170 GAY-RIGHTS ACTIVISTS MARCH IN DOWNTOWN S.L.

Carrying signs and making speeches, about 170 gay-rights supporters rallied at the federal building in downtown Salt Lake City Saturday.

"We want to bring an end to the violence perpetrated against gays and lesbians from time immemorial," said Christian Brown, director of the Utah Gay and Lesbian Anti-violence Project. "We want to end discrimination."The Salt Lake rally, sponsored by the Gay and Lesbian Utah Democrats, was a show of local support for today's march on Washington, D.C., by a national gay- and lesbian-rights group. Gay-rights supporters will march from the White House to the Capitol.

Logan's first-ever gay rights rally also will be held today.

Brown compared Saturday's rally with the first Utah rally for gays and lesbians in October 1988. "There were only one dozen people here," he said. "We should be proud of our number this afternoon.

"We are not going to go away, we are not going to shut up until we get each and every thing we want," Brown said.

"This is the movement of the moment," said Melissa Sillitoe, executive director of the Utah Stonewall Center, a gay and lesbian community center.

Sillitoe said that although many people oppose lifting the ban on gays in the military, the issue is being discussed. And that is promising, she said.

"Ten years ago, no president would even have brought it up," she said.

However, gays and lesbians still don't have all the rights they want, she said."All of the people who were tortured in concentration camps are now protected - the Jews, the disabled, non-Arayans - but we're still not," she added.

Ken Johnson of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance of Cache Valley invited ralliers to take part in the Logan march, which is also being held to protest the Logan Herald Journal's decision to suspend the daily comic strip "For Better or For Worse" because of a story line that features a teenage boy coming to terms with his homosexuality.

Lenoris Bush, second vice president of the NAACP, Ed Mayne, president of the Utah AFL-CIO, and Jim Gonzales of the Utah Coalition of La Raza all pledged support for equal rights for gays and lesbians.