The Memory Hole

This is the first post in the Pride 2026 Series.

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Winston Smith’s job at the Ministry of Truth was not dramatic. He did not burn books in the street or arrest dissidents in the night—others did that. His work was quieter and, in its way, more thorough. He corrected the historical record. A newspaper archive. A photograph. A name. The correction made, the original dropped into the memory hole, the flame consuming it in an instant. The past became whatever the present required it to be.

On the night of February 13, 2025, someone at the National Park Service sat down at a computer and edited a webpage. By morning, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera—two transgender women of color who were at the front of the uprising that created the modern LGBTQ rights movement—had been administratively disappeared from the monument built to honor what they did. Johnson and Rivera were not incidental to Stonewall; they were among the first to push back against the police raid that sparked three days of riots, and the movement that followed was built in part on their refusal to disappear quietly. The acronym “LGBTQ+” had been shortened to “LGB” throughout. A fifteen-part video series about the Stonewall Riots was gone.

George Orwell had a name for this.

The NPS edit was not an isolated act. Six months later, on the night of August 21, 2025, the Florida Department of Transportation sent crews to Orange Avenue in Orlando. Their assignment was to paint over a rainbow crosswalk outside the Pulse nightclub memorial—the site where, on June 12, 2016, a gunman murdered 49 people in what was then the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. The crosswalk had been installed by the state of Florida itself in 2017, met federal safety standards, and had stood undisturbed for eight years. It was not on the state’s official list of non-compliant street art. It was targeted separately, outside the normal process, in the middle of the night.

When community members arrived the next morning and began recoloring the crosswalk with chalk, Florida Highway Patrol troopers were stationed at the site to watch. Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer called the removal “a cruel political act.” Governor DeSantis posted on X: “We will not allow our state roads to be commandeered for political purposes.”

This is what the memory hole looks like when it is not a novel.

Stonewall and Pulse are among the most visible points on a line that runs through nearly every level of American civic life—from federal survey instruments that no longer ask whether you are transgender, to legislation that tracks and restricts queer lives in 42 states and counting. The scale is difficult to hold in mind all at once, which may be precisely the point. Each individual act is deniable. The pattern is not.

I want to be clear about who I am and why I am writing this, because it matters for what follows. I am a cisgender, heterosexual white man. I am a clinical psychologist who has spent years working with queer patients in primary care, and I have watched what it costs people to move through a world that keeps telling them, in ways large and small, that they do not fully exist. I was raised Mormon¹—formed by a tradition whose theology insists on the divine worth of every human soul, and whose institutional history has not always honored that insistence. I am not a member of the community whose history is being erased. But I was shaped by a tradition that gave me a specific question to ask when I see someone being left on the side of the road: am I going to stop?

Pride month exists because queer people refused to disappear. They are refusing again now. What follows over the next 5 weeks is my attempt to say, plainly and for the record, what I am watching happen—and why it matters to those of us who are not directly in the crosshairs but are paying attention.

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The word pride requires some explanation, because it has been so thoroughly domesticated that its origin is easy to forget. Pride month is observed in June because of what happened at the Stonewall Inn on June 28, 1969. The Stonewall Inn was not a celebrated institution. It was a Mafia-owned bar in Greenwich Village that served the people mainstream gay society preferred not to acknowledge—drag queens, transgender women, homeless queer youth, people of color, the conspicuously gender nonconforming. It had no running water behind the bar. Glasses were rinsed and reused. It was raided regularly by the NYPD, which enforced laws requiring people to wear at least three pieces of clothing that matched their assigned sex at birth. The raids were routine humiliation, and the community had absorbed them, until the night they didn’t.

What happened over the three days following that June raid was not a pride parade. It was a riot. The people who started it were not the most respectable members of the nascent gay rights movement—they were the people the movement itself had been quietly trying to distance itself from. Marsha P. Johnson—by most accounts among the first to resist, throwing what some historians have called the shot glass heard round the world—and Sylvia Rivera climbed a wall. The Stonewall Rebellion was, at its core, an act of resistance by people who had run out of reasons to accommodate their own erasure.

The parade came later. The celebration came later. What came first was the refusal.

It is worth holding that sequence in mind as we watch a government engage in its own systematic refusal—both of people, but, this time, also, of the record that proves they were ever here. The NPS didn’t stop at removing transgender and queer references from the Stonewall website. Over the months that followed, bisexual people were erased as well—the monument’s history rewritten to describe Stonewall as a milestone solely for “gay and lesbian civil rights,” as though Rivera and Johnson had never existed, as though the people in that bar had sorted themselves neatly into the categories the present administration finds acceptable. When the bisexual erasure drew public outcry, those references were quietly restored. The transgender and queer references were not. In February 2026, the rainbow flag was removed from the monument entirely, under a National Park Service policy prohibiting non-agency flags—a policy applied, somehow, to the first national monument in American history dedicated to LGBTQ rights and heritage.

The same month the flag came down, the administration found other uses for June. It proclaimed the month National Homeownership Month. Great Outdoors Month. Caribbean-American Heritage Month. What June would not be, the White House press secretary confirmed, was Pride Month—there were, she said, “no plans for a proclamation.” The Department of Education filled the gap by declaring June “Title IX Month,” in honor of the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in schools. The irony that Title IX was being invoked to justify the removal of transgender students from girls’ sports, rather than to protect them, went unremarked in the official announcement.

This is not, it should be said, a new idea. In May 1933, four months after coming to power, the Nazi regime burned the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin—the world’s first gay rights organization, founded by Magnus Hirschfeld, which housed tens of thousands of books, medical records, and case histories documenting the lives of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. The students who threw those books into the fire were not destroying perversion. They were destroying evidence. A community cannot be made to not exist if the record of its existence survives.

The National Park Service did not light a fire. It used a text editor. The Florida Department of Transportation used gray paint. The mechanism is quieter now, more procedural, more deniable—but the logic is not new, and history has a name for what that logic produces.

History also has a name for what comes next. Within weeks of the Stonewall website edits, a group of more than a thousand off-duty and former NPS rangers—calling themselves Resistance Rangers—built an archive of the deleted pages, preserving the stories of Johnson, Rivera, Two-Spirit individuals, and dozens of others the official record had erased. When the Pulse crosswalk was painted over, people arrived the next morning with chalk. When the chalk washed away in the afternoon rain, they came back. Florida Highway Patrol troopers were eventually stationed at the site to watch, apparently concluding that the full weight of state authority was required to prevent people from coloring a sidewalk with chalk outside a murder memorial. When the rainbow flag was removed from Stonewall in February 2026, elected officials and community members raised it again within days—unsanctioned, defiant, and visible. Two months later, a coalition of nonprofit organizations sued the federal government and won: under a court settlement reached in April 2026, the Pride flag will fly at Stonewall permanently, its presence no longer subject to the political whims of whoever holds power.

It is difficult to read that sequence of events and not think of Winston Smith’s opposite number—the person who, somewhere in Orwell’s Oceania, keeps remembering anyway.

What they are trying to erase, however, is not a webpage. It is not a crosswalk. It is the fact—stubbornly, irreducibly factual—that queer people have always been here, have always refused disappearance, and have built something that outlasts every attempt to undo it. The government can edit a webpage. It cannot edit Leaves of Grass . It cannot edit what happened on Christopher Street in June 1969. It cannot edit the 49 names on the Pulse memorial, or the people who showed up the next morning with chalk.

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There is a tradition I was raised in that has a specific word for what I am trying to do here. In the faith of my upbringing, to bear testimony is not merely to express an opinion. It is to stand and say, plainly and before witnesses: I know this to be true. The obligation is not to be persuasive. It is to be honest, and to speak—even when, especially when, the speaking is uncomfortable.

So here is what I know to be true.

I know that the people whose history is being erased from Stonewall’s website, from federal survey instruments, from a crosswalk outside a nightclub where 49 people were murdered, are my neighbors. Not metaphorically. They are my patients, my colleagues, my friends, and my family. The tradition that shaped my ethics has a clear answer for what I am supposed to do when I see my neighbor left on the side of the road. It does not ask whether I approve of how they got there.

And I know—because I have seen it in my clinical work, and because the research is unambiguous—what it costs people to move through a world that keeps telling them they do not fully exist. The erasure is not abstract. It lands in bodies. It shows up in emergency rooms and crisis lines and primary care waiting rooms. It is a health issue before it is anything else, and it is a moral issue before it is a political one.

If you are reading this and you are queer—if you are someone in my life, in my family, who has not yet found the words or the safety to say so out loud—I want you to know that I see you. What is happening in the world right now is not a verdict on your worth. You contain multitudes. You always have. And you are not alone.

For everyone else: bearing witness is not a passive act. It means saying, when someone at your table uses a slur, that you will not sit quietly. It means asking your doctor, your child’s school, your church, whether the people in your life who are queer are safe there. It means refusing to look away from what is being done in plain sight, and saying plainly what you see. You do not have to agree with everything to agree that painting over a memorial to murdered people in the middle of the night is wrong. Start there.

More than a century before Stonewall, Walt Whitman wrote:

“Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

He was a queer American and one of the great poets of democracy, and those two facts were always the same fact. The government can edit a webpage. It cannot edit Leaves of Grass. It cannot edit what happened on Christopher Street in June 1969. It cannot edit the 49 names on the Pulse memorial, or the people who showed up the next morning with chalk, or the lawyers who stood in federal court and said the Pride flag belongs at Stonewall—and won.

Pride exists because queer people refused to disappear. They are refusing again now. So am I.

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If you or someone you know is in crisis, please call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or contact the Trevor Project directly by texting START to 678-678 or calling 1-866-488-7386.

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If you are looking for ways to act, or for support for yourself or someone you love, these organizations are doing essential work: PFLAG supports families and loved ones of LGBTQ+ people with resources, community, and advocacy; the ACLU is tracking anti-LGBTQ legislation state by state; the Trevor Project provides free, confidential crisis support to LGBTQ+ young people twenty-four hours a day; GLAAD monitors and responds to anti-LGBTQ rhetoric in media and government; and the Human Rights Campaign works toward full legal equality for LGBTQ+ Americans.

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This post was written by the author. Claude (Anthropic) assisted with verifying current‑event details, refining the structure of the series, supporting revision and editing, and generating ZotPress and WordPress shortcode syntax for citations and formatting. All positions, interpretations, and personal statements are the author’s own.

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1. I use Mormon to describe my own lived experience and family history—the culture, the stories, the ethical formation that shaped how I see the world. I recognize that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints prefers different terminology, and I respect that preference in other contexts. Here, I am not describing Church doctrine or policy. I am describing myself. [↩]