Seeking Equality, Not Tips, Topless Marchers Draw a Crowd in Manhattan

NEW YORK: It was not all that surprising that a march of a few dozen topless women (and fewer men) through Midtown Manhattan on a sunny Sunday afternoon would attract perhaps thousands of gawkers, bemused tourists, leering loafers, journalists and passers-by - every single one, it seemed, carrying a camera.

"I have you on Periscope right now," one young man gleefully informed a trio of topless women marching down Broadway, referring to the live video streaming smartphone app that he was using to broadcast the march. "There are 60 people watching you. People are liking you."

"Great," said one of the women, Angie, 24, her voice steely. She wore sunglasses, shorts printed with sunflowers and nothing in between.

These women were not desnudas, the topless panhandlers who last week found themselves in Mayor Bill de Blasio's cross hairs. Sunday's marchers were after something more high-minded: the right of all women to go bare-chested if they chose.

Yet political statement soon devolved into exhibitionist spectacle - partly by its own nature, and partly by human nature - proving that even in New York City, more than two decades after the New York State Court of Appeals ruled that toplessness is legal for women, taking advantage of that right still has the power to shock.

Shock and awe, of course, were part of the plan. A truck decorated with double-breasted balloons blasted, for reasons unknown, the Rolling Stones' "Salt of the Earth." One woman painted herself with Pokemon symbols; another dressed as an anime superhero; still others each wore a single enormous cloth breast. One brought an equally topless baby.

But they made clear that they were flaunting their chests for a cause.

"We have boyfriends that always take their shirts off, and we were like, 'This isn't fair,'" said Sarah Koon, 31, a musician who had come from Newark, Delaware, to New York with a few friends. She wore a bright pink wig, a black mask, black tape over her nipples and a chain for added symbolic heft.
She had thought about joining a topless march for several years, she said, but "it took me a while to build up the ovaries and actually do it." (Her boyfriend, she added, is very supportive.)

But she was the only one in her group from Delaware who removed her top on Sunday. The rest were deterred by the gantlet of cameras that threatened to swallow the march.

"I can't go whole hog," said Phoebe Connell, 23. "There are people who are creepy and make you feel weird, and it's overwhelming and scary."

Those who did go top-free, however, unanimously recommended the experience - as long as they were around like-minded women. ("Imagine being the only one," shuddered Claudia Simondi, 46, a topless marcher.)

"It's liberating," said Mandy Aviles, 25, a bartender from Bayonne, New Jersey, who nevertheless put her T-shirt back on after the march reached Bryant Park, where it caused a traffic jam of people in the park when they realized what they were seeing. "There was no shame, no regret, no nothing."

There was also broad support for the desnudas, topless women wearing body paint and headdresses who pose with tourists for tips, whom de Blasio has suggested flushing out of Times Square, possibly by tearing up the area's pedestrian plazas.

While the 1992 Court of Appeals ruling established women's right to go topless for noncommercial reasons, desnuda opponents argue that their activities are illegal because they solicit tips while topless. The state has already sent investigators from the Department of Labor to the plaza to look into the matter.

Only a single desnuda could be seen in Times Square on Sunday, though others had added bras to their outfits to avoid confrontations with the police.

"They're wearing paint; they're not naked," said Simondi, who strongly disapproved of what she called the mayor's prudish bent. "It's paint, it's art. The human body is beautiful, and who doesn't want to see beauty?"

Angie, who declined to give her last name while topless, had a blunter opinion. "All he does is get rid of fun things," she said.

The 1992 case concerned a group of seven women in Rochester, sometimes known as the Topfree Seven, who were arrested in 1986 for holding a shirtless picnic to protest the state law that prohibited women, but not men, from baring their chests.

Ramona Santorelli, 57, was one of two defendants who pursued the case all the way to the Court of Appeals. Although she and her co-defendant won, it was not quite the sweeping victory they had hoped for. The court did not find the law discriminatory, as the women had argued.

Interviewed by telephone in Rochester, she said she was not surprised that "the patriarchy" - as represented by the mayor, the governor and the police commissioner - was trying to rein in the desnudas. But to go as far as ripping up the pedestrian plazas?

"Women's breasts," she said, "are very, very powerful."