On the 55th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, hundreds of people gathered at Stonewall National Monument in New York to celebrate the opening of its new visitor center — the first of its kind. Everyone from President Joe Biden to Katy Perry to Elton John honored the significance of the site and its watershed rebellion for equality. Mark Segal, one of the participants in the uprising, was among the speakers. In this episode, he remembers that night in 1969 and shares how it sparked a lifetime of activism ― and how Stonewall continues to shape the LGBTQ+ movement today.
Last month, several hundred people gathered in Greenwich Village to celebrate the opening of a new visitor center at Stonewall National Monument and to honor the movement Stonewall set in motion as the “birthplace for Pride.” Mark Segal is a longtime activist and journalist who participated in the momentous events that took place here in June 1969, and he curated the interpretive exhibit featured in the new visitor center.
In this episode, host Jennifer Errick speaks with Segal on the events of the uprising and how it shaped his lifetime of activism. We also feature NPCA Northeast Program Manager Timothy Leonard who has spent 10 years working with the coalition that helped create and support the monument, as well as clips from the grand opening event, featuring President Joe Biden and Pride Live CEO Diana Rodriguez, the driving force behind the new visitor center.
Special thanks to the staff of Pride Live, NPCA Communications Director Alison Zemanski Heis and NPCA Northeast Regional Director Kristen Sykes.
Original theme music by Chad Fischer.
Learn more about the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center and make a reservation to visit at StonewallVisitorCenter.org
Learn more about this podcast and listen to the rest of our stories at thesecretlivesofparks.org
For more than a century, the National Parks Conservation Association has been protecting and enhancing America’s national parks for present and future generations. With more than 1.6 million members and supporters, NPCA is the nation’s only independent, nonpartisan advocacy organization dedicated to protecting national parks.
And we’re proud of it, too.
You can join the fight to preserve Stonewall National Monument and all of our national park sites. Learn more and join us at npca.org
Episode 32
It Takes a Village
Jennifer Errick: On the 55th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, hundreds of people gathered at Stonewall National Monument in New York to celebrate the opening of its new Visitor Center, the first of its kind.
Mark Segal, one of the participants in the uprising, was among the speakers. In this episode, he remembers that night in 1969 and shares how it sparked a lifetime of activism.
I'm Jennifer Errick, and this is The Secret Lives of Parks.
Please be aware that in this episode there are words that some listeners might find offensive just before the 18-minute mark of the show.
[break]
Last month, 55 years to the day after patrons of the Stonewall Bar in New York City fought back against police harassment. Several hundred people gathered in Greenwich Village to celebrate this nightclub and the movement it set in motion for human rights and dignity.
Mark Segal: Welcome to the birthplace of Pride.
Jennifer Errick: That's Mark Segal, a longtime activist and journalist. He's one of the people who understands this pride best because he participated in the momentous events that took place here in June 1969.
On this day, a brand-new visitor center is opening at Stonewall, and Segal has played an instrumental role in curating the interpretive exhibit on what happened those first nights of the rebellion and giving context to the larger movement that grew in the weeks and years that followed.
Segal takes the stage as part of a star-studded lineup of speakers. Beaming in a blue suit, he shares the importance of having a place where generations of LGBTQ people will come to learn our history and take pride. He stands in front of a piano where Elton John will give a surprise performance at the end of the program. After his time at the podium, Segal is followed by First Lady Dr. Jill Biden among many other luminaries.
New York Governor Kathy Hochull opens the event announcing that the city will rename a nearby subway station after Stonewall so that people will have a sense of pride when they take the train. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland gives a tearful speech describing herself as the proud mom of a queer child and an unwavering ally to the community. Writers and singers give moving performances and a transgender teenager who is lobbying the state of Pennsylvania for the right to play sports, stands alongside her mom at the podium and shares her perspective too. Yes, even President Joe Biden is here.
President Joe Biden: In 2016, President Obama, I was the vice president at the time, designated Christopher Park as a national monument. Today I'm proud to unveil a new visitor center for Stonewall National Monument, the first ever LGBTQ Plus visitor Center in the National Parks in America.
Jennifer Errick: Before the start of the festivities, I ask my colleague, NPCA Northeast program manager, Timothy Leonard, to fill me in on some of the details about this new visitor center, and he tells me it's been years in the making.
Timothy Leonard: At the time of the designation eight years ago, the visitor center emerged pretty early on as something that the Park Service really needed for their rangers, for them to be able to get out of the elements, for them to have restroom facilities to change into their uniforms, provide that National Park Service stamp. All of those things were communicated to our coalition as a real need and one of our partners in this case, Pride Live stepped forward to say this is a piece of this work that we can really lead on and works hand in hand with NPCA and the Park Service to turn it into a reality.
Jennifer Errick: Timothy has worked with a coalition of partners for over a decade, organizing for the designation of Stonewall as a national park site in 2016 and supporting the park in the years since it was established. One of those partners, Pride Live, led by CEO Diana Rodriguez was the driving force behind the creation of the new visitor center.
Timothy Leonard: I don't think it's fully sunk in yet, how exciting this is. This is 10 years of work at NPCA and even longer than that. I personally came out of the closet when I was in high school, have always hoped that there would be a place where I could learn about LGBTQ history and culture. One of the programs we do currently at NPCA is bring students from public schools to the monument who will come from their GSAs, their gender and sexuality alliances, their clubs. LGBTQ Clubs.
To see these students when they get here already is powerful and moving when they meet those rangers. But to have them be able to come to this new visitor center have a place where we can go and they can really interact with the history is going to be so exciting. I wish that when I was their age there had been that same place and facility for me to go and learn about this history. I'm overjoyed, I'm thrilled and excited on a personal and professional level. It really takes a village, in this case, Greenwich Village, but it really takes a village to really make something like this happen.
Jennifer Errick: It's my understanding that it's a unique situation in that it is a non-profit partnership. In this case, it's going to be staffed by non-profit staff. Is that right?
Timothy Leonard: That's correct. For the initial opening year it is. As we know, the Park Service has limited funding and limited resources here in New York City. There's 10 units in New York City and they all share the same staff. They all share the same resources. There simply wasn't the funding to build a new visitor center that was so sorely needed. Luckily, Pride Live did step in along with NPCA and say, "We can help make this happen."
But you're right, it is a unique model. It is primarily privately funded. But the NPS National Park Service does have a real role. The rangers will be there, they'll be able to answer questions, they'll provide tours from there. They'll give the National Park Service stamp. It is again, a real collaborative effort. But this was an instance where because of the Park Service's limitations, we really needed the help from external groups like Pride Live, like NPCA to make this a reality.
Jennifer Errick: The grand opening celebration includes far too many people to fit into the visitor center itself, and so we enjoy the program packed in a very large tent with very tight seating. Stonewall and Christopher Park are barricaded when I arrive due to the high security around the event. I asked Timothy if he's seen the new exhibits that Mark Segal has curated, which include a series of educational panels and a jukebox of the exact model that was in the bar on the night of the uprising.
Timothy Leonard: I've been a few times already this week. There's a fantastic wall when you walk in on the left side, and it really traces the history from pre-Stonewall to during the uprising to the incredible legacy afterward, which is really why Stonewall is so important. The way that it changed the modern LGBTQ rights movement. All of that information is there along with a video that you can watch and a couple of other really informative exhibits. Really excited to see what programs continue to be rolled out as the center develops, as the programs build, as the staff builds out. But this is a great place for people to go to start to learn that history.
Jennifer Errick: To see all the work you've put in these 10 years coming to fruition in the park site and now seeing you here at this grand opening, it just gives me so much pride to have seen this effort really come up from the ground level and to all of this, is amazing.
Timothy Leonard: That's what it's for. It's for everyone to visit, whether you identify as LGBTQ, whether you are not part of the community, everybody can come and learn about this history and this culture, and that's so important in today's day and age.
Jennifer Errick: Thank you, Timothy.
Timothy Leonard: Thank you. This is great.
[music break]
Jennifer Errick: Mark Segal was an ideal choice to curate the visitor center exhibits at Stonewall. He wasn't just there on the night of June 28, 1969, and so many of the nights that followed. He's also spent a lifetime building on that experience as one of the founders of Gay Liberation Front and Gay Youth and activists who protested and disrupted media programming to win increased LGBTQ visibility and the founder of the Philadelphia Gay Paper, among many other accomplishments.
A few weeks before the grand opening, I asked him about his life of advocacy and how his time at Stonewall inspired him. Here's an excerpt of that conversation.
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I thought we could start by going back to 1969 where a lot of this story begins. I think it can be really difficult coming from where we are now in 2024 to really appreciate what a difficult time that was in many ways to be in the gay community, even in New York City. What was it like?
Mark Segal: Well, I was born in Philadelphia in 1951. That sort of makes me prehistoric. That was before cell phones or internet. I grew up like most other people in the '50s and '60s, which was a time when we were literally invisible. I know that for sure because at about the age of 13, I realized who I was. Somehow, and for some reason I knew I shouldn't bring that up to my parents. I knew I shouldn't bring it up to my friends. I didn't understand that.
Since there was no internet and since there were no cell phones or social media, I went to the only place that had information, which was the library. In there you could probably find about five books. It talked about people like me and where were they? They were in the criminology section. They were in the psychological section. They were in the religious/morality section. I would leave that building with the feeling that I was illegal, immoral, and psychologically unsound. Not a great way for a 13-year-old to feel.
But the strange thing is, for some odd reason, I didn't feel that I was all those things. I wanted answers, but there were no answers to be had because we were invisible on TV, radio, magazines, newspapers. They didn't write about such. It was not proper to write about us or broadcast us or for us to be seen in public. There really wasn't an LGBT community. It was very underground because 99.9% of our community was in the closet.
I felt totally isolated and totally, I was the only one in the world. But one night I was lucky enough to see on PBS a David Susskind show where they had real live homosexuals on the air. The one point I took away from that was that there were people like me that lived in New York in a place called Greenwich Village. When I graduated high school, May 10, 1969, that day I left for New York.
Jennifer Errick: I had assumed you'd been to Stonewall before the uprising. A good month and a half or so, you got there?
Mark Segal: Six weeks. Yep.
Jennifer Errick: Six weeks. What was it like on a normal night?
Mark Segal: Full of energy. The reason it was full of energy was because outside you could be stopped and harassed by the police, if not arrested by the police. There would be people coming down who might want to pick a fight with gay people. Even on our street, Christopher Street, we were not safe. But when you entered that illegal bar, it might've been dirty. It might've had watered down drinks, but we were safe. Safe in the sense that we could hold hands, that we could cuddle, that we could kiss, that we could dance, that we could be ourselves. It was the only place that you really could. It had that kind of energy of freedom. It was always crowded enough that your friends were there and you could talk, you could dance and just be yourself.
Jennifer Errick: Unlike when you were in Philadelphia, you weren't the only one.
Mark Segal: Correct. I now had a community around me. I had friends. They were lifelong friends, and these are people that meant a lot to me. They're part of my education in a sense.
Jennifer Errick: Did you have experiences of harassment before the uprising, either in the bar, by police or outside the bar, on your way?
Mark Segal: No, not at all. There are pictures of me when I was 18 and I look like the boy next door. I used to say the police didn't care much about me inside. They wanted to arrest the people who were more stereotypical, who were in drag, or even the older customers who they knew were gay. For some odd reason, looking like the boy next door, I escaped the worst of it.
Jennifer Errick: Had you witnessed that with your friends prior to the uprising?
Mark Segal: All of them have talked about it to me. Told me a little bits. It just got talked about as almost like it was a regular part of life and it had an effect on me. For those six weeks that I had been going to the Stonewall, there had never been a raid, at least that I noticed or was part of. When that happened on June 28th, it was a total shock. That was the first time that I actually saw the violence against us.
Jennifer Errick: That must've been just terrifying.
Mark Segal: I got to admit, I've never been in a scene like that before in my life. It was frightening. My memory of it, the lights blinked. I had never been in a raid before. Six weeks in New York, I asked person next to me, "What is this?" They casually said, "Oh, just another raid." To them I later learned that meant police came in, they got a payoff and they left. That didn't happen that night. That night they barged in. That night they broke up the bar.
That night, they took the bottles of liquor and threw them around at people. That night they took people slung them up against the wall. It was something I, as a kid from Philadelphia had never seen. My thought in my brain as I look back at it now was, gee, better call the police. Well, these are the police who were doing this. People who were supposed to be protecting us. If they could do that, anybody could treat us that way. That's a pretty low feeling. At that moment, I think it was one of the lower points in my life.
Jennifer Errick: Going back, then, you said they came in, they're smashing bottles around, they're grabbing people. What happened from there?
Mark Segal: Well, after they did as much damage as they could possibly do or got whatever they felt they needed to get or getting out their anger, taking whatever they wanted from behind the bar, at which point they started letting us leave. As they started letting us out, some of us, most people in there went running for the subway or just to get out of the area. Most people had jobs or family. In those days, the police, if they wrote down your name, it could get published somewhere and you could be out to everybody, lose your job, lose your family.
Most people just dispersed. A few of us, kids like me, street kids, drag queens, marginalized people, we didn't have very much to lose, so we just stayed there. For me, that sorrow eventually turned into anger. I just stood there getting angrier and angrier and angrier. Those of us who stayed, I'm sure had that same exact feeling. When the police wanted to leave the bar, there came a point when there were only like six people left in the bar. There might've been somewhere between 25 and 50 of us outside the bar. That's just from my hazy memory of 55 years ago. But when they wanted to leave, we started throwing things at them. Coins, maybe an empty soda can, and that scared them and they retreated. As I like to say, for all those years, they were incarcerating us, this was the first time we incarcerated them.
Jennifer Errick: You incarcerated them inside Stonewall. Then what happened?
Mark Segal: Well, everybody who was there had a different experience. It happened over many hours. It happened over many city blocks. The police eventually called for reinforcements. I would've loved to have heard that call with the police saying, hey, we raided this bar. I'm sure they said, “the fags and the dykes have us trapped!” I can imagine how embarrassed they were to make that call. But for me, what happened was that a man by the name of Marty Robinson, an unsung hero in our community, came up to me, gave me a piece of chalk.
He said, "I want you to write up and down Christopher Street, on the streets and on the walls, tomorrow night, Stonewall." He was the person that I knew wanted to change the world. When he came up to me and said write on the walls in the street, wasn't quite sure what it would lead to or what it meant. But I trusted him. The following evening, from the steps of the Stonewall, Marty gave a speech. That was illegal. We weren't allowed to congregate. We certainly weren't allowed to talk about organizing homosexuals.
Jennifer Errick: What part of that was illegal?
Mark Segal: We were considered undesirables and people such as us couldn't congregate. Give you a perfect example of how that played out in mainstream. From the ashes of Stonewall came Gay Liberation Front. We were the first radical gay organization, and we were out loud and proud. We tried to place an ad in the Village Voice, the most liberal newspaper in all America. It said something to the effect that homosexuals are organizing. If you want to come to a meeting, our meeting is at XYZ. Please join us.
The Village Voice at first would not print that ad. They were afraid that the police would come in and harass them or whatever. What did we do? We demonstrated outside the Village Voice and shamed them. They eventually printed it. We were an invisible group of people at that time. Even before Stonewall, there were other LGBT uprisings, but none of them captured a grassroots effort from the community. That night, for whatever reason, in the height of the Counterculture 69, made us want to fight back.
Wanted us to organize and do things that we'd never done before. It also made us come together united as a community, which had never happened before. All segments of our community, men, women, trans, a word that we didn't have then, but we came together. From that came Gay Liberation Front and from Gay Liberation Front came literally everything that we have now. Because we never left that street again. We were on that street every night after leafleting for one thing or another. Gay Liberation Front was the first organization to be out loud and proud and take it to society.
Jennifer Errick: I definitely wanted to ask you about Gay Liberation Front and Gay Youth as well. I don't think I realized it started literally from the steps of Stonewall. How did that come together?
Mark Segal: Almost like osmosis. If you asked me to give you a day-to-day map of it, I couldn't. It was Stonewall, steps. Someone came up with the idea of leaflets, let's leaflet legal rights. Then someone said, "Well, what about medical rights?" Then I somewhere along the lines said, "What about the needs of our gay youth? They're being bullied, they're harassed, and some of them are so upset with themselves, they want to commit suicide. What could we do for them?" We organized Gay Youth. Another group of people who were going to NYU and were GLF members decided, well, there needed to be a gay student group at NYU. Then the chancellor of NYU, again, one of the most liberal schools in America, said, "No, you can't have a gay organization." Then we had a sit-in at NYU.
All of this was happening so fast that if I look back at it now, I think I get whiplash.
Jennifer Errick: I also want to talk a bit about your work to bring gay voices and gay visibility into the media. I was really interested to hear about the disruption campaigns you did. Can you tell me about how that started?
Mark Segal: Oh, absolutely. It's one of the things I'm most proud about in my life. Everybody had their own experience at Stonewall. Everybody had their own experience at Gay Liberation Front. One of the chief things about what we did was we were doing it out loud and proud. Rather than being visible, we were out. We weren't depressed, we were proud, and people were going to get to know us. By '73, I had moved back to Philadelphia, but I was still a part of what I consider the movement.
There was burgeoning movements now all over the country and even in Philadelphia. But what I noticed was, I didn't think we were getting far enough with visibility. At that time, again, no internet, no cell phones, no social media. The media of that time period was television. I thought, well, if they're not going to allow us on the media to talk about ourselves, let alone work in there, they're public airways and they're doing a live show, why shouldn't I appear on those shows?
I started disrupting TV shows. We disrupted the Today Show, the Mike Douglas show, the Tonight Show. But the biggest of all was CBS News with Walter Cronkite. Walter Cronkite was at that time, the most trusted man in America. In those days, he would get 60 million people watching him on a given night. One night, as he's reading the news, I sat between him sitting in his desk and the camera that photographed him, so therefore they could only see me, not Walter.
I yelled, "Gays protest CBS prejudice." At which point people came out of nowhere, cameramen, stagehands grappled me to the floor, wrapped me in cables. But all the time this is happening, the CBS network went blank. When they come back, Walter said, "Well, we've just had a disruption by something called a Gay Raider protest and CBS prejudices against homosexuals." That was a victory that he even said that. Because people then had to think about that, they were thinking about us. They might've hated me, and that was okay. I didn't care. But the idea was start the discussion of who we were. Discussion brings education. Education brings equality.
Jennifer Errick: Then you went on to found a newspaper, too.
Mark Segal: Yep. Philadelphia Gay News, and I like to say we were the most award-winning LGBT media of all LGBT media in the nation. I'm not afraid as publisher to have our editor and reporters tackle some of the main subjects that we deal with as a community. There are issues of homeless amongst gay youth. We sent a reporter out to sleep on a bench with a gay youth one night, and to record what that was like. There is this group called Mothers for Liberty that wants to demonstrate and silence our community. We discovered they were having a convention, national convention in Philadelphia, and we started promoting that six months before it happened. Therefore, when it happened, they were scared to leave their hotel.
Jennifer Errick: Now I know you're going back and are going to be involved again at Stonewall.
Mark Segal: It's sort of strange. For many years, I really didn't want to discuss Stonewall because everybody was always debating about what happened to Stonewall, who was at Stonewall? What was the bar like? It was overwhelming.
For me, I was in Philadelphia. I was away from all that debating. I was going from project to project to project. I never realized the connection of everything I did until I was literally doing a speaking engagement for the opening of a Stonewall exhibition at the Illinois Holocaust Museum.
The curator there was very astute woman, amazing. Somehow through our talk, she realized I had not connected them. One of the pieces of the exhibition was a videotape of me disrupting the CBS Evening news with Walter Cronkite. She said, "What did you do after you did that?" I had to think for a while. Then I said, "Well, I did a lot of TV shows because finally people wanted to know who was that guy who was hurting Uncle Walter?" As he used to be known.
From that, I wrote a letter to our governor and I asked our governor if we could have a meeting and he agreed. He asked me what he could do. I said, "Well, you could stop discrimination against gay men and lesbian women. You could create a commission." I asked for everything you could possibly ask for. Well, we left that meeting and lo and behold, I started working with his office. Within a few months, Governor Schapp issued the first non-discrimination law in the country.
Which said, in state government, you could not discriminate against gay men and lesbian women in state employment. That happened because of Walter Cronkite. Because at the end of that meeting with Governor Schapp, as he opens the door, he tapped me on the shoulder, "By the way, caught you on the Cronkite Show." Was his exact words. That meeting would've never happened without that. The disruptions would've never happened without GLF. GLF would've never happened without Stonewall. I feel that anything that I've contributed to our community comes from Stonewall.
Jennifer Errick: How does it feel to be going back to Stonewall and talking to an 18-year-old now?
Mark Segal: If I saw an 18-year-old outside Stonewall or coming into the Visitor Center, I would say there's now a community for you. I didn't have that place before Stonewall. You now have that place. There are many organizations. There's the internet. You could find organizations in every major city of America and even some very small cities in America. But I can guarantee you, you will find organizations in every one of the 50 states. Before Stonewall, there was never a public congregation of more than 100 gay people publicly out, anywhere in the nation, anywhere. One year later, on the first anniversary of Stonewall, when we created the first pride in June 1970, 15,000 people showed up.
Jennifer Errick: Amazing.
Mark Segal: Even more amazing than that is the following year, tens of thousands around the country having pride in their city. Then more tens of thousands around the rest of the world. Today, if you look at pride, you would see not tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands. There are millions of people around the world today celebrating pride. It all goes back to Stonewall.
Jennifer Errick: What are your hopes for the future? What are you looking forward to most?
Mark Segal: I don't know. I'm lucky, I guess, in the fact that projects seem to find me. I didn't expect to ever meet my governor. I didn't expect to be involved with creating the first non-discrimination law or the first LGBT governmental commission. I didn't expect to be involved with an LGBT newspaper. I was so busy doing projects, I didn't want to look back. Now I discover people want me to look back.
Jennifer Errick: But I feel like you are looking forward with that history behind you.
Mark Segal: You're right, absolutely. But I have something now I never had before, which is I'm old, which means I'm experienced and I've seen things. When I talk to young activists, they might ask a question, and it's possible, just possible I might have an answer. I know that everybody is upset about the current backlash we're having. It's a backlash, absolutely, and it's horrible. But what I could tell them about that is we've already had many backlashes. We had Anita Bryant, we had moral majority. We had Ronald Reagan. We had George W. Bush who literally bashed us over the head about our marriage equality so he could get reelected. Guess what? We became stronger after every one of those backlashes. I can promise you, we will again, just stay visible.
Jennifer Errick: I'm really grateful for the work that you've done throughout your life. From those early days right on through you've made a huge difference to so many people, and you've touched so many lives, including people who you'll never meet.
Mark Segal: I have. But it's also been good for me. Most important way I can personalize it. I've said this many times, and each time it gets to me. When I told my mother I was gay, her reaction was, "I'm afraid that you'll be lonely when you're old." Well, if she was here, I could say, mom, I'm definitely old. Mom, I'm married. Mom, guess what? I'm legally married and I love the man that I'm married to. Who would've ever thought of that 18-year-old outside Stonewall being invited to bring his husband to the White House and to dance at a reception. I've gotten to see the change and I've been part of the change. Luckily for me, if my mom was alive today, I forget to tell her that as far as I'm concerned, I've lived the American Dream.
[music break]
Jennifer Errick: Cofounder and CEO of Pride Live, Diana Rodriguez is the woman who served as a convener, fundraiser and driving force behind the creation of the new visitor center. She has said that Stonewall belongs to everyone. During her speech at the grand opening, however, she also made it clear that it was dedicated to one person in particular, a man named Tony Torres, who represents many of the people who couldn't be at the celebration on that day.
Diana Rodriguez: My family has served in the military for four generations. My Uncle Tony served in combat in Vietnam. He was maybe five foot seven and 130 pounds, and I could never imagine him there. Even though he came back very ill, he still felt he could serve. He took a job as an administrator at the VA Hospital here in the city. He was that guy. Kind and generous to all a leader in his community and a deacon in his church. When he died of HIV AIDS, not one of his colleagues from his job or the military, sorry, came to his funeral. That cuts me to this day. He was one of a generation we all lost to AIDS and indifference. Anne and I built the Visitor Center in his memory. Because of the hard work of rebels and renegades over the last 55 years, our community has many more rights than Uncle Tony had, but we can never take that for granted.
Jennifer Errick: As the only National Park site devoted specifically to LGBTQ history, Stonewall can continue to play a key role in honoring decades of heroes like Tony Torres and inspiring the next generation of rebels to carry their memory forward.
[end theme]
The Secret Lives of Parks is a production of the National Parks Conservation Association. Episode 32, It Takes a Village was produced by me, Jennifer Errick, with help from Todd Christopher, Bev Stanton and Linda Coutant.
Special thanks to the staff of Pride Live, to NPCA Communications director, Allison Zemanski Heis, and to NPCA Northeast regional director, Kristen Sykes. Original theme music by Chad Fischer.
Learn more about the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center and make a reservation to visit at stonewallvisitorcenter.org.
Learn more about this podcast and listen to the rest of our stories at thesecretlivesofparks.org.
For more than a century, the National Parks Conservation Association has been protecting and enhancing America's national parks for present and future generations. With more than 1.6 million members and supporters, NPCA is the nation's only independent, non-partisan advocacy organization dedicated to protecting national parks.
And we're proud of it too.
You can join the fight to preserve Stonewall National Monument and all of our national park sites. Learn more and join us at NPCA.org.
President Joe Biden: I remember my dad was dropping me off to get a license to be a lifeguard in Wilmington Delaware and the swimming pools. I got out of the car at Rodney Square, they called it, and two well-dressed men were kissing each other. I hadn't seen that before. I looked at my dad. I was 16 years old. Looked at my dad, and he said, "It's simple, Joey, they love each other. It's simple."