there’s something psychologically interesting there. The attacks on trans people have been quite remarkably effective precisely because trans people remain, for many Americans, abstract. It’s easier to construct a persecutory… that no one’s ever met or seen; you can just believe and project any image you want onto it.” For the love of the flags | Shutterstock The LGBTQ+ community seems to have an infinite number of flags. An infographic shared earlier this month by LGBTQ Nation shows dozens of flags focused only on variations of asexual and aromantic identities. There’s a flag for leather pride, ally pride, nonbinary pride, and polyamory pride. There’s pansexual, bisexual, and lesbian pride (and even a separate flag for butch lesbian pride). The list goes on, and new flags are introduced all the time. Some folks, both in and outside the LGBTQ+ community, think it’s all too much, that it has made queer people a source of mockery, and that one or two flags are enough to encompass everyone. But there’s a reason these flags continue to proliferate in a way they don’t in other communities. “It speaks to something really important about how the community relates to symbols of identity compared to nationalist flag culture,” Blades said. “When you look at the original rainbow flag and trace the evolution, including the trans flag, intersex inclusive flag, progress flags, these various identity flags, each new addition acknowledges there’s something within the broader community that’s not yet fully seen. It’s an ongoing reparative gesture, a refusal to leave anything in the position of being unacknowledged. “There are genuine debates about this in the community on whether that dilutes the symbol’s power or if it reflects real political tensions around race and inclusion that need to be named as well. Those are legitimate conversations, but I think the impulse behind it is to make the symbol more accurate. I think it’s quite beautiful, really, and quite worth defending, trying to ensure that level of inclusivity and always making progress and space for different identities and different people to feel included.” Pride flags, he explained, do “something quite unique compared to a lot of political symbols.” Groups often co-opt existing flags to serve their own agendas, like how the American flag has come to symbolize conservative values. But in this case, flags serve as “rallying points” to bring a community together that might not have found each other any other way. “The LGBTQ+ flags come from the bottom up, the grassroots. They already represent a community rather than trying to force a community onto a flag.” Smith points out that, unlike other marginalized communities, LGBTQ+ people may feel especially isolated because they may find themselves the only queer people in their families. Flags signify there are people out there like them. “Race, that’s something that you can see… Part of how [queer people] build community is how we communicate symbols to each other.” No place like this PROVINCETOWN — 08/22/24 — Steven Love Menendez, of Harlem, New York, rides his bike down Commercial Street with a peace flag. | © Merrily Cassidy/Cape Cod Times / USA TODAY NETWORK Once, while working in the park, Menendez spotted a young trans person trying to take a selfie with the Progress Pride flag in the background. He offered to take a photo for them, and as he did so, the person began to cry. “They said to me, ‘I’m here for a visit, I’m on vacation from Texas, we don’t have a place like this.’” “Some people want to discount the flag and say, ‘Well, what does it mean? It doesn’t really mean anything,” Menendez said, “but it really is important to so many people.” Under an administration so hostile to LGBTQ+ rights, Pride flags, it seems, have come to take on even more meaning. The presence of a flag, and the existence of Stonewall specifically, is a source of comfort to many, a signal of safety, and a reminder to those who are suffering that there is an entire community out there that supports them and is like them. In a way, these visual cues might just make it possible to keep going. How else, after all, will we find each other? How else will we know there are people out there still fighting? How else can we know that people still care? In other words, it seems it’s not that the flag is more important than other battles; it’s that the flag makes it possible to fight them. Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.
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