Oops?
The National Park Service (NPS), already under fire for intentionally scrubbing several pages about transgender individuals, appeared to mistakenly remove part of a web page about the former New York City home of the late out gay civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. The page was restored on March 12 after Gay City News brought it to the federal government’s attention.
Rustin, who played a significant role in organizing the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, served as an advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr., and advocated for LGBTQ rights — including here in New York City — lived at 340 W. 28th Street in Chelsea from 1962 until he died at the age of 75 in 1987.
After dedicating his life to fighting for racial justice, LGBTQ rights, nuclear disarmament, and other causes, Rustin’s residence was listed on the New York State Register of Historic Places in 2015. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places the following year. Rustin’s surviving partner, Walter Naegle, continues to live there.
The nps.gov web page about Rustin’s residence remained live all along. However, further down the page, there was an issue with a link that had previously sent users to a PDF showing the completed nomination form, which contained nearly 100 pages of historic accounts, letters, and other documents highlighting Rustin’s life story and the significance of his work. Users were getting redirected to an error page saying that the “site administrator may have removed it, changed its location, or made it otherwise unavailable.”
Manhattan Councilmember Erik Bottcher, who co-chairs the Council’s LGBTQIA+ Caucus, first sounded the alarm in a March 10 post on Instagram.
“Outrageous! The National Park Service has removed the nomination form for the Bayard Rustin Residence (at Penn South) from its digital record,” out gay Councilmember Erik Bottcher wrote. “Our history will not be erased.”
When asked why the page no longer worked, National Park Service spokesperson Jordan Fifer told Gay City News on March 12 that “there appears to be a broken link,” and he said he would “let our web team know.” In the meantime, Fifer provided a separate URL to access the nomination form PDF.
Shortly after, Fifer acknowledged that “it does appear” the broken link was a mistake.
“It looks like https://www.nps.gov/nr is no longer in use, which is the first part of the nomination form URL on the page,” Fifer explained. “We’ll be updating the page with the active link to the nomination form shortly.”
The page was restored by the afternoon on March 12. Bottcher did not respond to a request for comment.
It is not clear what caused the broken link, but there were some notable differences between that case and the erasure of other NPS pages about LGBTQ community members. When the NPS removed the letters T and Q from the Stonewall National Monument, for example, or when the NPS removed pages about the late trans activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, the agency told Gay City News on both occasions that the changes were made in accordance with two of President Donald Trump’s anti-trans executive orders. One of those orders denies the existence of transgender individuals and another one disavows diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
Still, the NPS has been inconsistent in carrying out those executive orders online. While the letters T and Q have been removed from some pages, they remain in place on other pages, and some links to LGBTQ research have continued to work, but not others.
No matter how it happened, Rustin’s surviving partner underscored the importance of maintaining historic records into the future.
“Freedom of information is one of the pillars of democracy,” Naegle told Gay City News on March 12. “Censoring or erasing factual information, whether from history books, websites, or public memorials is antithetical to democracy and thus un-American.”
According to nps.gov, Naegle subsequently moved into the apartment after they met in 1977. The couple could not marry — marriage equality wouldn’t become a reality for decades — so they worked around the law and Rustin subsequently adopted Naegle, giving him hospital visitation rights when Rustin was sick and allowing him to stay in the residence after Rustin died.
The NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, which played a key role in advocating for the historic recognition of Rustin’s residence, welcomed the news with caution. Co-director Ken Lustbader expressed concern that the NPS page about Rustin’s residence is difficult to find.
“I’m certainly pleased to hear this information might still be located via this sub-section of the NPS site, but remain dismayed that our history would require such sleuthing to be located,” Lustbader said. “We know how powerful access to this history can be — not just for researchers, but for individuals seeking community and an understanding of their shared past. Even now as one might casually search for the National Register listing for Bayard Rustin, this gallery sub-site doesn’t even make the first page of Google search results. So for the overwhelming majority of the public, the history becomes inaccessible, disappeared.”
Rustin’s legacy was recently highlighted in the 2023 biopic, “Rustin,” with actor Colman Domingo portraying the civil rights icon in his successful quest to organize the 1963 March on Washington. Though he was known for his national work, Rustin also made a mark at the local level in New York City, where, among other causes, he advocated for the city’s Gay Rights Bill. More than a decade after the bill was first proposed, the City Council passed the Gay Rights Bill in 1986.
