Elderly Gay Activist Assaulted by Trans Protesters at Vermont Pride Parade

A prominent gay rights leader who helped organize New York City’s first gay pride march in 1970 claims he was attacked by radical transgender activists over the weekend while he protested their movement during a gay pride parade in Vermont.

Fred Sargeant, 74, an early advocate for gay rights in the U.S. who participated in the 1969 Stonewall riots, said trans activists at Sunday’s parade in Burlington grabbed his signs, shoved him, poured coffee on his head, smacked him, knocked him to the ground, and stole his property because he held a sign and handed out pamphlets critical of the trans movement.

Sargeant told National Review that after the attack he was briefly sent to the hospital, where he underwent a CT scan, but is now home in central Vermont and “on the mend.”

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.”

“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. “I don’t recognize it any longer.”

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.

In an email to National Review, Burlington police said they were first contacted about the incident by a parade attendee who reported a man who was “allegedly carrying an offensive sign and was upsetting people in the parade.” The caller said someone poured coffee on the man, presumably Sargeant, who had “elbowed her friend.”

More than two hours after the parade ended, Burlington police received another call from an emergency room nurse who reported that a patient had been assaulted at the parade. By the time an officer followed up nearly three hours later, Sargeant was no longer at the hospital, according to the police department.

Sargeant said he called again to report the alleged assault on Monday, but hasn’t heard back from an investigator. Sargeant denies that the activists who tussled with him are victims. “When they’re claiming they’re the victim of an elderly man, you know that they’re a bankrupt group,” he said.