Fred Sargeant debunks the latest Stonewall revisionism from Pink News

Fred in the eighties and now

Fred Sargeant participated in each of the nights of the 1969 Stonewall riots and was one of the four co-founders of the first Gay Pride march in New York City in 1970.

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Someone tagged me into a post recently about a Pink News article regarding Mark Segal's visit to the UK. I don't link to Pink News pieces because Pink News.

Apparently, Mark's making the rounds in the UK of anyone who'll pay attention to him and giving them whatever they want to hear, even if it's shaded or flat-out fiction. I have this image of Mark, in his old age, accosting any stranger on the street to tell his story. It's not uncommon today to find people who have spent a lifetime self-promoting their involvement at the Stonewall riots and their aftermath to anyone who'll listen. Oddly, his insights never made the cut for the histories about Stonewall and the movement by Carter, Cervini, Duberman, Katz, Marcus or Marotta. It was disappointing to read the untrue statements from someone who professes to be a journalist.

Outrageously, Segal starts his myth fest off by saying that the Stonewall "was the only place that was safe" for gay men in New York. Quite the opposite was true. The Stonewall was the center of a blackmail operation focused on men with "families and jobs" whose scheme was being investigated then by NYPD and the FBI.

In his fractured retelling of the riots, Segal tellingly credits solely the "lowest" of taking on the police. According to Segal, people with "families and jobs" fled the scene; the gay liberation movement was the creation of The Gay Liberation Front, this despite the fact that the people he mentions as being central to the creation of GLF were members of the Mattachine Action Committee at the time of the riots. According to him, GLF was made up of two groups, "faeries and lesbian separatists." Utter nonsense. For every faerie or lesbian separatist that he doesn't name, I can name a student homophile* activist, an adult street youth counselor, or longtime homophile radical who all accomplished more during that period than GLF ever did during its barely yearlong existence. Within six months of Stonewall and GLF's emergence, most left to work with more productive, enduring organizations like Gay Activists Alliance, in large part because of GLF's male-centric focus. Segal's assertion that transgender figures played a substantive role was even then disputed by longtime activist, Craig Rodwell who said that there were "maybe a dozen drag queens" present among the hundreds of predominately gay male youth. Craig was one of the harshest critics of the Stonewall's abuse of the gay community.

Historian David Carter tells us near the end of his seminal history of the riots that "if we wish to name the group most responsible for the riots, it is the young, homeless homosexuals, and, contrary to the usual characterizations of those on the rebellion's front lines, most were Caucasian; few were Latino; almost none were transvestites or transsexuals; most were effeminate; and a fair number came from middle-class families." I would add that we were not led by drug-addled criminals.

In the Peabody Award winning documentary, Stonewall Uprising, based on Carter's research, we meet one of the very few transgender people in the Stonewall during the raid. When the raid happened, he worried about his family finding out, his job, and he attempted to escape through a bathroom window. As he was being taken out of the bar, under arrest, he told the officer that he was celebrating his eighteenth birthday, had dressed in his mother's clothes and feared that she would find out what he'd done if he were arrested. He began to cry and begged the officer to let him go. Feeling pity, the officer uncuffed him and he ran away. According to him, he never returned during the subsequent nights of rioting. A witness, yes, but hardly the heroic leader that Segal's narrative would have us believe was common on that night.

Segal knows all of this is true.

I'm embarrassed for Segal by the revelation in the article that while in Terfland he made time to pal around with that eulogist of paedophiles and promoter of the idea that adult sexual abuse of gay youth is a positive thing, the world-class, self-important creep, Peter Thatchell.

In the wrap for the Pink News article, Segal says that “I think it behooves us, who are gay and lesbian, to let trans people be a bit on the forefront, so society can get to know them.” Jeezum crow, Mark, who doesn't know them today?

I'd ask, what did they ever do for anyone else to deserve that? Mark, we know them. They did virtually nothing at Stonewall or to help create the gay liberation movement. If they couldn't grift, they didn't do anything worthwhile. Establishing a cell in GLF called S.T.A.R. whose only tangible result was a eight-month squat in a rundown apartment on 2nd Street without utilities for drug-addicted sex-workers, isn't the accomplishment that some make it out to be today. The owner of the building was in the mob, fer chrissakes.

In my book, trans activists did nothing worthwhile then and turning over the movement to them now will do nothing worthwhile today, unless you call stripping women of their sex-based rights and promoting the lifelong medicalization of LGB youth "worthwhile," all while re-centring the needs of straight men one more time fifty plus years later and expecting a different result..

I'm sure that Pink News was delighted to fluff Segal's untruths and misrepresentations. It serves their agenda of misogyny, homophobia and LGB historical revisionism well.

* I asked Fred about the word ‘homophile’ and he said this “During the era that Segal claims to be an authority about, "homophile" was used as a way to say "homosexual" while minimizing the sex part, which was very taboo all the way around in the 50s & 60s. I was vice chair of the Homophile Youth Movement; the first Pride march was created under the auspices of the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations; most of the NYC campuses each had their own Student Homophile League, etc. I forget that most people lack that connection to the word.”