The National Park Service (NPS) is continuing to scrub references to LGBTQ history on its website — this time targeting the late New York-based activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera — in its ongoing quest to follow President Donald Trump’s anti-trans executive orders.
On March 5, NPR first reported that NPS had removed pages about Johnson and Rivera, who were major figures in the local fight in the decades following Stonewall. They were active in political organizing at the Gay Activists Alliance and Gay Liberation Front before forming Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), which offered shelter and food for homeless LGBTQ youth and young adults.
According to NPR, NPS also removed pages about Philadelphia LGBTQ history and a Black LGBTQ bar in Washington, DC.
The latest moves come nearly a month after NPS erased references to “transgender” and “queer” from its website and scrubbed T and Q from LGBTQ, including on pages about the Stonewall National Monument, which former President Barack Obama designated in 2016 as the first federal monument dedicated to the LGBTQ community.
“Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) person was illegal,” the NPS website stated on Feb. 14. “The Stonewall Uprising on June 28, 1969 is a milestone in the quest for LGB civil rights and provided momentum for a movement.”
An NPS spokesperson told Gay City News on March 7 that the pages were removed because the agency was applying two of the president’s executive orders that deny the existence of transgender individuals and disavow diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. NPS had previously told Gay City News the same thing when the agency was initially asked about the removal of LGBTQ-related content in February.
According to NPR, the process of removing LGBTQ-related content from NPS site has been uneven and sloppy. Some links to research about LGBTQ history are dead, while others still work, and while the letters T and Q have been removed from some pages, they remain in place on other pages.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s Department of Defense — which has imposed a ban on trans service members — is also embarking on what appears to be a sloppy effort to nix LGBTQ-related posts. The Associated Press reported that one of the posts that were marked to be deleted were references to the Enola Gay, which was the name of the Boeing B-29 bomber used to drop the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan during World War II.
