Half-Erased: Trump’s Bisexual Vanishing Act at Stonewall
In the latest example of the Trump administration’s purge of progressive values from the state, it removed any mention of bisexuality from National Park Service webpages for the Stonewall National Monument — until it didn’t. After a backlash, the term “bisexual” was quietly reinstated on the monument’s home page on July 14. However, other parts of the site, such as the history and culture sections, have not restored references to bisexuality. This sort of LGBT editing has been going on for months.
Early in Trump’s second administration, the Stonewall National Monument website was changed to remove the words “transgender” and “queer” from the homepage. Then this month, it was changed again, to remove any mention of bisexuality, reading “Before the 1960s, almost everything about living authentically as a gay or lesbian person was illegal” — before the word “bisexual” was added back.
Why the erasure? There are a number of reasons the administration may now be targeting bisexuality. The Trump White House may be engaging in a deliberate strategy by expanding the boundaries of what concepts it is willing to challenge. Bi people present an easy next target not only because bisexuality is not as widely understood or accepted as exclusive homosexuality, but also because it is much more prevalent in society. The spectrum-based nature of bisexuality — which encompasses people who are “mostly straight” as well as “mostly gay” — also runs against the natural inclination of social conservatives to think in highly categorical terms. Like trans people, bi folks are an “in-between” group, making them easier to erase.
The Trump administration has been exceptionally aggressive in its war against trans and “gender ideology.” The move to partially backtrack on its erasure of bi people from history appears to be an aesthetic decision in response to an outcry in the LGBT press. The fact is, the administration has never been particularly invested in a specifically anti-bi agenda the way they have with trans issues, and perhaps saw little to be gained.
We can only speculate at this time, but the partial restoration could also represent a compromise between competing factions within the National Park Service, pressure from interest groups, or resistance from the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center, which the non-profit Pride Live runs in cooperation with the NPS. The Visitor Center openly condemns the Trump administration’s “removal of transgender individuals from the Stonewall National Monument website” — going so far as to encourage potential donors to “Text REBEL” to donate.
I reached out to the National Park Service and the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center for comment. I have not heard back from the NPS; however, the Visitor Center referred me to a statement from February in which they criticized trans erasure from the NPS site.
Bi people were deeply involved in the LGBT movement from the beginning. The so-called “Mother of Pride”, Brenda Howard, was bisexual and a friend of many Stonewall participants. Howard organized early pride demonstrations and the one-month anniversary rally of the Stonewall Rebellion in July 1969. The Stonewall Veterans’ Association website also indicates that bi people were present during the riots.
The Trump administration’s war on “woke” within the federal government has not explicitly focused on bisexuality until now. In March, the New York Times released a list of words that the Trump White House is limiting or avoiding due to their association with identity politics, civil rights, and environmentalism. While “LGBT”, “LGBTQ”, and “men who have sex with men” were all on the list, “bisexual” was not. In January, GLAAD reported that the word “bisexual” was no longer searchable on whitehouse.gov. However, this was part of a broader purge of LGBT terms and was not specific to bisexuality.
The removal of bisexuality may simply have been a trial balloon to incrementally test the boundaries of what the public will tolerate. The administration appears to have found the boundary.
Bi people have always been an easier group to sideline because bisexuality is perceived more negatively than exclusive homosexuality, and is more likely to be seen as illegitimate than the attraction to a single sex. A 2019 study found that 85% of bisexual individuals surveyed experienced “identity invalidation” due to disbelief or confusion among people around them.
Recent popular research by the Manhattan Institute’s Eric Kauffman may also have contributed to skepticism of bisexuality. Kauffman argues that the significant increase in bisexual identification among young liberal white women is symptomatic of a progressive culture that values transgression and fluidity. From there, he lumps in the increase in bi identification with the “1,000-fold increase in trans identification” that inspired significant pushback from the right.
More broadly, conservative reactions against what they see as bohemian lifestyles may be motivated by more than mere prejudice. The fluid nature of bisexuality (and trans) challenges the nature of the conservative psyche. Research on the biology of political differences finds that people on the political right tend to think in more black-and-white terms and have greater difficulty integrating incongruous information, while those left-of-center are generally more tolerant of ambiguous concepts. Bi people, like trans folks, do not fit neatly into binary categories such as straight/gay or woman/man. One component behind the distaste for or dismissal of bisexuality may simply be a natural consequence of the diversity of brain structures and how they correlate with political beliefs.
By removing bisexuality from the Stonewall website, the Trump White House challenged bi people’s place in history. It attempted to rewrite the story of LGBT rights to make it more palatable to rigid and binary systems of thinking and to expand its war on “wokeness” to a new group of people. But the administration also found a limit to how far it can take LGBT erasure without significant pushback. Despite the fact that bisexuality is perceived more negatively than homosexuality, the sheer percentage of the population that is openly bi may have made resistance inevitable. At close to 60% of the LGBT population, bi people are the queer majority. This episode provides a glimpse into a future where, as bi people continue to come out and the bi community continues to grow, they become much harder to push aside or push around.
Published July 15, 2025
