After taking down any mention of transgender people from the Stonewall National Monument, figures of the movement such as Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera are also missing from the National Park Service (NPS) website.
Johnson and Rivera were both transgender activists, on top of being key figures, present at the Stonewall Uprising in 1969. Previous to the most recent edits on the main website, both also had pages dedicated to their histories chronicling their lives and roles in the iconic protest. Johnson, for what is left of their inclusion on the site, has been reduced to just a photograph on one of the monument’s pages. Curiously as well, a video chronicling Stonewall’s history, narrated by former President Obama, is also absent from the website.
The most recent move by the NPS is one in a line of changes the federal government has made to censor LGBTQ+ histories and identities. What started as erasing the letters “T” and “Q,” which stand for “transgender” and “queer,” over multiple government sites has expanded into erasing whole educational and informational pages regarding the queer community.
Where there are obvious hits of censorship, like on the Stonewall National Monument website, there are other places online that seem to have been clipped randomly. For instance, there are .gov sites that have retained the “TQ” letters while many only display “LGB.” Certain LGBTQ+ history research pages have been disabled, while some still directly link to insightful material.
Other sites have been completely dismantled by the NPS, including one about Philadelphia gay history, one that commemorated a now-closed Black LGBTQ bar in Washington D.C. and a page about an eighteenth-century American preacher who appears to have been gender nonconforming.
Alan Spears, a senior director at the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonpartisan group established in 1919 to help protect the national parks, published a statement regarding the direction of the recent barrage of historical white-washing. “These efforts to tamper with our history set an unacceptable precedent,” the statement reads. “LGBTQ+ history is history, period. It should remain represented at national parks and on the National Park Service website, so that people all over the world can learn about it from the best of the best in the history preservation business.”
“As mandated by law, dedicated National Park Service staff have poured more than one hundred years of work into preserving, protecting, and interpreting the stories that built our nation,” the statement continued. “By removing these educational and historical materials from public access, the administration is making it harder for National Park Service staff to fulfill their obligation to tell the stories of all Americans and maintain an accurate account of history.”
Michael Bronski, a Harvard University history professor, pointed out that a disproportionate number of the erasures also affected webpages about Black activists and spaces. A specific example he found on one of the NPS sites were deleted references to queer and transgender Americans during the Cold War, which Bronski claims are attempts to purge LGBTQ people from the government.
“I really see this as a symbolic attack,” said Bronski, who authored the 2011 book A Queer History of the United States. “The impulse behind it is to symbolically eradicate all of this progress: all of the government recognitions, gay rights, the presence of gay pride, flags on government buildings.”
“Since you can’t get rid of transpeople or gay people, or bisexual people, or queer people, you can try to get rid of documentation about us,” he added. “That means you’re trying to rewrite history.”