Despite creating one of the most successful (and delicious) brands of all time, Ben Cohen has never thought of himself as a businessman.A huge crowd of New Yorkers and local elected officials gathered in the city’s Christopher Park on Thursday to see the LGBTQ+ Pride flag raised at the Stonewall National Monument days after the Trump administration had it removed. But local LGBTQ+ people have been left wondering how long it’ll stay up, as the Trump administration issued a statement denouncing the re-raising.
The New York Daily News estimated that over 2,000 people spilled onto the streets around the Greenwich Village park across from the historic Stonewall Inn, where the modern fight for LGBTQ+ rights kick-started in June 1969. Many held Pride flags of their own and signs reading “You can’t erase our history.” At one point, the crowd chanted “raise the flag.”
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As the Associated Press notes, the Pride flag has flown for years over the National Park Service-run monument, the first in the nation to honor the LGBTQ+ rights movement.
But on Monday, the National Park Service removed the rainbow flag in accordance with new guidance issued by the Trump administration in January. A spokesperson for the agency told Gay City News that a government-wide guidance now mandates that “only the U.S. flag and other congressionally or departmentally authorized flags are flown on NPS-managed flagpoles, with limited exceptions.”
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“Any changes to flag displays are made to ensure consistency with that guidance,” the spokesperson added.
The removal sparked immediate outrage in the LGBTQ+ community as well as local officials, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, New York state Sen. Erik Bottcher (D), and Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal.
On Tuesday, Holyman-Sigal vowed that he and other elected officials would re-raise the Pride flag in Christopher Park this week. New York City Council speaker Julie Menin told the New York Times that she and other lawmakers had sent a letter to the National Park Service demanding the flag’s restoration. And on Thursday, the city council passed a resolution urging Congress to respect the history of the Stonewall monument, according to The Guardian. The flag was restored the same day.
“We have brought the flag back to a sacred site,” Holyman-Sigal told the Times Thursday.
“Stonewall is a sacred site in this city,” Menin said. “It is sacred ground for civil rights and sacred ground for the LGBTQ community.”
According to the Times, officials initially raised the original rainbow flag designed by artist Gilbert Baker, which includes eight stripes, below the American flag flying in Christopher Park. But several activists briefly removed the flag before hoisting it alongside the stars and stripes.
“We won’t let Trump erase LGBTQ+ history. Stonewall was a rebellion. Stonewall was a beginning. Today, Stonewall is a call to action once again,” U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), who was among those at Thursday’s flag raising, said in a statement. “I’m proud to be at Stonewall today as we re-raise the Pride flag. It’s flying once again.”
The Pride flag removal represents the Trump administration’s latest attempt to rewrite the history of the Stonewall monument. Last February, the National Park Service (NPS) removed all mentions of transgender people from its website for the monument in compliance with the president’s executive orders prohibiting any federal recognition of trans people in any aspect of civic life. In June, the agency reportedly banned both the trans and the Progress Pride flags from being displayed at the monument. Both moves were seen as a blatant effort to erase the trans community’s pivotal role in the 1969 uprising.
The Times noted Thursday that it remains unclear how long the Pride flag will be allowed to fly in Christopher Park. In a statement, the U.S. Department of the Interior, which oversees the National Park Service, called the flag restoration a “political stunt” and a “distraction” from what it described as the city’s failures in response to this year’s winter storms.
“Today’s political pageantry shows how utterly incompetent and misaligned the New York City officials are with the problems their city is facing,” the statement read, according to local ABC affiliate WABC.
“They’re probably gonna take it down again, maybe,” New Yorker Joyce Burstein told the Times on Thursday, “but it’ll just go back up.”
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The first reported cases of what would be known as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) included five white men and two Black men, one from Haiti and the other from Los Angeles.
Though HIV was a mystery and researchers had little information on what caused it, let alone which communities it impacted most, that lack of knowledge didn’t prevent the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) from erroneously inferring that Black Haitians were at greater risk for contracting HIV. By the time the CDC began collecting racial statistics on the disease, Black people already made up 26% of all AIDS cases within the United States, even though they only made up 13% of the national population.
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Misinformation prevented the world from realizing that HIV didn’t discriminate based on gender, race, nor sexual orientation. Yet, 1980s conservatism and society’s lack of knowledge around HIV created a lethal stigma towards the LGBTQ+ and Black communities.
As of 2023, Black men and women experienced the highest rate of new HIV diagnoses among all races and ethnicities. With growing disparities in healthcare, socioeconomic standing, and housing, the Black community continues to be disproportionately impacted today, no thanks in part to the Trump administration.
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Black HIV activists and community leaders must continue to learn from the past in order to secure a better future.
In January, Congress rejected the House Republicans’ last-ditch effort to annihilate $1.7 billion distributed to critical HIV care, treatment, and prevention programs in the final fiscal year funding bill. Efforts like President Trump’s Ending the HIV Epidemic initiative and the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Care and Treatment Program budget were seemingly saved from the administration’s September 2025 budget cuts.
But that win has occurred amid the Trump administration’s cut of funding for dozens of HIV studies and $600 million in public health grants to track and prevent HIV; congressional Republicans’ ending of healthcare subsidies, which will leave millions of Americans without healthcare coverage; and the administration ending suspending the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), all of which threaten to worsen care for the estimated 1.2 million people living with HIV in the U.S. and 40.8 million people living in the U.S. globally.
Even worse, these communities are left even more vulnerable due to the administration’s removal of data revealing the pandemic’s impact.
When Dr. Aishah Scott, assistant professor of health sciences and Black studies at Providence College, told LGBTQ Nation that when she wrote a microsyllabus last year on HIV/AIDS and Black activism, “A lot of the data points that I reference[d] from the CDC, if you click them now on that website, it goes to ‘page not found.’ The CDC’s had so much data wiped from its website that it’s making it difficult for people to even know what’s going on.”
Dr. Scott’s scholarship examining the intersections of race, medicine, and public health will culminate in her upcoming first book, Respectability Can’t Save You: The AIDS Epidemic in Urban Black America. Her work is a reminder that even in the midst of our medical, political, and social advancements, HIV still haunts “Black America” — and that Black HIV activists and community leaders must continue to learn from the past in order to secure a better future.
Black Americans already have a torrid history with the U.S. healthcare system, marred by racism in medical research, as seen in the U.S. Public Health Service’s untreated syphilis study at Tuskegee, implicit bias in regard to patient care, and socioeconomic hindrances preventing access to healthcare and insurance. Other social determinants of health, such as housing, are closely linked to HIV prevention since people living with HIV who are experiencing housing instability are more likely to delay treatment, less likely to access care, and are left navigating increased medical costs and limited incomes — an estimated 31.6% of houseless people are Black.
“Within the Black community, the issues that leave folks at risk for contracting HIV come down to these social determinants of health in a very fundamental way,” Dr. Scott stated. “Something that really shocked me when I was doing dissertation research: Every HIV advocate that I spoke with brought up housing as HIV prevention, every single one. I think that when we think about social determinants of health within ‘Black America’ and HIV housing, affordable housing is really a key factor.”
These same socioeconomic disparities have lain heavily on Black America like a weighted blanket since HIV’s emergence. During the height of the AIDS epidemic, these glaring disparities gave rise to Black community-centered HIV groups, Black-centered conferences to advocate for change, and the return to the “Black Church,” the epicenter of Civil Right movements.
These three historic developments still center Black HIV advocacy today and provide a possible blueprint as Black communities continue to advocate for prevention, care, and survival.
While the HIV epidemic raged on in the background of the 1980s, Black HIV activists called upon white-led HIV activist groups to establish minority outreach programs. Organizations, like the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), followed suit. However, division in supporting Black-centered efforts arose in HIV activist leadership, with some favoring HIV activism’s focus on sexuality rather than race.
White-led organizations honed in on gaining access to HIV treatment, Black activists fought for intersectional care, racial equity, and socioeconomic support. And when Black activists called out these inequities within the leadership of white-led organizations, the response was either apathy or criticism about the Black community’s presumed lack of support for the white community’s welfare, according to HIV historian Dan Royles.
“Avoidance of these root causes was intentional because addressing socioeconomic disparities meant dismantling the structures that maintain the economic sustenance of white supremacy,” Dr. Scott told LGBTQ Nation, who added that the AIDS epidemic also raised the issues of “respectability politics” — the adherence of dominant cultural norms within marginalized communities in an attempt to combat stereotypes and mitigate discrimination — something Dr. Scott calls “a problematic tool of resistance within Black American fellowship.”
To combat this, Black activists and advocates — such as Dr. Rashidah Hassan, Sandra MacDonald, Wesley Anderson, Bishop Rainey Cheeks, Dazon Dixon Diallo, Prem Deben, Reggie Williams, Aundrea Scott, Archbishop Carl Bean, and Howard Morris — mobilized to address the lack of medical research around HIV treatment, prevention, and proper care left on the Black community by the Reagan Administration.
Their efforts and those of many more activists established organizations in 1980s and the ’90s resulted in the rise of Black-led HIV organizations like Blacks Educating Blacks About Sexual Health Issues (BEBASHI) in Philadelphia, Black and White Men Together and the Black Coalition on AIDS (now Rafiki Coalition) in San Francisco, Us Helping Us in Washington, D.C., Gay Men of African Descent in New York City, the Black AIDS Institute, and the Minority AIDS Project in Los Angeles.
While the government, media, and mainstream HIV advocacy groups ignored the harsh realities of HIV’s impact on the Black community, these organizations offered HIV education, outreach, direct services, and intersectional care to Black Americans, while advocating for research, housing, and employment programs as well.
By 1987, HIV was the third-leading cause of death for Black men, fifth for Black women ages 25 to 34, and ninth for Black children between up to age 14. Simultaneously, the crack cocaine epidemic ransacked communities of color, with researchers discovering connections between crack cocaine use and HIV infections in women of color.
What rose from this growing epidemic came the first National Conference on AIDS in the Black Community in Washington, D.C. (now the U.S. Conference on HIV/AIDS) in 1987. The conference brought over 400 activists, educators, and healthcare providers to the nation’s capital to address the needs of Black Americans navigating HIV/AIDS.
Conference sessions became platforms for the Black community to stress the need for intersectional and culturally competent HIV education and care, discuss the role of intravenous drug use as a catalyst in heterosexual HIV transmissions, call out the lack of media representation in Black and LGBTQ+ outlets covering the HIV epidemic, and push for Black churches to respond to the growing infection rates.
“Existing AIDS organizations, which have grown out of the predominantly white gay movement of the ’60s and ’70s, have been very effective in serving their communities,” activist Craig Harris stated, in regard to the conference. “Similarly, it is time for both traditional and newly established Black political, social, and health organizations to do the necessary outreach to our own communities which are at risk.”
If they’re not going to do it [prevention for gay men of color], then goddamn it, we can do it ourselves. We’re not crippled! We have power.
Black HIV/AIDS activist Reggie Williams
What started as a 15-minute lunch meeting at the conference between Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and activists of color, including Gil Gerard, Suki Ports and Archbishop Carl Bean, transformed into a 2.5-hour conversation on how to address HIV/AIDS’ impact on communities of color. That same discussion covered Koop’s upcoming “Understanding AIDS” report, which acknowledged that HIV didn’t just impact Black and queer people and was the only report to be mailed en masse to Americans in 1988, aside from tax and census forms.
The same year as the National Conference on AIDS in the Black Community, not a single person of color was invited to partake in the American Public Health Association’s first session on AIDS.
Instead, Craig Harris, a Black, gay activist living with HIV, stormed the session stage, famously shouting “I will be heard!” Harris took the microphone from then San Francisco health commissioner Dr. Merv Silverman and used the moment to advocate for the plight of communities of color in their fight against HIV/AIDS.
Harris, along with several other activists, including Gerard and Ports, formed the National Minority AIDS Council (NMAC), an organization dedicated to responding to the HIV epidemic’s impact on people of color through advocacy, education, and care.
Harris’s sentiment echoed that of Reggie Williams, who said, “If they’re not going to do it [prevention for gay men of color], then goddamn it, we can do it ourselves. We’re not crippled! We have power.”
In 1988, Williams and other board members of the queer anti-racist group the National Association of Black and White Men Together submitted a proposal to the CDC’s National AIDS Information and Education Program for a $200,000 grant to launch the National Task Force on AIDS Prevention, a national organization dedicated to developing HIV education and service programs by and for gay and bisexual men of color in local chapters nationwide.
The NMAC recruited R&B/Soul singer Patti LaBelle, one of the few recording artists to publicly discuss HIV/AIDS in the media during the 1980s, as a spokesperson. NMAC placed her front and center of their 1989 “Live Long, Sugar” campaign, along with four HIV-positive men and women of color, capitalizing on her popularity with Black gay men and Black women to steer traction towards seeking HIV/AIDS education and care.
LaBelle wouldn’t be the only Black celebrity to take a stand against HIV and as infection rates continued to rise within the Black community, and media coverage started to reflect this.
NBA legend Magic Johnson, gay tennis trailblazer Arthur Ashe, and NWA rapper Eazy-E became tabloid fodder after publicly sharing their HIV status. Whereas music groups, like Salt-N-Pepa and TLC, used their popularity and artistry to create songs, like “Let’s Talk About Sex” and “Waterfalls,” to address safer sex practices and HIV. Even Essence, a lifestyle magazine that catered to Black women, featured activist Rae Lewis-Thornton, a Black woman living with HIV, on the cover. But her magazine feature carried a terrifying truth.
“A lot of the folks who were living with HIV, in this moment, that were Black women [were] not middle-class Black women,” Dr. Scott told LGBTQ Nation. “These are low-income, working-class, Black women who are not necessarily having access to the same resources as a Rae Lewis-Thornton. [She] finds out she has HIV because she’s working in politics in DC. She’s hosting a blood drive as an event and she’s immediately connected to resources.”
However, this is in stark contrast to what happened to Russelle “Rusti” Miller-Hill, an HIV advocate Dr. Scott interviewed for her research article, Erased by Respectability: The Intersections of AIDS, Race, and Gender in Black America. While Lewis-Thornton received resources upon her HIV diagnosis, Miller-Hill’s experience reflects that of countless Black women who lacked access to proper HIV care and were subjected to systemic inequities that left them overlooked during the height of the HIV epidemic.
“[Miller-Hill] was a woman who found out that she was living with HIV when she was getting ready to enter a drug treatment program in New York,” Dr. Scott said. “She went to [the] New York City Department of Health. They basically ran a finger down the list and was just like, ‘Positive,’ turned around and left her to her own devices.”
“She ends up not going into the drug treatment program, spiraling back into her addiction, and ends up incarcerated within the next three years, and then has to navigate living with HIV incarcerated as a woman,” Scott added, pointing to the fact that women, drug users, and incarcerated people continued (and continue) to be marginalized even as public attention increasingly focused on the epidemic’s impact upon Black people.
While HIV infection rates continued to rise, Christian adherents, who historically have been urged by their religious leaders to care for those impacted by epidemics, drew a line in the sand between faith and compassion. This allowed for religious leaders, like Rev. Jerry Falwell, to use the lack of education around HIV and the growing stigma connected to gay men to instill fear in the congregation.
Falwell also used his political organization, the so-called Moral Majority, to oppose HIV research and reduce the epidemic to a “gay problem.” Falwell and the religious right fervently denounced the queer community, while the Black church, or rather the collective of Black Christian congregations that constituted it, took a more apathetic approach.
During the 1950s and ’60s, the Black church became synonymous with combating racial injustice, serving as the headquarters for the Civil Rights movement. However, HIV’s association with homosexuality and its stigmatization within the Black church community garnered disapproval from the pulpit, hindering the Black church’s involvement in the fight against HIV, even with queer members in its congregations.
“The Black church was not as active, and they did not take the helm the way they were supposed to when it came to HIV and AIDS in black America,” Dr. Scott stated. “I’ll put that out there first. But also, their response was reflective of the respectability politics that were happening from the federal government down.”
In the 1980s, we’re seeing the rise of mass incarceration, crack epidemics. And when you look at Black church leaders in this moment, that’s what they’re talking about… HIV was not being framed as an issue of Black America in the 1980s.
Dr. Aishah Scott, assistant professor of health sciences and Black studies & author of an upcoming book on Black HIV activism
This particular stigma was reinforced by respectability politics, which most notably impacted Black Americans with middle-class aspirations in discussing HIV, which was associated with homosexuals, drug users, and poor people — community members that were not considered as part of “the American Dream.”
“This was being marketed as a disease that was impacting gay, predominantly white men. It was still being called GRID [gay-related immune deficiency] in the media for a significant period of time, which is why this was a disease that people just immediately associated with gay men,” Dr. Scott said.
“In the 1980s, we’re seeing the rise of mass incarceration, crack epidemics. And when you look at Black church leaders in this moment, that’s what they’re talking about,” she continued. “They are responding to what is being framed as the issues of Black America of the day — but HIV was not being framed as an issue of Black America in the 1980s.”
With Black religious leaders turning a blind eye and white queer-led HIV activist groups decentering communities of color, the Black queer community sat at the center of an unjust and extremely vulnerable intersection. However, religious figures, such as Bishop Rainey Cheeks, founder of Washington, D.C.’s Us Helping Us, People Into Living Inc.; and Archbishop Carl Bean, founder of the Minority AIDS Project (MAP) in Los Angeles, developed HIV care programs in response to rising infections.
Cheeks’ organization leaned into offering holistic care, support groups, and HIV-prevention programs for individuals living with HIV in the nation’s capital. MAP partnered with celebrities and politicians to raise funds for the organization to provide HIV education, testing, and social services for the Black community in the City of Angels.
But the same could not be said about all Christian churches. While Black HIV activists and community leaders established organizations in response to the growing threat, Pernessa Seele led the charge to mobilize the Black church.
A South Carolinian immunologist, Seele helped congregations navigate theological challenges with responding to HIV and developing Black community-focused outreach programs, including her own organization Balm of Gilead. Seele’s nonprofit sought to serve as a bridge between congregations and public health by leveraging community planning and faith-based services to address health disparities, such as HIV.
“When you think about grassroots [HIV] organizations, those folks were very active members of their church, and a lot of their faith is honestly what led them to do this work,” Dr. Scott stated. “Those organizations largely became the bridges, in most cases, for the Black church to be able to be taught the language they needed to engage with people living with HIV in a meaningful way.”
In response, Seele mobilized religious leaders to implement the Harlem Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS, including congregations in creating public health HIV awareness strategies to support the Black community.
The initiative expanded into what is now the National Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS, which incorporates over 10,000 churches worldwide. Along with organizations, like the NAACP, creating faith-based public health initiatives, the Black church has maintained an active fight in the battle against HIV.
The Black church has since evolved in its approach, using different tactics to alleviate the socioeconomic disparities that play a role in exacerbating the HIV epidemic. Now, more Black congregations offer support in areas of education, housing, and healthcare equity, all of which can be found at the root of the HIV epidemic in Black America.
As history proves, Black Americans have had to continuously fight to be seen and heard since the rise of the HIV epidemic. These intergenerational efforts sowed seeds that, when harvested, will lead the Black community towards a future with HIV no longer in it.
“I think there’s going to be a lot of rebuilding that is going to have to happen in terms of HIV and AIDS outreach, activism, awareness campaigns, funding structures, and surveillance efforts, after we transition to the next administration,” Dr. Scott said.
February 7 marked the 27th annual National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day. Created in 1999, the observance day highlights the continued disproportionate impact of HIV on the Black community as well as the community’s united engagement, education, and empowerment efforts to finally end the epidemic.
If anything is apparent from the history, it’s that Black activists, medical professionals, politicians, and community leaders will need to continue to advocate for better HIV prevention, treatment, and education for Black Americans, especially in the midst of all the setbacks from Trump’s second presidency.
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In the latest episode of the Hackaday Podcast, editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start things off by discussing the game of lunar hide-and-seek that has researchers searching for the lost Luna 9 probe, and drop a few hints about the upcoming Hackaday Europe conference. From there they’ll marvel over a miniature operating system for the ESP32, examine the re-use of iPad displays, and find out about homebrew software development for an obscure Nintendo handheld. You’ll also hear about a gorgeous RGB 14-segment display, a robot that plays chess, and a custom 3D printed turntable for all your rotational needs. The episode wraps up with a sobering look at the dangers of industrial robotics, and some fascinating experiments to determine if a decade-old roll of PLA filament is worth keeping or not.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Download this episode in DRM-free MP3 on your ESP32 with BreezyBox for maximum enjoyment.
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