Stonewall feature image by Walter Leporati via Getty Images

The Stonewall National Monument page on the National Park Service website has removed the word transgender and any mention of trans people. The page now begins: Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) person was illegal.

This is not a surprising development given the second Trump administration’s widespread attack on trans people and the deleting of valuable LGBTQ health resources and data.

The Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative (the official nonprofit of Stonewall) and The Stonewall Inn released an official statement saying they are “outraged and appalled.” Their statement goes on to say, “This decision to erase the word ‘transgender’ is a deliberate attempt to erase our history and marginalize the very people who paved the way for many victories we have achieved as a community.”

Last June, I was invited to the Stonewall visitor center in the weeks before it opened. I felt a combination of joy in its potential for education and frustrations with its limitations. I have a similar feeling now. I’m grateful that The Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative is explicitly stating their support for trans people in this difficult time. I’m sad and scared about yet another attempt to erase trans people from public life and history. But I’m also reminded that our lives and our identities are not dependent on the words of the American government.

I’m re-sharing the piece I wrote last June. It’s important to hold both the severity of this action and the fact that even in June all of us were not included. As long as we live in a country that criminalizes sex work, that imprisons human beings, that allows people to be unhoused and go hungry, and that spends its money on the destruction of people abroad, our government leaves our community behind.

The following was originally published on June 24, 2024. 

The only thing my public school ever taught me about queer people was that we weren’t allowed.

I didn’t know enough queer history to question why it was absent in our textbooks, but I knew enough about the queer present to try to get a gay speaker at our annual Acceptance Week the year I co-chaired. The administration rejected this bare minimum.

In fact, the only inclusion of queerness I can recall was a unit on Oscar Wilde my senior year. The word dandy was defined. Wilde’s sexuality was not. We learned he was put on trial for indecency, the details of what that meant still left out.

Our cultural attitude toward queerness has evolved dramatically since I graduated high school in 2012. The current backlash — through anti-trans bills, through LGBTQ book bans — has succeeded in terrorizing young queer people, but it has failed to return us to the ignorance of a decade ago.

But what is education without support? What does it mean for young people to know they exist when they immediately have to fight for their existence?

I thought of these questions during my private tour of the new Stonewall Visitor Center which opens officially this Friday. Built adjacent to the bar, this restoration of the second half of the landmark location aims to preserve and evolve one of the most important — or, at least, famous — places in queer history. It arrives eight years after Barack Obama designated the Stonewall National Monument, making it the first U.S. national monument dedicated to LGBTQ+ rights and history.

For many in 2016, this declaration felt like a triumph. With the recent federal legalization of gay marriage and mere months from our expected first female president, progress seemed unstoppable. But even before Trump won the election, this progress was a combination of fact and myth. How could Obama celebrate a rebellion led, in-part, by sex workers of the past while criminalizing sex workers of the present? Does it matter that he evolved on gay marriage when he continued to deport and bomb people of all sexualities?

Developed by Pride Live in collaboration with the National Park Service, the Stonewall Visitor Center requires a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. There is a quote from Obama when you first walk through the door. The — admittedly very cool — jukebox was created in partnership with Amazon. Google and Chase Bank are celebrated as partners. Chelsea Clinton appears in a photo montage on the back wall.

But, I would argue, it is a cognitive dissonance worth engaging in. “We’re excited that this can be a destination for families and kids,” Pride Live executive director Efrain Guerrero told me. “We’re partnering already with some summer youth camps. We’re reaching out to primary education. We’re looking into how to put this visitor center on the list of recommended field trips.”

I’m not one to quote anyone in the current administration, but Kamala Harris was correct when she said, “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” And while the combination of radical queer voices and watered down corporate Pride saddened me, I couldn’t help but still feel excited about the visitor center’s existence.

Every federally recognized place, person, and object carries the asterisk of the violent history and present of the United States of America. But I’m still happy Pink Flamingos is preserved in the Library of Congress and I’m glad Yosemite can’t be turned into condos and I’m glad young people will take field trips to Stonewall.

I asked Guerrero how Pride Live navigated the need for big name donors within the context of Stonewall’s radical roots. “We’ve gotten lucky,” he said before explaining that their partners — like Google and Chase Bank — already had a history of supporting LGBTQ+ people. What was he going to say? It’s my job as a journalist and artist to ask that question and it’s his job as the executive director of a non-profit to feel relieved he can partner with Google and Christina Aguilera instead of, say, the Sackler family.

I want to hold queer people and queer institutions to a higher standard — I also want to be conscious of the realities of our world. And, in our reality where Google and Amazon are omnipresent, their involvement here does not negate programming like the visitor center’s plans to highlight other queer uprisings around the country.

“It feels like now is a great time to remind our community and allies that progress is not linear,” Guerrero said. “It comes in waves. We go forward and take steps back. So for me this is a reminder of what we can do collectively when we unite.”

Twenty years ago, the existence of this visitor center would’ve been impossible. But to call it radical is to judge our progress on the timeline of our enemies. There is nothing radical here, and that’s okay. It’s still a reminder. It’s still an education. Or, at least, a start to an education. And while the kids begin this education, those of us who long ago learned of Stonewall can keep fighting the deeper fight so their knowledge can be paired with material support.

So let’s celebrate the grand opening of the Stonewall Visitor Center and all the hard work done by the many queer people who made it happen. Let’s just also remember that Sylvia Rivera would’ve fucking hated it.

The Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center is open to the public.

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