Stonewall's Flag Comes Down

There's a flagpole at the corner of Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue in Greenwich Village that was put up for one reason. It held the first Pride flag ever flown on federal property — raised at the Stonewall National Monument in 2022, at the site President Obama designated as the nation's first national LGBTQ monument in 2016. Sometime around February 7, 2026, the flag came down. Nobody announced it. It just vanished.

The order came from Jessica Bowron, the NPS comptroller turned acting director, designated by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. On January 21, she signed a memo restricting flags at all National Park Service sites to the U.S. flag and agency banners. Bowron is a budget analyst by training — Oregon State, University of Arizona — not someone who came up through the parks. The memo was bureaucratic in tone and sweeping in effect. At Stonewall, it meant exactly one thing.

The Stonewall Inn, steps from the federal flagpole where the Pride flag quietly vanished around February 7, 2026, after NPS acting director Jessica Bowron signed a memo restricting flags at all National Park Service sites.© Antigng, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Five days after the flag disappeared, hundreds of people filled the streets around the monument. Brad Hoylman-Sigal, Manhattan's borough president, climbed a ladder and raised a new Pride flag on a separate pole. Hoylman-Sigal is the first openly LGBTQ man to hold the office. He's a Rhodes Scholar, a former state senator who passed over 400 bills including New York's ban on conversion therapy for minors. He has a husband, David, a filmmaker, and two daughters, Silvia and Lucy. "If you can't fly a Pride flag steps from Stonewall monument, at the national monument for LGBTQ liberation, where can you fly it?" he told CNN. "So, we put it back."

But Hoylman-Sigal put it on a city pole. Jay W. Walker put it on the federal one. Walker is a Black, gay, cisgender man and longtime HIV survivor who moved to New York in 1985 and attended his first Pride march in 1988. He co-founded the Reclaim Pride Coalition and the Queer Liberation March, helped found Gays Against Guns and Rise and Resist. On February 12, he and fellow activist Josh Tjaden physically re-attached a Pride flag to the original NPS flagpole. "That flagpole was put up there for the sole purpose of displaying the rainbow flag," Walker told The Advocate. "Our community is outraged — they are attempting to erase the history of queer people, of black people, of brown people, of indigenous people all over the country."

The plaque at the Stonewall Inn marking the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ rights movement — a history the NPS had already begun scrubbing from the monument's web page in February 2025, removing references to transgender and queer people.© Grace.Mahony, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Mayor Zohran Mamdani didn't wait for the rally. He condemned the removal immediately. "New York is the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement," he wrote, "and no act of erasure will ever change, or silence, that history." It wasn't just the flag. The NPS had already removed references to transgender and queer people from the Stonewall monument's web page the year before, in February 2025. The flag was the next step in the same direction.

The lawsuit came five days after the rally. Lambda Legal and the Gilbert Baker Foundation filed Gilbert Baker Foundation v. U.S. Department of the Interior in the Southern District of New York on February 17. The foundation's president is Charles Beal, a lifelong activist who attended his first civil rights demonstration in 1962 and was a close friend of Gilbert Baker — the man who sewed the original rainbow flag in San Francisco in 1978 at the urging of Harvey Milk. Baker died in 2017. Beal, an award-winning art director with credits on films like Milk and The First Wives Club, is now the lead plaintiff in a case to protect his friend's legacy. Doug Burgum is the named defendant.

Then came the legislation. On February 25, Chuck Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Representative Dan Goldman introduced a bill to make the Pride flag a congressionally authorized flag eligible to fly on all federal parkland. Goldman had gone to Stonewall the day after the removal to help put the flag back up. Then he went to Congress and tried to make sure it couldn't be taken down again. The Interior Department's response was a single line: Stonewall National Monument "continues to preserve and interpret the site's historic significance through exhibits and programs."

As of early 2026, an unofficial Pride flag flies at the monument — put there by the people who showed up. The NPS-sanctioned flag has not been officially restored. The lawsuit is pending. The bill hasn't been voted on. The memo that took the flag down is still in effect. Gilbert Baker sewed the first rainbow flag forty-eight years ago. The fight over where it can fly is just getting started.