Friday's march began at 9 p.m. and was called to protest "the fencing of the piers, curfews and other restrictions imposed on the right of assembly there; and increased arrests and harassment of gay men and lesbians by the Hudson River Park Conservancy, the parks police, the Port Authority, and other police agencies."

A Stonewall era veteran who marched, Sylvia Rivera, told GayToday, that the areas under police fire include a public park at the Hudson River end of Christopher Street, as well as nearby piers which have served for decades as a favorite gay cruising area. Ms. Rivera expressed "mixed feelings," she said, about the closing of the pier.

On the one hand, she says, the piers were where her good friend, another Stonewall veteran, Marsha P. Johnson, was murdered, Johnson's body dumped into the river. For that reason, Rivera says, she feels negatively about the piers.

"But it is also really a safe haven" she explained, "for the homeless, I mean. They can sleep in those piers and know that the presence of non-violent gay men surrounding them at night provide them a kind of protection."

Sylvia Rivera, who has been many times homeless herself, has a long history of advocacy activism for the homeless. In the wake of the Stonewall riot, Ms. Rivera stood up forthrightly for the rights of "street transvestites" and others who are often abused or whose plights are ignored by those with accommodationist or yuppie sensibilities.

"The piers," explains Sex Panic! literature, "have historically been a favorite site for music, dancing and vogueing (as documented in the film 'Paris is Burning');

New York's Anti-Violence Project also reports a "sharp increase", according to Sex Panic!, "across the city in arrests, harassment, and entrapment of gay men under public lewdness charges by several police agencies. Sex Panic! Members circulated petitions protesting these conditions, addressed to both Mayor Guiliani and Governor Pataki.

Prior to the march, at 7 p.m., historian Allan Berube, author of Coming Out Under Fire, presented a talk and slide show at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center. Titled "On the Gay Waterfront," Berube accompanied hundreds of old and new photographs to tell the dramatic stories of how sexual outcasts fought back on the Chelsea and Greenwich Village waterfront--from the seaman's strikes of the Great Depression to the sex piers and leather bars of the 1970s, to the police crackdown going on right now.

A negative response to Sex Panic!'s efforts came unexpectedly from another veteran gay activist, Randolfe Wicker, now also the Public Relation's Director and founder of the world's first cloning activist group, Clone Rights United Front (CRUF). The march passed barely fifty feet from the headquarters of CRUF located in Randy Wicker's Uplift, an antique lighting store near the corner of Christopher Street.

Four years ago Wicker, had been advised by close friends, including this reporter, to stay neutral and to cancel his earlier plans to adopt a Carrie Nation activist's approach to public sex venues, including baths, bookstores, and similar locales where sex spills from private bedrooms into semi-public gathering places, little-known or used except to those who are meeting or cruising.

"Your advice kept me from leaping to the cutting edge of what's happening," he good-naturedly scolded Gay Today's editor, "but now I'm finally taking a position on this whole issue."

As the Sex Panic! marchers passed near his antique store, Wicker, inspired by the momentary circumstance, procured a picket sign, a stepladder and an electronic bull horn. As the marchers passed, their estimated number between 75 and 100 mostly youthful males, Wicker stood atop his step ladder, brandishing a sign that read: "Gay Liberation is NOT About Sex in Public Places." And "You Don't Represent the Gay Community! Shame on You!"

Next, he issued the similar sentiments through his electronic bull horn, reverberating clearly above the lesser noise made by the crowds. He also bellowed, "Haven't you heard about AIDS?" Police immediately approached him and advised him to turn off the electronic bullhorn or face its seizure.

"So I turned it off immediately," Wicker told GayToday, "but my message had already been heard by everybody on the street, and there was some very visible anger. Police formed a small protective wall around me."

Later, Wicker told GayToday, he telephoned author Gabriel Rotello, whose recently published book, Sexual Ecology, has placed Rotello, according to members of Sex Panic! and other pro-sexual advocates, at the forefront of the movement toward a more conservative approach to living sexually in gay male culture. Rotello and Larry Kramer, believes Wicker, have, all along, been right about the impersonal development of gay sexual culture.

"You are my hero," Wicker told Rotello on the phone, "I only wish I hadn't waited till now to join you in your cause."

A dead rat, its throat slit, was found at the door by one of Wicker's employees who opened his antique lighting shop on Saturday morning.

We're not sure if Sex Panic! put it there, or whether somebody might have been offended by the sign in our window that says 'Clone Diana! One Good Life Deserves Another.' "