Why Stonewall’s Pride flag mattered enough to sue Trump — and win

For Tanya Asapansa-Walker, Christopher Park in New York City has never been just a park.

Sitting across from the Stonewall Inn, the transgender activist remembers gathering there with friends during the height of the AIDS epidemic, long before social media connected LGBTQ+ people across cities and states.

"It was a great place to meet my friends who were dying from AIDS and just to meet up with folks and chat," Asapansa-Walker says in a newly released short film. "This park is a place where we got our gay rights. We got our LGBTQ rights. People fought, bled, and died here just to exist."

Her reflection opens Stories from Stonewall, a new video series launched Wednesday by Lambda Legal. The project is premiering less than two months after LGBTQ+ advocates secured a legal victory requiring the Trump administration to permanently restore the Pride flag at the Stonewall National Monument, which it had removed earlier this year.

The series is part of a larger project called “Flying Our Flag, Protecting Our History”, a roundtable discussion film scheduled for release on June 28, the anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. Together, the films document the experiences of activists who helped preserve one of the most visible symbols of LGBTQ+ history at a moment when many advocates believe that history itself is under attack.

Related: LGBTQ+ groups score legal victory over Trump, restoring Pride flag at Stonewall National Monument

From outrage to victory

The fight began in February when the National Park Service removed the Pride flag from the Stonewall National Monument, citing federal flag display policies.

The move immediately sparked outrage among LGBTQ+ advocates, elected officials, and historians, who argued that the rainbow flag was not merely a political symbol but also part of the monument's historical context.

Protests erupted at Stonewall, and within days, activists raised the flag again, and Lambda Legal and the Washington Litigation Group filed suit on behalf of the Gilbert Baker Foundation, Equality New York, Village Preservation, and activist Charles Beal. The lawsuit argued that federal officials had ignored an existing exception allowing historically significant displays and had targeted a symbol central to the history that the monument was created to preserve.

The case ended in an unusually swift victory.

In April, the Trump administration agreed to a settlement requiring the Pride flag to be restored within seven days. Under the agreement, the display — consisting of the American flag, the rainbow Pride flag, and the National Park Service flag — must remain in place and may not be removed except for practical reasons, such as maintenance. The federal court retained authority to enforce the settlement.

The agreement also confirmed that the Pride flag falls under federal law and National Park Service policy due to its historical significance to the monument.

For LGBTQ+ advocates, the settlement represented a rare retreat by an administration that has repeatedly targeted LGBTQ+ visibility across federal agencies and institutions.

For Nephetari Smith, the Tyron Garner Legal Fellow at Lambda Legal, who helped litigate the case, the public reaction reflected Stonewall's continuing significance in LGBTQ+ life.

"To attack the literal symbol of the birthrights of the LGBTQ movement and to do it at this place that is this safe haven or this safe space for so many folks," Smith told The Advocate in an interview. "So many people come to New York and come to Stonewall specifically to say, look at this site of where we are, where we're safe and where we were born."

President Barack Obama designated the Stonewall National Monument in 2016, making it the first U.S. national monument dedicated to the history of LGBTQ+ rights. The site encompasses Christopher Park and the area surrounding the Stonewall Inn, where a police raid on June 28, 1969, sparked an uprising that helped launch the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. The Stonewall Inn is privately owned.

To Smith, the dispute over the flag fit into a broader effort to remove LGBTQ+ people from the historical record.

"LGBTQ history is under attack by the Trump administration," Smith said, pointing to executive actions and agency directives affecting LGBTQ+ visibility in schools, government agencies, and public institutions.

Yet she believes the Stonewall fight demonstrated something equally important.

"When LGBTQ history is under attack, the government is not the main holder of that information," Smith said. "There are so many of us who can come together and make sure that history is not lost."

Related: Mamdani, Schumer & NYC Council demand National Park Service return Pride flag to Stonewall National Monument

Preserving memory

That idea sits at the center of the new film project.

Participants include Equality New York members Asapansa-Walker, Melissa Sklarz, Eunic Ortiz, and Eve Ortiz, as well as Gilbert Baker Foundation board member Catherine Marino-Thomas. Their organizations were among the plaintiffs that challenged the flag's removal.

The group gathered at Lambda Legal's New York office in April for a filmed roundtable discussion before traveling to Christopher Park to record personal reflections about Stonewall and the meaning of the Pride flag.

For Smith, who at 29 is a generation removed from many of the activists featured in the project, the conversations felt like a living archive. Some participants helped advocate for Stonewall's designation as a national monument. Others lived through the AIDS crisis. Some watched as the LGBTQ+ rights movement emerged from the margins and entered the mainstream.

"It was really awesome to sit with a lot of our plaintiffs, some of whom knew Marsha P. Johnson personally," Smith said. "It's such a beautiful time capsule of this full breadth of what Stonewall as a moment meant and what Stonewall as a monument means and continues to mean."