Equipped with whistles and walkie-talkies, and wearing fabulous T-shirts, we escorted folks from the clubs to the subway and from the piers to the PATH train, regarding ourselves as activists, not urbanists. For a brief period in the early 1990s, I patrolled the streets of Greenwich Village in the wee hours of the weekend as a member of the Pink Panthers, a neighborhood watch group founded in response to rising incidents of gay-bashing and other forms of anti-queer violence.