Fred Sargeant

Frédéric André Sargeant (born July 29, 1948) is a French-American gay rights activist and a former lieutenant with the Stamford, Connecticut Police Department. He participated in each of the nights of the 1969 Stonewall riots and was one of the four co-founders of the first NYC Pride March march in Manhattan in 1970. He was vice-chairman of the Homophile Youth Movement at the time.

Sargeant was born in Fontainebleau, France, to an American G.I. father and a French mother. He grew up in Connecticut.

Sargeant moved to New York City at age nineteen. There, he met and began dating Craig Rodwell, who had recently opened what was then the country's only gay bookstore, the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in Greenwich Village. The bookshop was a gathering place for young gay activists, and soon Sargeant was managing the store and had become an active member of the Homophile Youth Movement (HYMN), which operated out of it.

After 1 a.m. on Saturday, June 28, 1969, Sargeant and Rodwell were returning from dinner at a friend's home and were passing the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar and club owned by a member of the Genovese crime family. They saw a crowd of about 75 people gathered outside the Inn and a police car in front, and were told the club had been raided. As police emerged from inside the Stonewall leading a customer, someone began throwing coins at the officers and others joined in throwing objects and yelling insults, eventually forcing the police to retreat back into the building and call for reinforcements. A full-scale riot broke out between the responding Tactical Patrol Force and the crowd that lasted for several hours, with Sargeant and Rodwell staying until the sun came up.

In a radio interview that he gave to WBAI's New Symposium II days after the riot, Sargeant was asked what had set the crowd off and replied:

The kids felt that some of the other kids were being kept inside and being beaten up by the police. I don't know whether it really happened that way or not, but the rumor spread.

At dawn, the couple went back to their apartment, where Rodwell and Sargeant began writing the first of many leaflets calling for the gay community to seize the moment and stand up to the corrupt police and the mafia who controlled their neighborhoods. After returning to the Stonewall again for a second night of rioting on Saturday evening, they released the first leaflet on Sunday, June 29, 1969.

The headline of the first leaflet read Get the Mafia and the Cops Out of Gay Bars, and began,