Do you ever feel grief that you can't go home again? I sure do! Home for me is a New York City that will never exist again except in my memories. Home is strolling 1990s-era Greenwich Village arm in arm with Lenny, my husband-in-fact but not at law. Home is sitting with him in Christopher Park across from the darkened site of the former Stonewall Inn. Home is our queer friends sharing their happiness or grief in the shadow of that venerable ground.

Lenny often stands up from a park bench and offer hugs all around. I have a hard time getting used to that, having been raised differently. But I'm learning!

The idea that Donald Trump is desecrating [the Stonewall] is almost unbearable. It's like they're trying to rip out our hearts.

Carla is always delighted to see us sitting with George Segal's statues. One night, Lenny compliments her latest outfit. She's so stylish, always with a different silk scarf to cover a bobbing adam's apple she tells me I had better NEVER mention. She sounds severe, but I know she's teasing me. I never bring up how passing is challenging for a woman like her who lived as a man for the first several decades of her life.

She stops by our apartment on the regular, and she even helped me dress up as Mae West for Halloween. She's part of our little queer family, always over for holiday meals, and if Lenny and I are quarreling over something silly, she offers just the right wise advice.

She's not our only trans friend, far from it, but she's our closest trans friend.

One evening, Lenny points across the street to the Stonewall and tells Carla and me what went down there in the summer of ཱྀ — how queer misfits from all over the City got fed up with cops throwing people in jail for daring to dance together as same-sex couples. He tells me "all us queers and fairies" were sick and tired of cops throwing us in jail for wearing too many articles of clothing meant for members of the "opposite" sex.

Carla is just as drop-jawed as I am when Lenny explains that many women like her were at the forefront of riots that broke out all over the Village the very last time the cops raided the Stonewall. "Everything changed after that, bubbie," Lenny tells me. "We stopped stopped hiding in the shadows. We stopped being ashamed of ourselves."

On a sunny afternoon, a few blocks over at the LGBT Community Center on 13th Street, Lenny points out a skinny older Black woman sipping a coffee in the garden as she thumbs a tattered copy of Outweek Magazine.

"Remember what I told you about the Stonewall?" Lenny asks. "See that woman? That's Marsha. Marsha Johnson. She was there, one of the leaders. She's one of the reasons we're not ashamed of ourselves anymore."

I start to stand up, but Lenny pulls me back to the bench. "Give her privacy? She'll have a crowd around her soon enough."

Lenny passed away decades ago, and I was evicted from our Chelsea co-op apartment because the deed was in his name only, and legal marriage didn't yet exist for same-sex couples. Carla is gone too, but both of them live inside me. I never did introduce myself to Marsha, but I don't regret that. I'm just happy I got to breathe the same air she breathed, however briefly.

For most of my decade in NYC, I helped continue Marsha's legacy — as a member of Queer Nation and Act Up. I didn't JUST march in the streets with gay and trans activists. I worked at an agency that cared for people living with HIV and AIDS. I volunteered with an informal network of friends (gay and/or trans) to visit with, clean for, and cook for people who could no longer do for themselves. Sometimes that meant gentling soup into an emaciated young person who couldn't hold a spoon steady.

Marsha died just a year or so after I first "met" her, but her legacy is stronger than ever. She and trans woman Sylvia Rivera took point after Stonewall to make sure transgender people were not sidelined from the Gay Liberation Movement.

(I should take a moment to comment on language differences between then and now. Yes, it was called the Gay Liberation Movement then, but gay didn't mean precisely what it means now. It was more of an umbrella term, similar to queer today. Marsha described herself variously as "gay," as a "drag queen," and as a "street queen." But that's semantics. She lived full time as a woman. Her cisgender gay-activist roommate referred to her always with she/her pronouns. Marsha always publicly presented as a woman.

In her final years, the word "transgender" was just coming into common parlance, and I imagine she would eventually have embraced it, as her friend and comrade Sylvia Rivera eventually did.)

I shed tears last night over the Stonewall Inn being defaced

Tucker Lieberman brought the news to the Prism & Pen Slack workgroup for editors, sharing news from trans activist and journalist Erin Reed — who had posted about the National Park Service removing all references to transgender and queer people from their web page promoting the Stonewall National Monument.

I quickly went to the site and learned for myself, breaking out in tears. The idea of not being able to go home again had just got more real. I told Tucker, "The idea that Donald Trump is desecrating [the Stonewall] is almost unbearable. It's like they're trying to rip out our hearts."

My heart was crying in pain, for sure! All I could think about is how devastated Carla would be if she were still living. How devastated Marsha would be.

The New York Times has published a breakdown of the Park Service changes. If you're interested in the full details, here's their story. The following excerpt tells the tale:

On Wednesday, according to a version of the Park Service website saved by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, the introductory text on the monument's main page said: "Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ+) person was illegal."

By Thursday afternoon, the word "transgender" and the letter T in the abbreviation had been removed from the page. By Thursday evening, the word "queer" and "Q+" had also been removed from the website.

My own personal grief is nothing compared to the Trump administration's Orwellian attempt at rewriting history

It's not just a Park Service website at stake. As powerful and distressing as that symbolism is, it's barely the tip of the iceberg of government censorship and rule by decree.

The Trump administration has threatened all schools (from kindergarten to university) with the loss of federal funding unless they remove any "DEI" references in policies and curricula. That threat includes erasing transgender people and gay people.

The State Department has removed its web page offering advice to gay and trans people who travel abroad. The US CDC has removed web pages offering education and advice to people living with or at risk for HIV/AIDS. Government scientists and physicians have been ordered to cease any ongoing healthcare research that happens to involve queer people.

And so much more. The erasure is happening so fast that activist heads are spinning. We don't have time to process or even keep track of it all.

Many of these actions have been challenged in federal court, and legal experts say the administration is likely violating the law as well as the Constitution. But the same experts say the U.S. is enmeshed in the most serious Constitutional crisis since the Civil War, and nobody knows if Trump will follow court orders.

One federal judge has already ruled that Trump is violating one of his orders, and in response Vice President JD Vance announced last Sunday that judges don't have the authority to overturn presidential orders. Vance has been howled down by astonished academics on both the left and the right, but Trump has not changed his tune.

Speaking of Vance, here's something powerful and important as encouragement

The Vice President is abroad at the moment, touring Europe for a security conference with Trump's new ultra-right-wing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. A few minutes ago as I was typing, I listened to Vance give a speech in Munich scolding European leaders for not upholding democracy, accusing them of suppressing free speech.

Yet, according to the New York Times, U.S. military schools in Belgium scrambled yesterday to remove student art displays featuring Black, trans, and gay people — in advance of a visit from Hegseth's wife:

In the NATO schools preparing for Mrs. Hegseth, in the town of Mons, Belgium, Black history month materials were scrapped. Art displays with even vague references to rainbows — a symbol of gay pride — were removed. A cart at the middle school library held books related to sexual identity and gender issues — including titles like "Allies" and "Gracefully Grayson" — that were pulled from the shelves, based on a photo circulating among teachers and viewed by The New York Times.

Student drawings and paintings of Underground Railroad hero Harriet Tubman were pulled from walls! Harriet Tubman!

Tubman is celebrated in most U.S. schools (including all the schools I ever attended in the 1960s and ྂs) because of her history escaping enslavement and helping dozens of other enslaved people escape to freedom. Her heroism and leadership inspired a popular movement that rescued many thousands more people from enslavement. Also, as detailed in this Medium story presented by Oxford University Press, Tubman led "150 African American soldiers of the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers to rescue more than 700 former slaves freed five months earlier by the Emancipation Proclamation."

But she's now erased too! Just like Marsha Johnson and Sylvia Rivera — who, by the way, were also women of color. Significant? You decide.

Want to hear about a silver lining?

Hegseth canceled planned visits to high schools during her Belgium school tour, after being advised that students planned to protest en masse over the censorship of their art and speech. She visited only an elementary (primary) school, but she still encountered significant protest from outraged teenagers who accommodated her schedule change to meet her and give her their views on government censorship.

I think that's remarkable, as a former Air Force officer who is well aware that military families tend to hold right-of-center political views. I'd also say it looks like the kids are all right! Perhaps some grownups should start listening to them.

Here's what you can do.

Tears are fine and necessary. I'm not ashamed of crying last night. But after you've wiped your tears, it's time for action. There's already one protest in the offing, as you can see from the above screenshot. (Click here to follow BlueSky coverage of today's protest.) More actions will follow soon!

On this particular issue, if you live anywhere near New York City, follow Gay City News and Act Up's website, where you'll be able to find information about future protests and other actions.

Also, please find your representatives and senators in the U.S. Congress, no matter what party they belong to, and express your outrage at the erasure of queer people. Express your shock at government censorship. Tell them you expect to see them resisting Trump's dictatorship. Tell them your future votes depend on their resistance.

Together, people of good will can fight back against Orwellian rewriting of history. Together, we can win!

By "together," I mean trans folks, cisgender gay people like me, and allies. All of us! Need some motivation to act? Just think about Harriet Tubman being ripped off school hallways. Think about Marsha Johnson and other revered trans leaders being scrubbed from government websites and from history.

Then reach out to reps by phone and email to let them know you refuse to be complicit and you expect them to refuse too.

Here's that link again. Please start right now!