Right now, men are getting a lot more fun in the sun than women in Massachusetts and topless equality advocates are planning to bare their frustration on Boston Common — practically the front yard of the State House.
“It is time to act. To achieve topless freedom we must communicate this desire for constitutional equality to our lawmakers and representatives,” the topless equality activist group Equalititty Now writes on its website.
A protest scheduled for Saturday afternoon on the Boston Common seeks to lift and support women’s topless equality.
Co-organized by GoTopless.org and Equalititty.us, the protest is advertised as “their first topless protest in Boston” and tags the event with the message “If men can be topless in public, women should have the same constitutional rights.”
The march will wind its way from the Martin Luther King statue at 1 p.m. and will wind its way through the park to the State House and then back to the statue at 3 p.m., according to a calendar event from the U.S. Raelian Movement, which is also behind GoTopless.org
A man who has taken on the name Rael founded the new age religious movement centered around UFO studies and famed for its pro-human cloning stance in the 1970s and has taken up the topless equality clause, according to GoTopless, at least since 2007 when a woman named Phoenix Feeley was wrongfully arrested for walking topless in New York City — where topless equality has been on the books since 1992.
While the vast majority of states have at least legally established topless equality — although some people are still cited illegally under various public nuisance statutes, advocates say — Massachusetts is among a handful of states that “have ambiguous state laws on the matter,” according to GoTopless.
The group and an organizer listed for a calendar entry did not immediately respond to requests for further comment.
Topless equality won a victory in Nantucket in 2022 when at the annual town meeting, residents adopted the Gender Equality on Beaches bylaw, which then-Attorney General and now-Gov. Maura Healey approved that December. The Herald reported that its first summer in effect went swimmingly.
“In order to promote equality for all persons, any person shall be allowed to go topless on any beach within the Town of Nantucket,” the town website states. “We ask everyone to be patient and respectful as the island adapts to this first-of-its-kind bylaw in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”
This is a developing story.
