STONEWALL — with a Tall, Proud “T” for Transgender — WILL NEVER FALL.
It will stand strong — long after Trump is sentenced to a legacy of infamy — and teach future generations where the fight for LGBTQ+ Equality began.
(The next, proud generation of the Villano Family at the site of the Stonewall Rebellion for LGBTQ+ equality.)
When we took our three granddaughters to visit New York City three years ago, our oldest granddaughter, now almost 16 years old, wanted to see the Stonewall National Monument.
She is a remarkable human being, incredibly intelligent and compassionate, and acutely aware of what’s going on in the world around her. An out and very proud Lesbian, our oldest granddaughter is already a strong, clear voice for equality, human rights, and personal honesty. She has taken her father’s mantra, “putting humanity first,” to heart, and it guides every single thing she does.
I thought I already knew a lot about the LGBTQ+ community, having been part of it for many years, and having raised tens of millions of dollars for HIV/AIDS education, treatment and care, and secured a few billion dollars of pro-bono TV time to fight anti-HIV stigma and discrimination and violence against the entire community. My decade as CEO of Cable Positive — theAIDS action organization of the Cable Television industry — introduced me to every sexuality and gender under our big, welcoming umbrella of love.
Then, my granddaughter began educating me.
She meticulously drew every multi-colored flag representing each segment of the Queer community. Her father, who welcomes diversity with a Pride Progress flag proudly flapping in the breeze in front of his house, was delighted to hang her hand-done flags as a valance over the patio doors in his kitchen. My granddaughter never tired of explaining the difference to me between each flag, and each community.
Patiently she told me about some of the definitions describing the newer nuances of gender, and she never once tired of her “boomer” Grampy asking question after question. If only every family could have a caring, nurturing teacher like my sweet Sage I thought; the world would be a far, far better place.
I sent my granddaughter an Instagram photo of this weekend’s demonstration at the Stonewall Monument, protesting the mean-spirited Trump Administration’s removal of the “T” from the National Parks Monument to Stonewall, on Christopher Street in NYC. Driven by the shrivel-souled Fundamentalist religious fanatics behind Project 2025, on a jihad against “Transgender ideology,” Trump signed an Executive Order demanding that any reference to “trans” or “gender” be scrubbed from all national sites, websites, and documents.
The National Women’s Law Center has been sounding the alarm about these totalitarian actions, which, are ripped right from the playbook of Nazi Party in 1930’s Germany:
“For the architects of Project 2025, few things are more terrifying than LGBTQI+ people.. . . on page after page, they weaponize that fear to try to demonize, dehumanize, and destroy LGBTQI+ people.
Right out of the gate, Project 2025 bemoans “transgender ideology” — a phrase that suggests that trans people are not actual humans as much as embodiments of malignant propaganda. For Project 2025’s authors, the “ideology” of trans existence and LGBTQI+ equality has seeped into every crevice of the federal government, and it’s their mission to eradicate it.
For starters, Project 2025 calls for removing the terms “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” This erasure isn’t symbolic — it’s part of a systematic effort to strip LGBTQI+ people of all legal protection from persecution, discrimination, and violence.”
The fact that it was Barack Obama in 2016 who designated that a National Monument be built at the site of the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion — the first LGBTQIA+ visitors center within the National Parks System — must have given Trump a sick sense of joy when he signed his flagrantly prejudiced fatwa into effect.
I went to the National Parks Website, for the Stonewall Monument, and discovered that the “T” had indeed been torn down by the troglodytes, with the National Park site identified as an historic site for the “LGB” community. How lame.
Fortunately, on the website of the Stonewall National Visitor Center — a NYC visitor’s center on the location of the original Christopher Street uprising — the full LGBTQIA+ designation waves proudly in almost each paragraph. And, nothing prevents the City or State of New York from building a massive monument honoring the Transgender community on City property smack in front of the National Park sign.
I thought of the small, gnarly and gnome-like worldview of the people who wrote Project 2025, and of Trump, Russell Vought, Stephen Miller and the sewer full of red-fanged rat-faced functionaries who take delight in cruelty to one individual or to a group of people.
Then, I thought of my beautiful, loving granddaughter, and her full, bright smile and wonderful, unbridled laugh, and knew that no amount of smallness or meanness or narrow-minded fear, could ever hold back the world that she and her contemporaries are demanding for themselves, with all of us who love them standing shoulder-to-shoulder with them fighting for equality and a better life.
