LGBTQ+ pride under pressure: Fighting back, then and now | The Excerpt
On a special episode (first released on June 26, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: Stonewall veterans helped ignite a global movement for LGBTQ+ rights. Now, over 50 years later, they’re battling a new wave of erasure—one that begins with a website and echoes throughout new executive orders signed by President Donald Trump.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Fredd “Tree” Sequoia:
We were dancing by the pole, and the other side was where the cops came in. And a friend of ours, a kid we knew named Gypsy, we heard him scream at the top of his lungs, "Don't touch me." They came in nasty, pushing, shoving people, and that was not good.
Dana Taylor:
That was Fredd "Tree" Sequoia, now 86, who was at the Stonewall Inn on June 28th, 1969 when the riots began that kicked off six days of protests that was the defining moment in the struggle for LGBTQ plus rights just over 50 years ago. Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. How has the struggle for equality evolved since Stonewall? And what sort of pressure is the queer community facing now at this high stakes moment under President Donald Trump's second administration? For more on that, I'm now joined by Paste BN national correspondent Michael Collins. Michael, thanks for joining me.
Michael Collins:
Thank you for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Let's step back and revisit the history of Stonewall for those of our listeners who were unfamiliar. As we heard at the top, police raided the Stonewall Inn the night of June 28th, 1969. You spoke with several people who were there that night. What did they share with you?
Michael Collins:
Well, it's interesting. They all talked about how the raid was terrifying, and then once the riots started, once people started pushing back against police, it became sort of affirming. They were tired of police harassment and they were fighting back. They were fighting for their rights. And you have to remember that this was a time when very few gay people were out publicly. Same sex relations were illegal. You could get arrested in New York for just wearing clothing that didn't match up to your gender at birth. And police were frequently raiding gay bars like the Stonewall Inn in New York's Greenwich Village. And on this particular night, they came barging through the front door. They smashed liquor bottles, they threw people up against the wall, they smashed the jukebox. One of the people that I interviewed was Mark Segal, who is from Philadelphia. And he had been in New York for just six weeks when suddenly he found himself in the middle of all of this chaos. He was at the back of the bar near the dance floor when police came through.
Mark Segal:
And it was frightening. I was scared. I was saying to myself, "This is very dangerous. Why don't we call the police?" How do you call the police when it's the police who are doing something like this? I went from being extremely frightened inside to coming outside and being angry and not understanding why and realizing something had to be done.
Dana Taylor:
Michael, as you wrote in your piece, The First Night of Activism, starting with the police raid was really the beginning of the movement for LGBTQ plus rights. Walk us through that time.
Michael Collins:
Well, what happened was you had the police raid that night and then people pushed back. There was a riot that night. People were fighting back. But it wasn't just that one particular night. Over the next five nights after the raid, there were also spontaneous protests and demonstrations outside of Stonewall, and at several times there were several thousand people that were involved in these protests.
Then over the coming weeks, you had a number of new organizations that formed, groups like The Gay Liberation Front, and they were demanding an end to this police brutality, and they were demanding equality. And then about a month after the Stonewall raid, there was a march. There was a small but boisterous crowd that gathered in Washington Square Park, which is just a few blocks from the Stonewall Inn. And so from that park, they marched over towards Stonewall. They halted traffic, and they shouted slogans like gay power.
And one of the people that I interviewed, an activist named Karla Jay, she was part of that march, and she talked about how it was a great victory because here you had gay people marching for gay rights in broad daylight in 1969 and no one attacked them. In fact, she said most of the people that they encountered were very supportive. So this march really was the first march for gay pride in New York City, and it was kind of the frontrunner for all the Pride marches that we see everywhere across the country and really all over the world.
And today, of course, Stonewall has become synonymous with LGBTQ rights. What happened at Stonewall has become such an important moment in LGBTQ history, in American history, really, that in 2016, President Barack Obama designated the exterior of the bar an adjacent park and nearby streets as a national monument. He did that because he wanted to make sure that what happened there, the people who were involved, and the cause that they were fighting for, he wanted to make sure none of that was ever forgotten.
Dana Taylor:
As you know from reporting on this community, Michael, President Trump's rhetoric has been particularly hostile to the trans community. Recent change by the National Park Service or NPS removing the word transgender and the letters T and Q from the monument's website has sparked fierce backlash. What did you hear from Stonewall veterans on this?
Michael Collins:
Well, what I heard was that members of the LGBTQ community, particularly transgender people, feel like they are under siege. Erasing transgender people from the Stonewall Monument website is particularly disturbing for them because transgender people were there that night. They were so pivotal to the events of Stonewall. They were fighting back against police, right alongside gays and lesbians and so many other people who were there.
Mark Segel, who we heard from just a few minutes ago, told me it's almost like the Trump administration is trying to rewrite history, trying to erase an entire group of people and their contributions to Stonewall. And it's interesting because Stonewall is the only national monument dedicated to LGBTQ rights or LGBTQ history, and as Mark Segel points out, people come from all over the world to visit Stonewall and see the place where the modern LGBTQ rights movement was born.
Mark Segal:
I think it's really important to realize that throughout America, there are many places people go to celebrate their heritage, their culture, or their feeling of patriotism. If you want to feel proud about your patriotism in America, you might come to Independence Hall. If you want to feel proud about the building of the LGBT community and where that started, you come to Stonewall.
Dana Taylor:
The NPS has said that these actions were in alignment with the president's two-gender policy, which directs federal agencies to recognize only male and female. What precedent might it set for other historical sites?
Michael Collins:
Well, I think it's important to keep in mind that this is not just about the two-gender policy. I mean, that's a big part of it, but it's really about this administration's efforts to target any government program that promotes diversity and inclusion.
And we've already seen the impacts of that in numerous ways. There have been numerous photos that have been flagged for removal from some government websites just because they contained the word gay. One of the most notable cases of that was the Enola Gay, which of course was the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on the Hiroshima Japan during World War II. Photos of the Enola Gay were among those that were flagged for removal from the Pentagon website because the bomber's name included the word gay, even though it had nothing whatsoever to do with gay people or the LGBTQ rights movement.
Dana Taylor:
The revised website scrubs mention of transgender people, even though trans women of color like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, were central to the uprising. What happens socially, politically, and culturally when a government rewrites history and decides later who gets to be remembered?
Michael Collins:
Well, what happens is you end up with a one-sided view of history, or really an incomplete view of history. And to many people, that's alarming. One of the people I interviewed for the story was a transgender activist named Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, and she was there in New York in 1969, and she participated in the Stonewall Riots. And she's really disturbed by how the Trump administration has really targeted transgender people, limiting their access to everything from high school sports to even gender-affirming healthcare. Here's what she said.
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy:
They keep continually attempting to eradicate us. Well, we're not going anywhere. We've been here since time began and we're going to be here in the future.
Dana Taylor:
And finally, where does the LGBTQ plus movement go from here?
Michael Collins:
This is such an important moment for LGBTQ people. On the one hand, so much progress has been made since the Stonewall Riots in 1969. Just this month we're the 10th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality. And yet the people that I've talked to are so worried that so many of those rights that they fought so hard for, they're worried that those rights are in danger and could vanish if we continue on the track that we're on.
One of the things that I asked Stonewall veterans that I talked to is, "What do you do? What comes next?" And they all told me the same thing. They said, "We're going to fight." Just like they did at Stonewall almost six decades ago. And they feel pretty confident, just like they did at Stonewall, they will again prevail.
Dana Taylor:
Michael, thank you so much for coming on The Excerpt.
Michael Collins:
Thank you for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.