Sylvia Rivera heads a walk in action after the New York Union Square Park in June 1994.
Justin Sutcliffe / AP
hide
tilting legend
Justin Sutcliffe / AP
Only a few weeks after the references to transgender people have disappeared from the Stonewall National Monument website, the web pages of the National Park Service formerly dedicated to figures such as Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera have now disappeared.
The two were transgender activists and key characters in Stonewall uprising in 1969. This protest against the police during a raid on a gay bar from Greenwich Village became a flash point in the LGBTQ civil rights fight (a photograph of Johnson remains on the NPS site, but without mention of his role.)
This is part of a continuous decision of the federal government to delete and modify the web pages of the National Park Service linked to LGBTQ history.
The law professor Pauli Murray arrives for courses at Brandeis University in September 1971.
Frank C. Curtin / AP
hide
tilting legend
Frank C. Curtin / AP
A large part of censorship seems to be a sliphod. Certain links to a “theme study”, containing dozens of research pages on the history of the United States LGBTQ, are now dead; Others work well. The letters “t” and “q”, standing for “transgender” and “queer”, were excised from the acronym LGBTQ on certain NPS web pages but remain on others. And a NPS page dedicated to the achievements of Pauli Murray, an activist for civil rights and an episcopal priest, and who discusses her gender identity, no longer works, but a link that shows that her family home remains active.
The NPS has completely closed several sites, including one on the gay history of Philadelphia, which commemorated a black LGBTQ bar now closed in Washington DC and a page on an 18th century American preacher who seems to have been non -compliant with the genre.
“These efforts to alter our history have created an unacceptable precedent,” said Alan Spears, principal director of the National Parks Conservation Association, in a press release. “LGBTQ + history is history, the period. It should remain represented in national parks and on the National Park Service website, so that people around the world can learn from the best of the best in the preservation of history.”
“As obliged by law, the dedicated staff of the National Park Service spent more than a hundred years of work in the preservation, protection and interpretation of the stories that built our nation,” continued the press release. “By deleting these educational and historical documents from public access, the administration makes it more difficult for the staff of the National Park Service to fulfill their obligation to tell the stories of all Americans and maintain a specific report in history.”
The National Parks Conservation Association is a non -partisan group created in 1919 to help protect national parks. He called on the federal government to immediately restore the suppressed equipment. In response to the request for NPR comments, a spokesperson for the NPS sent an email: “The National Park Service implements the Executive Order 14168 and the Order 2416 of the Secretary: Federal Register: Defending women of gender ideology and restoring biological truth to the federal government (and) SO 3416 – end the DEI programs and the extreme programs.”
Michael Bronski, history professor at Harvard University, noted that a disproportionate number of erasures affected web pages on militants and black spaces. And badly, he pointed out that one of the NPS sites that removed references to the Americans Queer and Transgender concerned the Cold War attempts to serve the Government LGBTQ people.
“I really see it as a symbolic attack,” said Bronski, who is the author of the 2011 book A queer story from the United States. “The impulse behind it is to symbolically eradicate all this progress: all the recognition of the government, the rights of homosexuals, the presence of gay pride, the reports on the buildings of the government.”
“Since you cannot get rid of pockets or homosexuals, or bisexual people, or queer people, you can try to get rid of documentation to us,” he added. “This means you are trying to rewrite history.”
Entertainment
