Trans activists assault gay rights leader at Burlington Pride parade

By Guy Page

A retired police officer, Vermont resident and early gay rights leader was assaulted by trans rights activists at the Burlington Pride march Sunday, the LGB Alliance reports.

The group reporting the assault called violence against gay rights advocates who do not support the trans movement  “the new face of homophobia.”

Gay rights legend & pioneer Fred Sargeant (74), one of the co-founders of the Gay Pride march in NYC and participant in Stonewall in 1969, was violently assaulted by trans rights activists at Burlington Pride this weekend, the LGB Alliance reported on Twitter September 19.

Fred Sargeant

Last year, Sergeant was reportedly “kicked out” of the Gay Pride parade because he wore a T-shirt saying ‘Woman: Noun. Adult Human Female.’ “The queer community has made it clear that homosexuals are no longer welcome at Gay Pride – unless they also worship at the altar of gender,” blogger Kurtis Tripp said.

On September 18, Sergeant posted on Facebook that he intended to attend the parade, and called its sponsors, the Vermont Pride Center, “an exclusionary gender identity organization focused on transing the gay away.”

Sargeant has a storied history in the gay pride movement. According to his biography, 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. He then moved to Stamford, Connecticut to become a cop, attaining the rank of lieutenant before retirement.

Sargeant told Substack writer Tripp he became a cop after his experience in the Stonewall riots. “I wanted to see if I could make a difference, and having seen the situation at Stonewall and how the NYPD handled that, I thought I could do it differently. Stonewall wasn’t the only riot I saw. I’d been caught up in riots in the Village before and watched what the police did.”

Sargeant married his husband in 2010 and now lives in rural Vermont.

After Sunday’s events, Sargeant said “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,” the LGB Alliance said.

His statement continues: “Being unsuccessful in their attempts to disrupt my protest and drive me away, the mob pushed me to the ground” He would later say, of attending: “Before I went, my husband asked why I was going to protest. I answered, if I don’t who else should?”

“Sadly, this despicable act was entirely predictable: activists at Burlington Pride had been distributing stickers like this (see below), and violent rhetoric from that quarter has become so commonplace, they can even justify assaulting a man who needs a cane to walk,” the LGB Alliance tweeted.

“Simply put, Fred Sargeant is a hero to all of us who have faced discrimination for wanting to assert our same sex attraction. It is sad that fifty years later, a new face of homophobia has taken over Pride and now threatens violent retribution,” the Alliance said.

Neither Vermont Pride Center social media nor any of the Vermont media (VTDigger, the three television news stations) mentioned the Sargeant assault in their news coverage of the parade. Vermont Daily Chronicle has reached out to Sargeant and the Burlington Police Dept. for more information.

Guy Page is publisher of the Vermont Daily Chronicle. Reprinted with permission.

Image courtesy of Public domain

7 thoughts on “Trans activists assault gay rights leader at Burlington Pride parade

  1. Another example of the danger of the leftist concept of the “microaggression” gaining acceptance in society. Someone said something that was deemed hurtful and the supposedly-aggrieved party responded with physical violence. This is how civil wars begin. Isn’t lefty-world wonderful?

  2. Always knew there would eventually be trouble when the LGB’s invited the letter T to expand on the alphabet soup.

  3. Anthony Fauci led the federal government’s response in scientific terms, to the AIDS crisis. What’s really important to recognize is that Fauci, as a public health official, came out clearly arguing that it was homosexual sexual behavior that should come to an end in terms of the promiscuousness of what were then known as the bathhouses in San Francisco and in similar metropolitan areas, because it was there through that kind of homosexual sexual activity, that unquestionably the HIV virus, as it came to be known, was being transmitted. Fauci clearly called for a suppression of, even using legal power, the suppression of those concentrated places of what was then called gay sexual activity.

    But the political power of the gay rights movement, even then, was so overwhelming that Fauci, having engaged with the leaders of that movement, then immediately changed course. He made a 180 degree turn.

    He came back and said, “No, it’s irresponsible. It is oppressive for the federal government to tell people how they should run their sex lives.”

    Instead, well, you know the regimen that came out of the AIDS crisis, what became known as safe sex. At least in worldview terms, we need to recognize that safe sex, even as it was developed originally as a public health response, even as it was developed as a response to HIV and the AIDS crisis, the reality is that the logic of safe sex became a major [lever] used by cultural progressives to transform the entire nation’s understanding of sexual morality.

    A principle that we keep in mind is that theology matters. In this case, the theology that matters in the case of Anthony Fauci is basically unbelief.

    He was raised in a Catholic family. He went to a Catholic high school, but Anthony Fauci, in his adult life, has declared himself to be an unbeliever and at least by some of his self-identification, a humanist in such a way that he identifies with what Christians understand as the worldview of ‘secular humanism’.

    If you believe in the worldview of secular humanism, then there is no absolute right, there’s no absolute wrong. There is no absolute righteousness. There’s no absolute unrighteousness.
    It is all a matter of human beings who are biological accidents, trying to find our way in a dangerous cosmos and of course, a part of the dangers of this cosmos are the microbes and the viruses and the bacteria.

    So everything becomes a matter of moral negotiation. Everything becomes a matter of crafting by politics a policy that will, in the view of those crafting the policy, accomplish some purpose. That worldview, as we understand that theology matters and it always matters, that secular worldview means that Fauci, in moral terms, can truly turn on a dime.

    Now, my criticism here is certainly towards Dr. Anthony Fauci, but it’s even more directed at those who, with less candor and less intellectual honesty, basically operate in the very same way. They might not ever come out and say, “I actually don’t believe in God.” They might not ever come out and say, “Yes, I identify as a secular humanist,” but the fact is that regardless of how they identify themselves, this is how they think, this is how they act, this is how they respond to public issues.
    h/t to Mohler

    • “No, it’s irresponsible. It is oppressive for the federal government to tell people how they should run their sex lives.” He certainly has done yet another 180 on the idea that the govt should not tell people how to run their lives in general.

  4. Now we need “Mental Illness Awareness” events.
    Many of these people have mental illness.
    Gender Dysphoria is a mental illness.
    Many Trans kids are on the Autism spectrum and are being victimized by these sick teachers that are promoting this Transgender Agenda.
    Here is a really good article about the Evil of the Transgender Agenda- that is a weapon to break up the family- in part.
    https://granitegrok.com/mg_lakesregion/2022/09/the-evil-of-transgenderism

    You can be a high functioning person with mental illness.. so sometimes things are not really as they outwardly appear.
    The American diet is so devoid of nutrition, of course people have issues today.
    People have got to be taught about what they are *really* looking at- as our society is on a downward spiral down the drain.

    This man, who was a police officer, should have known full well that you cannot have rational discussions with people that are nuts.

  5. Jessum, the gender confused can’t even get along.. is this part of bidens UNITY scotty and the rest of
    you RINO’s who voted for him? Personally I have nothing to do with acknowledging these peoples
    mental illness or their pronouns…I will not participate…fight away..

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