Representatives of Pride Flag’s Creator Sue Trump Administration
It’s one of two recent lawsuits targeting the government’s interventions across parks and monuments in the week after the Pride flag was removed from Stonewall.
A pair of lawsuits filed in federal court yesterday, February 17, seek to challenge the Trump administration’s efforts to obscure United States history at national park sites, including the recent removal of a rainbow Pride flag from Stonewall National Monument.
In Manhattan federal court, the foundation of Gilbert Baker, the late artist and creator of the Pride flag, and others are suing the Trump administration for ordering the removal of the iconic symbol of the LGBTQ+ movement in New York City's Christopher Park last week.
Separately, in a Massachusetts federal court, a coalition of educational organizations and national parks advocacy groups is suing Trump over the dismantling of exhibitions and labels at multiple National Park Service (NPS) sites. The NPS operates within the Department of the Interior (DOI).
Both lawsuits accused Trump’s DOI of engaging in a campaign to “erase” American history and alleged that the administration does not have the authority to make unilateral alterations to content within the parks.
The lawsuits come on the heels of a victory yesterday in Philadelphia, where a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to temporarily restore an exhibition about slavery in early U.S. history.
By removing the flag at Christopher Park, part of the Stonewall Inn monument, the NPS applied a double standard that unfairly targeted the LGBTQ+ symbol, the Gilbert Baker Foundation argued in its lawsuit.
"Gilbert Baker created the Rainbow Flag as a symbol of hope, unity, and liberation," the foundation's president, Charles Beal, told Hyperallergic in a statement. "The federal government cannot rewrite history by lowering our flag."
The NPS cited prohibitions on flying certain flags other than the national flag, the DOI flag, and POW/MIA flags in its parks as the official reason for its action at Stonewall.
But according to the Gilbert Baker Foundation, this explanation deliberately distorted the meaning of the restriction.
“The policies the government says require removing the Pride flag expressly permit the NPS to fly other flags that provide historical context to national monuments,” the lawsuit says. “This was no careless mistake. The government has not removed other historical flags at other national monuments, most notably Confederate flags.”
According to the lawsuit, the NPS allows the display of Confederate flags at cemeteries, including at the Civil War site Gettysburg National Military Park. Lawyers for the foundation asked the court to order the restoration and future preservation of the flag.
Gilbert Baker Foundation lawyers said in the suit that the Pride flag was legitimately flown according to the founding document of Stonewall National Monument, which requires the NPS “to interpret the monument’s objects, resources, and values related to the LGBT civil rights movement.”
Baker created the now ubiquitous flag in 1978, almost a decade after the 1969 Stonewall Uprising ushered in a new era of LGBTQ+ activism. The Kansas-born artist died in 2017, and his nonprofit foundation was established in 2019 to protect Baker's legacy and educate the public on the rainbow flag.
"We are taking this action to ensure that the Rainbow Flag flies proudly and permanently where it belongs, at the birthplace of our movement," Beal told Hyperallergic.
Last year, the NPS quietly removed multiple references to transgender and queer people from descriptions of the Stonewall Uprising on its website following a Trump executive order.
When local activists and politicians gathered at the site to re-hoist the rainbow flag last week, days after NPS officials complied with Trump's orders to pull it down, some attendees brought their own Trans Pride flags to raise at the event.
In Massachusetts, six plaintiffs led by the advocacy group National Parks Conservation Association challenged the DOI's interventions at sites across the country.
Trump signed the executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” after taking office in January 2025, delegating DOI Secretary Doug Burgum to identify content that “inappropriately disparage[s] Americans past or living” and “instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.”
According to the lawsuit, the executive order has already influenced the removal of interpretive public-facing signage and exhibitions on climate change, LGBTQ+ issues, women’s history, violence against Native Americans, segregation, and slavery.
Bill Wade, executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers, one of the Massachusetts lawsuit plaintiffs, called the Trump administration’s interventions in National Parks “disgusting and unacceptable.”
“We, as current and former employees of the NPS have, for decades, prided ourselves in telling truthful and accurate stories to visitors about the history and science in this country, even stories about past events that today we are not proud of,” Wade wrote in an email to Hyperallergic.
Officials at Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument in Arizona ordered the removal of a sign about basalt bubbles because there was an image of an individual holding a Pride flag on it, the lawsuit says.
NPS employees also removed information from Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona describing the federal takeover of Native American land to create a public site, according to the lawsuit. It also claims staff at Teton National Park took down a sign that explained Yellowstone expeditioner Gustavus Cheyney Doane’s participation in a massacre against Native Americans.
When asked for comment on the litigation, a DOI spokesperson criticized the politics of one of the plaintiffs, the National Parks Conservation Association, citing social media accounts the group allegedly follows.
“This group claims to be interested in helping our parks, but in 2023, grants from NPCA made up approximately 1.2% of their total expenditures. Further, if you look at the accounts they are following on X you will see they follow AOC, Center for American Progress, Sunrise Movement, Indivisible (the group who hosted the No Kings rallies), to name a few that show the political leanings of this group,” the spokesperson said.
The lawsuit asks the court to restore the dismantled sites and prevent Burgum from altering further displays, claiming the DOI is acting against Congress’s mandate for managing parks.
“We joined this lawsuit to reverse those attempts and to restore what has already been removed,” Wade told Hyperallergic. “The American public and visitors to national parks deserve unbiased and accurate information.”
