# Stonewall National Monument (2016) Designated by President **Barack Obama on June 24, 2016** — three days before the 47th anniversary of the [[Stonewall Riots]] — using executive authority under the **Antiquities Act of 1906**. The Stonewall National Monument is the **first U.S. National Monument dedicated to LGBTQ history** and the first National Park System site dedicated to a specific LGBTQ historical event. ## What the Monument Encompasses The monument covers approximately **7.7 acres** centered on: - **The Stonewall Inn** itself at 51-53 Christopher Street (still operating as a gay bar, owned privately and operated under license rather than as federal property) - **Christopher Park** directly across the street — the small triangular park containing the **Gay Liberation sculpture** (George Segal, 1979) and surrounding green space where post-Stonewall organizing meetings and early Pride gatherings were held - **The surrounding streetscape** of Greenwich Village's Christopher Street area ## Significance and 2025 Erasure Attempts The 2016 designation was a deliberate **codification of LGBTQ history into the national-monument system** — symbolically elevating the Stonewall Riots to the same level of federal historical recognition as [[American Civil War]] battlefields, Founding-era sites, and civil-rights-movement landmarks. The designation came one year after [[Obergefell v. Hodges]] (2015) and represented the high-water mark of Obama-administration LGBTQ-symbolic recognition. In **2025**, the [[Trump 2.0]] administration's National Park Service made several attempts to: - **Remove references to "transgender" and "queer"** from the official Stonewall National Monument NPS website and educational materials (February 2025) — quickly reversed after substantial public backlash, then partially reinstituted in modified form - **Modify the official interpretive framing** of the Riots to minimize the trans-led and people-of-color-led elements of the uprising - **Restrict NPS educational programming** at the site to exclude content the administration characterized as "ideological" These erasure attempts have made the Stonewall Monument a continuing site of conflict over the **official federal-government framing of LGBTQ history** under conditions of partisan presidential alternation. ## Place in the Vault The Stonewall National Monument is the **defining symbolic codification** of LGBTQ history into the official federal-historical-memory infrastructure — and, in the post-2025 era, one of the most-contested sites of right-wing attempts to roll back symbolic LGBTQ recognition through control of federal-agency educational materials. Its existence alongside attempts to erase its content makes it a useful case study in how political control of historical-narrative infrastructure operates. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[Stonewall Riots]]