Essays

Ls, Gs, and Bs: The US government is deleting your history too

The Trump administration is coming after all of us, no matter what part of the rainbow we identify with.

When the National Park Service removed the words "transgender" and "queer" from the Stonewall National Monument website last month, most news outlets noted that those words were specifically targeted. Headline after headline after headline covering this concerning erasure accurately implied these changes are a deliberate effort to target and erase transgender, intersex, and queer people.

Yet, those headlines also implied that federal agencies are being precise in targeting these groups. That is so far from the truth, NASA couldn't measure the distance with their spiffiest space telescope. The Trump administration may have targeted transgender, intersex, and queer Americans first because they know they can get away with bullying these groups. But as multiple independent journalists have pointed out, the Stonewall National Monument website was just the beginning of a larger effort to scrub any mentions of marginalized Americans from federal records.

Our own recent restoration of the Parks and LGBTQ Heritage page found that the National Park Service has been wildly inconsistent in their revisions of historical resources. On several pages, they attempt to maintain the pretense that they consider lesbian, gay and bisexual Americans to be the "acceptable" letters in the LGBTQ+ acronym by methodically revising the acronym to LGB and removing other specific references to the "unacceptable" letters.

However, they went ahead and deleted several other historical resources on lesbian, gay, and bisexual Americans. Plausibly, this could be because some of those resources contained PDFs and videos, which cannot be censored as easily with the sloppy "find and erase" treatment that was used on many of the National Park Service's web pages. Yet many of the pages the new leadership at the National Park Service removed were just webpages. They could have easily used the same stupid text replacement method on them if they wanted to.

For example, they have decided some gay men are acceptable while others were not. Referencing the potential homesexuality of Archibald Butt and Francis Millet was somehow fine. Yet a long article discussing the gayness of General von Steuban, a general who helped our founding freedom fighters in their war for independence, was completely removed.

Now the general might have been targeted because he was foreign-born and an immigrant, which are traits the Trump administration is not too fond of either. However, lesbians and bisexuals received similar treatment. Alice Austen and Gertrude Tate were apparently a-okay. A page on Frances Johnston and her partner Mattie Hewitt Tate was left alone too. Yet several of the resources referencing First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt's bisexuality and her relationships with lesbians were removed or altered beyond recognition.

Again, perhaps this administration is not keen to advertise that a famous First Lady slept with people besides her husband. Hopefully, you agree though that slut-shaming is an utterly ridiculous reason to alter history. If you need even more proof that this administration is targeting all LGBTQ+ Americans though, look at some of the locations they removed from the National Park Service webpages.

All references to two historical sites on Fire Island, the Carrington House and the Cherry Grove Community House and Theater, were erased. Fire Island was one of the first enclaves of LGBTQ+ Americans in our nation's history. Fire Island is thought to be an important precursor to the liberation movements that emerged following the Stonewall riots. A page on the historic Gay and Lesbian Town Meetings in Boston was similarly removed. Entire pages covering the history of LGBTQ+ people in Philadelphia were scrapped too. May the Maker have mercy on the souls at the National Park Service for doing that. Because the town that created Gritty is NOT one we would mess with.

The current leaders of the National Park Service were also fine with deleting a whole page listing places that are significant to Latinos in the LGBTQ+ community. They removed a church from their records too. Yes, a church! Apparently, churches get erased now for daring to host same sex weddings.

These are spaces and history that are just as important to the Ls, Gs, and Bs as they are to the Ts and Qs (as well as the perpetually ignored Is). Yet the National Park Service had no qualms about taking a wrecking ball to them. None, whatsoever. Not a surprising move from this administration considering that they fired the people who were looking after our nuclear missiles.

The national media is catching up. The government's recent proposition to remove images of the Enola Gay, the airplane that was used to drop nukes on Japan in World War II, was apparently ridiculous enough to get their attention. The New York Times also recently uncovered a memo listing hundreds of words that will be strictly monitored by the Trump administration.

The words "gay", "lesbian", and "bisexual" are not on that list of words. "Transgender" and "queer" definitely are. "Intersex" did not rate a mention because apparently intersex people are so unacknowledged, they aren't even considered censorship-worthy. Key words and phrases that were included for extra review though included "men having sex with men", "women", "sex", "trauma", and "stereotype" among many other words referencing diversity, inclusion, and sex positivity that could apply broadly to the LGBTQ+ community.

The fascists currently in charge would prefer for us to believe the lie that their bigotry can have sniper-like precision. They want folks who identify with the "acceptable" letters to feel safe about abandoning folks who identify with the "unacceptable" letters. Yet this administration's censorship actions are proving to be more like a drunk dude firing bear shot at a mosquito. That's why expecting them to exercise any degree of precision when it comes to distinguishing between sexual identities is ludicrous.

We rainbow people spend a lot of time within our own community exploring the nuances of our identities. We're not perfect, and people within our communities don't always express complicated feelings about race and gender well. We also have plenty of disagreements about our own history.

But it is still OUR history. We made it, and must unite to defend our heritage as well as each other. Because as recent attempts to repeal marriage rights, the Supreme Court's decision to take up a case on conversion therapy, and the ongoing persecution our transgender friends show, the dark forces of bigotry will not be content to just meddle with history.

They are coming after all of us and we absolutely cannot let them divide us.