Before the boot fell...
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NYPD reins on NY parade
"More Booty, Less Rudy," was the slogan emblazoned on the front of a float belonging to the group Sexpanic
in New York's gay pride march June 27th. The vehicle was a 1970s NYPD squad car, relabeled as "Rudy's
Sex Police," a reference to New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who has shut porn shops, arrested cruisers,
closed venues for dancing and sex, and otherwise extended the hand of Big Brother into New Yorkers' private lives.
It's no surprise, then, that the float proved too much for New York City cops, who booted the Sexpanic float out
of the pride march.
NYPD inspector Gilmartin confronted the float in Greenwich Village, after it had already
completed most of the parade route. "The cop just said it was 'inappropriate,'" said Sex Panic marcher Bill Dobbs, one
of some dozen people with the car. "There's nothing illegal here and you don't have a right to decide
who marches," Dobbs told police. Police brass insisted the car leave the march. "The implicit threat was if we
pushed it any further we'd be arrested," Dobbs said.
Sexpanic's car accompanied a float shared by cyber-escort services Rentboy.com and
Streetlife.com. During the march, Sex Panic "police," armed with fake nightsticks, pretended to beat up and arrest members
of the accompanying contingent, who were pretending to have very public sex.
Later, police claimed that they ejected the Sexpanic float for nudity, but Tom Weise of Rentboy.com
says that while there were naked men on their own float, unharassed by cops, there were none on Sexpanic's.
Mayor Giuliani himself marched in the parade, with the Log Cabin Republican Club, which broke
into the line of march in the middle of a contingent that organizers had reserved for people of color. Heritage
of Pride, the march sponsor, denounced the Log Cabin's intrusion in a statement.
"You should be able to march as the mayor of New York City anyplace you want," Mayor Giuliani
told the New York Times answering gay people who heckled him along the parade route.
Police kicked out another contingent from the parade-- a group called Stonewall Veterans, allegedly
for lingering too long for a group photo in front of the
Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street-- where another
police action exactly 30 years earlier sparked the Stonewall
riots. **
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