The Stonewall Crackdown is Another Move to Police Masculinity

It’s not very popular with young men.

In the thirteen months since Donald Trump returned to power, his administration has followed an uncomplicated logic of erasure. Oust federal workers, silence dissenters, and expunge the identities and histories that don’t suit the administration’s ethos. Call it The Purge, 2026.

Last Tuesday brought the latest salvo. Federal officials removed the Rainbow Pride Flag from the Stonewall National Monument, the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. The supposed justification was a recent National Park Service (NPS) memorandum restricting the display of flags on NPS-supervised spaces to only the U.S. and Department of the Interior (DOI) flags, with narrow exceptions.

New Yorkers wasted little time responding. Mayor Zohran Mamdani tweeted his outrage, insisting that “no act of erasure will ever change, or silence” the city’s history. Within the same week, Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal – joined by an entourage of city, state, and federal officials alongside defiant locals – marched to Greenwich Village and hoisted the Pride flag once more. Hoylman-Sigal asked the obvious question: “If you can’t fly a Pride flag steps from the Stonewall Monument … where can you fly it?”

This removal was hardly surprising to those who’ve followed the administration’s revisionist bent. In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” ordering a litany of changes to the Smithsonian Museums and other historical sites that align with the administration’s historical interpretation. Weeks ago, the administration tore down exhibits at Philadelphia’s Independence National Historic Park that documented the city’s role in the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the biographies of enslaved people held by George Washington.

As for LGBTQI+ Americans, transgender and queer references have been systematically scrubbed from government websites, including the Stonewall Monument’s page. The State Department’s travel guidance for LGBTQI+ travelers now only exists in archived form, with the acronym shortened to “LGB.” In October, the FBI fired an agent trainee who displayed the Pride flag at his desk, citing an “inappropriate display of political signage.”

This campaign of historical revisionism is about redefining what makes America “great.” The strong man (as exemplified by Trump, Vance, Patel and ICE agents) and tradwives are in; fluid expressions of gender and sexuality are out. The 2024 Trump ticket leaned into this antiquated script – from the most extreme displays like Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt at the 2024 RNC, to the “Tampon Tim” moniker, to decrying childless cat ladies. Men were the intended audience – and after making inroads with the youngest cohort in 2024, the administration may be betting that this demographic will sign off on its agenda.

But young men’s views on masculinity and gender norms are more nuanced than the MAGA-verse wishes to believe. And culture war theatrics do little for a demographic whose real concerns lie elsewhere.

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To be sure, young men have regressed on many social issues, increasingly inhabiting a different worldview from their female counterparts.

Equimundo’s 2025 State of American Men marked a notable rise in restrictive beliefs about manhood over the past eight years, and the gender gap among young adults on select social views is larger than any other demographic. The Equimundo survey found far too many young men trapped in the “man box,” a restrictive view of what it means to be a man.

This translates into vast gender polarization. Ryan Burge’s analysis of the 2024 Pew Religious Landscape Survey shows a seventeen-point gap between men and women born in the 2000s on acceptance of gay individuals, and a sixteen-point gap for transgender rights. Furthermore, while the youngest male cohort is more supportive of society accepting transgender individuals than any other male age bracket, still only 44 percent agreed that “acceptance of transgender people is a positive change,” compared to 60 percent of young women.

For some, these attitudes are inherited, passed down from parents, religion, or other early experiences. Others encounter them in dangerous online corners — the “manosphere” or otherwise — where anti-LGBTQI+ views are ubiquitous. For many, however, homophobia and transphobia often stem from the same root source: societal expectations about masculinity and the associated pressure to police its boundaries.

Equimundo’s Man Box study identifies heterosexuality and homophobia as one of the seven pillars of “real [manhood]” today, included alongside traits and behaviors like self-sufficiency, toughness, and hypersexuality. From the same 2017 report, 72 percent of young men in the U.S. say they’ve been told “A real man behaves a certain way,” higher than in the UK and Mexico, and 55 percent agreed that “society as a whole tells me that a gay guy is not a real man.”

Professor David Plummer has described this stiff pressure, writing that “homophobia patrols an intragender divide between successful collective masculinity and male otherness.” Such policing has external and internal costs. Those bought into rigid “man box” ideals are more likely to bully and harass men and women alike, and they are also more likely to experience depression and have suicidal thoughts. Equimundo works to prevent LGBTQ+ bullying and present more appealing alternatives to the man box through programming (e.g., Program H and Program D) curriculum, like Manhood 2.0, and new initiatives like the Young Men and Media Collective.

Yet for all these real and troubling trends, young men remain robust supporters of gay rights. Burge’s same analysis finds that sixty-five percent of men born in the 2000s agree that “homosexuality should be accepted by society,” rising to 72 percent among men born in the 1990s. Support for gay marriage is even higher: 71 percent and 77 percent, respectively. Though not a consensus, Young Men Research Project’s (YMRP) October 2025 survey found that men aged 18-29 disagreed by about a two-to-one margin that “gay men aren’t real men.”

Beyond the attitudes themselves, social matters simply don’t stack up with the kitchen table issues that dominate young men’s priorities.

In Young Men Research’s October 2025 survey, about half (49 percent) of men aged 18 to 29 ranked inflation in their top five issues, compared to 39 percent for housing costs. While “crime” broke into the top five, with outsized importance among Trump voters, the top issues were fundamentally economic. Meanwhile, LGBTQ rights, the opioid crisis, gun policy, and social issues altogether ranked significantly lower.

The implication is that Trump may not be finding the groundswell of homophobic rage he thought he would. These empty displays of hate are not only unpopular, but increasingly seen as distractions from the administration’s unfavorable handling of more pressing issues – whether that be the economy, the Epstein files, or crackdowns on free speech.

So who is this for?

The Stonewall crackdown could be easily dismissed as yet another example of culture war fodder targeted to the president’s base. But step back, and the larger story is an administration hellbent on demonstrating the most bellicose, vicious version of masculinity for their online followers. ICE raids as theater, the demeaning treatment of female journalists, AI-generated Studio Ghibli images of crying immigrants, all tied together through online trolling and edgelord humor.

Such moves may garner applause from a small but raucous minority. But for most young men, performative bigotry is flat-out unpopular – little more than cruelty masquerading as poor and frankly, unpopular, entertainment.