“Mugged at Burlington Pride. So, I went to Pride to protest their misogyny, homophobia, exclusionary policies and divisiveness. I was met by screaming, multiple assaults, ageist comments, shoving, slaps to the back of my head, pouring coffee on me and repeated attempts to steal my signs. Being unsuccessful in their attempts to disrupt my protest and drive me away, the mob pushed me to the ground as the parade ended, further injuring me. They stole or damaged more than $550 worth of my property. This is the sign that the young trans/rainbow brownshirts in dresses went absolutely nuts over.”
Sargeant posted the footage on Facebook and shared encouraging messages he received in response. Some were from struggling “de-transitioners” and others were from upset “gay” fans.
In recent years, Sargeant has become an outspoken critic of the gender identity movement that he believes has taken over the gay rights movement. On Sunday, he said, he attended the Burlington Pride parade to protest what he believes has become “an exclusionary parade and a venue for groups dedicated to discrimination within the same-sex community.”
Both gender ideology and gender role ideology refer to attitudes regarding the appropriate roles, rights, and responsibilities of women and men in society . The concept can reflect these attitudes generally or in a specific domain, such as an economic, familial, legal, political, and/or social domain.
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This isn’t the first time that lesbians and gays have faced vitriol from trans activists at Pride. Lesbians have been intimidated, shouted at, surrounded and unceremoniously thrown out of Pride events in London and Cardiff . In Paris , smoke flares were thrown at lesbians who insisted that the definition of lesbian doesn’t include people with male bodies. Imagine if straight men threw canisters at lesbians or threw them out of events for not liking dick. They would be arrested and widely despised. Yet such actions are applauded by the idiots who now run the gay press.
Fred Sargeant’s crime was to have silently held up some placards questioning the trans movement. One placard is reported to have said ‘no blackface, no womanface, no thank you’. For years, Sargeant has been pointing out the irony that it is considered an outrage for white people to black up (unless they are Justin Trudeau), but not for men to wear make-up, simper and declare they are women. At least minstrels didn’t argue that they really were black.
Sargeant is also a target because he is able to call out trans activists for their attempts to rewrite gay history. It is now fashionable to erase boring old gays and foreground trans activists instead. For instance, it is now claimed that the pivotal role at the Stonewall riots was played not by gay people, but by ‘trans’ activist Marsha P Johnson. This is despite Johnson being on the record admitting that he was actually a drag queen and not trans, and that he played no significant part in the events. This didn’t stop former New York governor Andrew Cuomo naming a state park after Johnson and repeating both lies.
The gay-bashing of Fred Sargeant is more than a singular moment of violence. It encapsulates everything that has gone wrong with what is now called the LGBTQ+ movement. In recent years, the gay-rights movement has been hollowed out and repurposed by those who call themselves ‘queer’. One of Sargeant’s placards also proudly declared he was ‘Gay not queer’. What is queer? Your guess is as good as mine. How can a movement fight for rights for a group of people that is indefinable?
What’s worse is that the vagueness of ‘queer’ leaves the door open for entryists of the sort that used to plague the gay movement in the past. If Fred once represented the dominant wing of gay rights – moderate and patriotic (he became a cop soon after Stonewall) – there was another wing that revolved around cranky activists. Take Harry Hay , who argued that the gay movement should aim to destroy the family, industrial society and the American way of life. If that were not bonkers enough, Hay argued that a key role in this should be played by paedophiles. Or take Gayle Rubin , who has bemoaned society’s stigmatisation of ‘boy-lovers’. Is it an accident that the word queer was championed by academics like Rubin? Who knows. But given that false accusations of paedophilia were historically used to slander gay men, it is a risky game for a movement to play with this sort of ambiguity.
It is surely just as risky to associate gay people with the trans movement – as the LGBTQ+ umbrella seeks to do. This, after all, is a movement that now seems to engage in the very gay-bashing the gay-rights movement once fought so hard against.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – JUNE 20: Pride flags and Black Lives Matter signs decorate The Stonewall Inn on June 20, 2020 in New York City. Due to the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic, this year’s march had to be canceled over health concerns. The annual event, which sees millions of attendees, is marking its 50th anniversary since the first march following the Stonewall Inn riots in 1969. (Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images,)
“The concern I have is that the movement that I knew, the gay liberation movement, has metamorphosized into a gender identity movement that is quite misogynistic, homophobic – values that I can’t share,” he told National Review .
Sargeant, who is now affiliated with the LGB Alliance – a gay rights group critical of transgender and queer ideology – said he was at the parade holding a sign that compared people presenting as the opposite gender to people in black face. “For some reason in society today, while no one would dare go in black face and expect to be taken seriously in the future, drag is celebrated, and I think that’s wrong,” Sargeant said. “I think it’s disrespectful for women.”
Sargeant said he positioned himself facing the oncoming parade, and stood silently with his sign, which read “Gay, Not Queer” on the reverse side. A trans woman in the parade, peeled off, approached him, and took his sign, he said.
“As best I could on a cane, but with a little adrenaline going, I kind of hobbled after him down the street, got my sign back,” Sargeant said.
But when Sargeant returned to his position on the parade route, he said, he was surrounded by more angry trans activists who confronted him. Video posted to Sargeant’s Facebook page shows a woman fighting with him, trying to take his sign. “Somebody dumped coffee on my head. A number of people were smacking me on the back of the head,” said Sargeant, who has been kicked off Twitter for allegedly misgendering trans people. “Eventually, toward the end of the march they knocked me to the ground.”
Sargeant said he had about $600 worth of items – including a folding chair, an umbrella, a box of leaflets, and a new L.L. Bean shirt – stolen from the side of the road. “They put two and two together and took some trophies,” Sargeant said of the activists he believes took his property.
From Sargeant’s bio:
Fred Sargeant is a gay American same-sex rights activist, whose roots in the movement go back to before the Stonewall riots. He was a proposer and organizer of the first pride march then known as the Christopher Street Liberation Day march, held on June 28, 1970. He was also the initial manager of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, the first gay and lesbian bookshop in the world, in New York City.
In June 18, 2019, he was honored for his role at Stonewall by the Association des Journalists LGBTQI+’s OUT d’or Awards in Paris. While there, he was part of the dedication ceremony at Place des Harvey Milk for two plaques commemorating both the Stonewall riots and Gilbert Baker’s Rainbow Flag with Parisian Mayor Anne Hidalgo.
In 2014, he was honored by the Heritage of Pride’s New York City Pride March, once again at the head of the march as he was on June 28, 1970.
He had introduced himself to Craig Rodwell in 1968, the founder of the bookshop, and the two of them became partners at work and at home. Fred became vice chairman of Craig’s Homophile Youth Movement that was based out of the bookshop. They participated in the Stonewall riots, after which Fred was one of the four proposers for the first Pride march, which was approved at the Nov. 2, 1969 annual meeting of the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations (ERCHO) in 1970, with Rodwell, Ellen Broidy and Linda Rhodes.
Fred’s eyewitness account at Stonewall in 1969, as told to Charles Pitts of WBAI days after the riot, is believed to be the only existing audio made contemporaneous to the riots (see audio on the site.)
In 1971 Fred left New York. In 1973 he became a police officer in Stamford CT, attaining the rank of lieutenant. Upon retirement, Fred moved to Provincetown MA and became involved in community service work on a variety of boards and committees, usually serving as chairman. In addition to his work on harbor development and regulations, community relations, community oriented policing, development of goals for the hiring of a new police chief and other matters, Fred proposed that the town take up the growing hate crimes issue in the early 1990s in Provincetown, which led to the creation of the Hate Crimes Working Group. The group was recognized by President Clinton for its work.
In June 2010 he appeared in the Peabody-award-winning documentary “Stonewall Uprising,” which was produced and directed by Kate Davis and David Heilbroner.
He also wrote the forward to Gayle E. Pitman’s “The Stonewall Riots: Coming Out in the Streets,” for young adults, published in May 2019.
In December 2019 he became active again over his concern that the historical record of the late 60s and early 70s had undergone a significant change that erased the prominent figures and their contributions as well as the primary role of same-sex activism during that period.
He was born in Fontainebleu, France and has lived in Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts and Vermont throughout his life. He lives now with his husband in rural Vermont.
Sargent says:
“I intend to keep speaking truth to power for the rest of my days. I have flown the Gilbert Baker Rainbow Flag during Pride for more than 25 years, but this year I stopped. The Rainbow Flag has been usurped by a purportedly progressive flag, which is truly representative of the appropriation of the acts and accomplishments of the lesbian and gay community during the past 50 years. The time has come for a new ‘gay liberation movement,’ a movement that began for me and many others in 2019, the fiftieth anniversary of our Stonewall Riots. It’s time again, as Stormé DeLarverie said then, to “do something.'”
Watch the footage from Sargent’s Facebook below.
