This post first appeared on Psychology Today in Mark O’Connell’s column, Quite Queerly.

“Definitions of marriage are evolving,” says Liza Monroy, author of the memoir The Marriage Act (Skullcross, 2014).  Jenny, a newly-married friend of mine, recently observed that, “We’re all rethinking how to celebrate marriage on our own terms.”  Two other female friends have told me, “I wasn’t sure I wanted a wedding, until I saw yours,” referring to my same-sex wedding—an event obviously free of historical references to brides as property.  These different, straight ladies all make the same point: marriage equality is good for everyone, especially women.

As we wait for the U.S. Supreme Court (“SCOTUS”) to decide whether or not to address state bans on same-sex marriage, we can reflect on how quickly marriage equality has ricocheted across the country since SCOTUS struck down a key section of the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013.  We also do well to ask ourselves what these rapid changes imply about our culture.

Richard Posner, the known-to-be-conservative federal appellate judge who earlier this month concluded that bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional — and whose eloquent, cogent, and entertaining opinion went viral — has been reflecting on this topic for years.  And his thoughts are not unlike what my female friends are saying above.

In a 2013 article for The New Republic, Judge Posner linked the growing acceptance of same-sex marriage to the “wide acceptance of sex outside marriage.”  The acceptance of “[o]ral and anal sex marital or otherwise,” he continued, “contributed to a growing acceptance of homosexual sex, which was traditionally non-marital as well as non-vaginal. With the decline of prudery, sexual practices formerly deemed ‘deviant’ created less revulsion in the straight population.”  Judge Posner argued in the article that, as in all cases involving discrimination, “[d]evelopments in society and culture mattered a great deal more than developments in jurisprudence”—and, specifically, that evolving attitudes on same-sex marriage have more to do with the effects of the sexual revolution of the 1960’s than the effects or actions of the courts.

In other words, according to Posner, our laws are simply going with the flow of societal practices, and we are all practicing more equality and more sexual and creative freedom in our marriages – whether we’re male or female, gay or straight — than we ever have before.

This is a coup, for women in particular, for a number of reasons. To start with, the idea of equality between spouses — which many same-sex couples model for our straight friends — encourages women to be as proactive in asserting sexual preferences as their male counterparts.  For example, some straight couples today find it socially acceptable to negotiate open marriages, a concept that was considered to be fairly taboo only a few years ago.  (Check out this recent article in Marie Claire, and this one by renowned psychotherapist Esther Perel.) It is now socially acceptable for married women both to attend 50 Shades of Grey parties — at which they playfully flirt with their sexually deviant side — and to tell their colleagues at work all about it.  In addition to these distinctive examples, women are generally more encouraged now to make their sexual desires known to their spouses, these days, than they were in the past.

In addition to loosening us all up sexually, marriage equality explodes gender stereotypes in a broader sense.  “Traditional” couples, for example, can easily fall into heteronormative patterns concerning employment and parenting – e.g., husbands should be bread-winners, wives should be child rearers — but such couples can glean a more gender-neutral perspective on these relationship roles from their LGBT friends.  A new study reveals that, in many cases, homes headed by two same-sex parents are often more “harmonious,” due to the emphasis on gender equality, than those headed by opposite-sex parents.  And, in another positive contemporary development, women who have chosen not to have children, as well as those who are infertile, are less stigmatized, and receive more positive recognition, for their non-procreative reasons to marry.

As my friend Jenny pointed out, these societal changes have impacted the way we all celebrate getting married.  Much as same-sex couples have been doing for years, straight spouses-to-be are now creating weddings that reveal their unique selves – e.g., through very personally chosen venues, text, music, and outfits –facing their nuptials with eyes wide open, as opposed to sleep-walking through tradition.

We do have a long way to go, even if SCOTUS takes up the issue this fall.  But our society is clearly moving in the direction of marriage equality for all.  Take Judge Posner himself, who was opposed to same-sex marriage for many years, but has since changed his mind.  Or has he?  In his 1992 book Sex and Reason, the very same book in which he stated his then-opposition to same-sex marriage, he wrote, “Doctrine frequently lags behind changes in social practice, but when it does we predict — and observe — a growing refusal to abide by it.”  Interestingly, Posner seems to articulate this same principle to opposite effect two decades later in his New Republic piece and recent judicial opinion on Indiana and Wisconsin’s.  Both of these were penned, of course, at a time when same-sex marriage had become common social practice.

More than ever before, couples  of all stripes are demanding equality, freedom, and recognition in their marriages, and are refusing to abide by laws that lag behind.

As memoirist Liza Monroy says, “Until gender-neutral marriage is federally recognized, there is still a ways to go.”  She continues, “[I]t’s not a ‘gay’ issue.  It’s a human rights issue, an ‘everyone’ issue.”

This image is from an inspiring presentation I recently attended at a major corporation.  It was given by Denise Norris, who presents worldwide on the topic of gender authenticity and expression.  The talk was incredibly effective.  So often discussions about gender can seem abstract and esoteric.  But Norris connected with the entire crowd of professionals, awakening them to an immediate and intuitive understanding of how issues of gender expression and perception in the workplace apply to absolutely every one of us.

Norris’ work can help us flesh out what Title VII really means by discrimination based on “sex stereotyping,” in clear, accessible, human terms. To begin with, consider all of your reactions to the image.

In the diagram below, Norris puts language to the gender cues you are responding to:

She then introduces a model to articulate how we all send and receive gender cues all the time; consciously or not.

The slide below depicts the various factors that influence the gender cues we send to other people.

Some of these influences on our gender expression are hard-wired–e.g., sexual orientation, gender identity–and so the cues we send are involuntary. Denise used a great analogy to explain how these aspects of self, our orientation, cannot be changed saying:

You can’t kill yourself by holding your breath.  You’ll just pass out, and then start breathing again.  (Trust me, I’ve tried.)  So, you can communicate a different orientation or identity for an indeterminate amount of time; this is how we distinguish between expression, and identity/orientation.  You can monkey with your gender expression depending on the situation, just as you can monkey with your breathing when you talk.  But you can’t change your identity or orientation any more than your need to breathe.

Some of these influences are outside of us: e.g., gender stereotypes.  And in the flicker of each moment, each situation–e.g., social, professional–we consider the potential rewards or penalties for our gender expressions.  In some cases we voluntarily send these gender cues hoping for a specific result, but as Denise articulates in her analogy, there are many ways in which we just can’t control what we send.

Then there’s the person on the receiving end:

When you are in this position you are decoding the gender cues you receive from another person.  You use influences outside of your self–e.g., stereotypes, social circumstances–as well as those that are internal: e.g., your own sexual and gender orientations.  You engaged in this very process in this very way just now, while observing the image of the person above.

Trouble occurs when the observer of another person believes their perceived gender violates gender rules: i.e., the person they see presents with a non-conforming gender expression.  This is when people get fired without justification; are mistreated when applying for a driver’s license; are not allowed to go to the prom with a date of their choice etc.  This form of discrimination forces us to contort ourselves, to hold our breath and hide our gender expressions for fear of being treated unlawfully and unfairly; what I call don’t act, don’t tell. (I’ve written about this here, here, and here).

The Department of Labor’s announcement revokes don’t act, don’t tell.  It is now up to us to follow Denise Norris’ lead and put words to our own experiences of gender.  This is how we might hold DOL to their proposed standard: to protect us all from sex stereotyping.

Copyright Mark O’Connell, L.C.S.W.

Slides, Copyright Denise Norris

This piece was first posted on Mark O’Connell’s Psychology Today column, “Quite Queerly.”

In Harvey Fierstein’s Tony nominated play, “Casa Valentina”, men embody women. Or rather they reveal themselves through women’s clothing, mannerisms, and identities. Set in 1962 and based on real events at a Catskills resort, the story follows (self identified) straight men who escape the constraints of their everyday lives through opposite gender identifications. Under the masterful direction of Joe Mantello, the varied, mellifluous, and vibrant ways these men come to life as their  alter egos emboldens us to question the word identity itself. And the roles gender plays in it.

As psychoanalyst Adrienne Harris writes, “Some…are caught up in the losses and emptiness of identity, some in the deep enmeshment of body and psyche, and some in the sliding and playful paradoxes of performance and authenticity.”

The men in the play are initially caught up in the deep enmeshment of body and psyche, as their coherence as a group depends upon strict rules when dressed in their female embodiments: e.g., they must address each other by their chosen female names. This doesn’t leave room for recognizing the losses and emptiness of identity, as we witness the novice newcomer, Jonathan, getting ignored as (s)he makes her/his virginal entrance as “Miranda,” fumbling to the dinner table unkempt. But when Miranda attempts to make a coy exit, empathy and a strong sense of play spontaneously take hold of the seasoned cross dressers. They all agree to give her a makeover together, emphasizing the playful paradoxes of performance and authenticity with regard to identity, despite their rules.

And here is where the production becomes magical, luring us into the characters’ secret, enchanted world; their “garden of eden,” as one of them refers to it. This is not Rupaul’s Drag Race; they are not trying to outperform one another. During this sequence you get the sense that these men-as-women are being rather than doing. As each of them delights in decorating Miranda in their own unique, authentic, and playful way, we begin to forget who’s a man, who’s a woman, and who cares. One could appreciate here Adrienne Harris’ suggestion that gender is not rigid, fixed, or binary, but rather that it is “softly assembled.” We become absorbed in the shared playfulness among the characters, particularly in the ways they shower Miranda/Jonathan with loving recognition. As Harris writes, “There is a deep expansiveness that comes from recognition and belonging, and there are the quirky spurts and frissons when the unexpected, the transgressive, the novel emerge into view.”

But as with any story with a “garden of eden” a snake must slither in to keep things real. Before dinner is over, the game of dress-up becomes one of Axis and Allies as a discussion about a rule to ban gays from joining their revelry fractures the group. The two leaders rigidly defend the “no queer’s allowed” policy, effectively turning the soft light of their rarefied, idyllic play space into one more common and harsh.

Founding psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s theories may help to explain this split between “good” straight crossdressers and “bad” gay men. As I have written elsewhere, Klein theorized that in states of anxiety–such as being a “straight” man who feels the need to secretly dress as a woman–we split self and other. We create a them versus us, pushing away feelings of vulnerability, dependency, and need. In such moments, we fail to hold both “good” and “bad” feelings–we continue to split and project rigid notions of “good” versus “bad,” “masculine” versus “feminine,” “straight” versus “gay.” A current example of such splitting is the palpable transphobia that runs through the LGBTQ communities.

The climax of “Casa Valentina” erupts in Act II, during a festive dance party when one of the men kisses Miranda, causing her to instantly split by turning back into Jonathan with an aggressive, defensive, punch. The party is over.

In 1991, nearly thirty years after the play takes place, psychoanalyst Virginia Goldner argued that “gender coherence, consistency, conformity, and identity are culturally mandated normative ideals” and that “to conform to their dictates requires the activation of a false-self system.” The play makes this point as its unsettling conflicts are born out of the characters’ rigid conformity to normative ideals, causing them to uphold a brittle, ultimately destructive, ”false” sense of self: e.g., as unquestionably “straight” men by day and as women with entirely different biographies by night. They could take a page from Goldner, who suggests that “the ability to tolerate the ambiguity and instability of gender categories is more [desirable] than the goal of “achieving” a single, pure, sex-appropriate view of oneself.” Twenty some odd years after Goldner penned her article we are still in need of its message.

Thinking back on the enchanting, dreamy delights of the play’s Act I, reminds us that the characters had within them the capacity to tolerate the ambiguity of gender categories that Goldner envisions. To “stand in the spaces” between genders, to invoke psychoanalyst Philip Bromberg, or as I say, to play in the spaces: maintain reverie while also embracing the painful need to negotiate self states. How can we find this capacity within ourselves?

Perhaps playing in the spaces becomes possible when play is inclusive (of men, straight or gay, and of women, however they dress, behave or identify). When Jonathans are allowed to wear dresses and heels without being forced to be called Miranda. When unkempt rookies can be engaged–playfully, empathically–without the shaming pressure of being either a dapperly dressed man or a glamorously dressed woman and nothing in between. When play can take the form of a mellifluous dance of various bodies, minds, experiences, conflicts, and identifications, all at the same time, without having to crescendo to one abrupt, violent, necessarily definitive climax. Such a climax makes for an evocative ending to a great, thought provoking play, but as inspiration for our own lives we might look to the gauzy-lit, ambiguous, revelry, of “Casa Valentina’s” Act I.

Bromberg, P. (1998). Standing in the Spaces. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.

Goldner, V. (1991). Toward a Critical Relational Theory of Gender. Psychoanal. Dial., 1:249-272.

Harris, A. (2009), Gender as Soft Assembly. New York, Routledge.

O’Connell, M. (2014): “Review of A Kid Like Jake,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 62: 363-371.

I posted eight images for my first TBT (Throwback Thursday): a weekly social media ritual during which users “share” photos from the past. This internet holiday provides a thin veil for the vain, arbitrary, impulse to post any old pic of one’s own face. It’s popular. But I myself had never before indulged in sharing my younger visage with all of my “friends.” Why now? And why eight?

Could it be the melancholy I was feeling, having just gotten some devastating news? The fact that it was mid April and still so so cold? The Spring holidays inspiring themes of death, memory, and rebirth? Maybe all of the above…but there was something more: an inextricable pang of grief and an unusually heightened desire for connection.

The photos I posted were from a professional production of Romeo and Juliet in which I played Romeo. I accompanied the pics with this message:“Before my dream to be a therapist came true, this one did.” I added the hashtags: #TBT, #Romeo, #HappyBdayShakespeare (It was his birthday after all, I had at least that warrant for this bit of narcissism). It was days before I realized the production took place that very week, twelve years earlier. And that my father had passed away, abruptly, shockingly, exactly one year before that.

Looking again at the pictures I had chosen to share, I saw beyond their superficial finish; behind the sparkle of my twenty four year old self, costumed as the best romantic leading man ever written. Inside my eyes in each photo was an urgent need to express extreme love, longing, and the brazenness to dream. I could also trace expansive feelings of grief. The shock and horror of abrupt loss.

These emotional memories live in my body. So too do memories of a creative act of survival and a survivor’s act of creativity.

In posting the pics I suppose I wanted my friends (and friends”) to know that creativity is survival. A way for us to move forward without having to forget our past. Through the act of creating we transform loss, passion, and need into art. And by sharing our art we might access similar emotions in the bodies of other people; wake them into life; inspire, and encourage them to use their own pain to create their own art. Such sharing is how we help each other to face life.

When my father died without warning in 2001, I was kicked out of a self-involved stupor and roused into perspective. As a young actor in New York, struggling to find my footing, it was too easy to waste time fixating, neurotically, on meaningless dead ends: e.g. How do I break into commercials? Why is so-and-so on Broadway and not me? Why am I the only actor in the history of actors who hasn’t appeared on Law and Order?! But my father’s passing connected me instantly and deeply to the reason I wanted to act in the first place. I wanted to share the experience of my challenged, flawed, and impassioned, existence with other people. In the form of a story they would all understand.

I made a deal with my late father: I would move on to another career if need be (I had always wanted to be a therapist) if I had the chance to play Romeo. If only once! One year later I got the job. And I kept his picture in the room I was staying for the run of the show.

The fact that I was fired up to portray a hot blooded Shakespearean character at that time is likely more than a coincidence. A newstudy called ‘William Shakespeare as Psychotherapist’ suggests that Shakespeare’s plays, which often feature intensely passionate, flawed, self reflective, characters, might have helped his audiences access their own unconscious–in the way Sigmund Freud would do years later.

Also another recent study entitled, ‘How Shakespeare Tempests the Brain’ suggests that Shakespeare may have been an early neuroscientist. The paper discusses how his heightened language continues to help actors and audiences get his meaning on several levels at once. I must have had a sense that portraying Romeo would allow me direct access to my severe heartache through those wonderful words, and also afford me the ability to connect intimately with an audience.

To this day feelings of grief for my father are entangled with memories of connecting to other people via creativity. Perhaps this explains my impulse to “throwback” all of those photos on that cold, April, Thursday.

Have I just composed a flowery excuse for posting some pictures of myself? Probably. But just as Shakespeare’s plays have always proven, we benefit from creatively sharing with one another our dreams, joys, pain, loss, imperfections, and self reflections.

“If they smell gay on you, it’s over!”

So declared a prominent casting director to me in my acting days. She was referring to the flat rejection actors face if they “seem gay” at auditions—a professional danger faced by all actors whenever they enter the room regardless of how they identify—gay, straight, or otherwise. At the time, I didn’t realize how prescient her words were.

The very same statement could apply to people around the world—in Africa, Russia, and portions of the United States—wherever it is legal to discriminate against LGBT people. But who determines “gayness,” and based on what criteria? Sight? Sound? Smell?

Anti-gay laws have metastasized globally over the past few years and now prescribe a variety of consequences for being—or seeming—gay. They range from the death penalty to imprisonment, public lashing, or employment or consumer discrimination. While frightening in their range of punishments, these laws share one thing in common: the implied message that those who seem gay—a highly subjective, perception-based determination—are socially acceptable targets of discrimination and violence.

Nations such as Nigeria and Uganda are obvious examples of this targeting, as their laws insist on punishment for those who engage in “known homosexual acts.” But countries with laws less explicit—Russia anyone?—have still effectively sanctioned general violence against anyone with a “non-traditional” gender presentation. Sadly, the U.S. is no exception. After twenty years of repeated introduction and subsequent languishing in Congress, our country still hasn’t passed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would prohibit employment discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The need for such uniform federal protection could not be more apparent. In the past month alone, the legislatures of Kansas, Arizona, Mississippi, and Georgia have all introduced bills seeking to allow anyone to “stand their ground” and refuse service to people who seem gay if it would compromise their “sincerely held religious beliefs.” (Those bills have all been vetoed or slowed for now, but the cultural message rings loud and clear.)

It’s one thing to be denied a wedding cake by a baker who can’t think outside the Bible. It’s quite another to be physically attacked for simply walking down the street. But the implicit messages in all of these anti-gay bills is that such targeting is fair game—and people are getting the message, right here in America.

Consider the man who last week suffered a broken nose after getting punched in the face by a stranger in a Greenwich Village subway station—just for seeming gay. He was gay, as it turns out, and celebrating his anniversary with his partner of ten years on the night of the attack. But consider alongside this story the one of Jose Sucuzhanay, an Ecuadorian immigrant who in 2008 was beaten to death in Brooklyn by strangers who thought he and his brother – who were holding each other in cold weather on their walk home – seemed gay.

The regular and flamboyantly ignorant statements of Representative Steve King’s (R-Iowa) remind us how those perceived to be gay can easily become targets of hatred and violence, and how such perception is an essential part of a paranoid, homophobic worldview. In 2012, the Congressman stated that those who are gay or lesbian do not need legal protection so long as they don’t wear “their sexuality on their sleeve” or make “their sexuality public.” Just last week, King implied that victims of anti-gay discrimination are asking for it because their sexuality is “self-professed,” “mutable,” capable of being “willfully changed,” and therefore undeserving of constitutional protections.

Now how many of the LGB or T people you know wear “their sexuality on their sleeve” by engaging in “homosexual acts” in public? Right, me neither.

Representative King is not talking about people having sex in public. Much like the Christian Tennessee pastor who recently stated that God punishes gays and lesbians by making them “effeminate” or “mannish,” the Congressman’s views about perceived sexuality are based upon a person’s gender presentation, i.e. the way one “acts.” His relentless implication being that so long as guys butch it up, and gals femme it up, everyone will be safe. (And, presumably, actors will have a fairer shot at nailing their auditions). I call this pressure to closet oneself Don’t Act, Don’t tell.

But even if we were to accept this oppressive logic, who gets to decide if somebody is acting “too gay”? Whose rubric of gay or straight, masculine or feminine, is being used?

In New Jersey, seeming not-gay apparently means “being a guy,” not being “weird,” not enjoying “peculiar fetishes” like “getting a manicure,” and instead enjoying “good Scotch and a cigar.” In Olympic skating – a seemingly gender non-conforming sport to begin with – seeming not-gay apparently means not wearing a costume with sleeves, if you’re a guy, and always wearing a skirt if you’re a girl. Where do these subjective judgments of perceived sexuality end?

And, more significantly, what happens to those of us who are perceived to be gay, at any given moment?

A client I worked with in my therapy practice suffered facial disfigurement after he was beaten unconscious at a high school party in suburban Connecticut. Not in Uganda, Russia, Arizona, or Mississippi, but a state with marriage equality and good laws that nonetheless got the message that “acting” gay makes someone an acceptable target of hatred and violence. The perpetrator, a teenage male at the party, was heard saying,“I’m going to beat up the gay kid,” while knowing nothing about my client aside from his self- presentation—voice, mannerisms, personality, etc. And when I consider that alone, I’m frightened to think that any one of my straight brothers could have been attacked that night, in just that way, based on just those criteria.

My client continues to live in a state of fear and hyper-vigilance, due to this trauma. As should you. When our own laws discriminate against a particular group, it encourages hatred and violence against that group, which is disturbing enough. But more disturbing yet, when membership in said group is open to subjective perception, it makes targets of us all. Homphobia based on seeming gay makes the world a more dangerous place for every person, however one identifies.

“I don’t” is a strong statement, more so than “I’d rather not” or “I’ll pass for now.” It’s a position, not a preference. It’s also a provocative title for an article about same-sex marriage, like The New York Times‘ Sunday piece “Gay Couples, Choosing to Say ‘I Don’t.'”

The article features LGBT folks who are wary of diving head-first into marriage just because they can, and who want you to be wary too. Fair enough. We should all test the waters before making the choice to dive into anything. But this is where the article (and others like it) has a blind spot. It suggests that most same-sex couples are rushing into marriage with eyes shut or blinded by novelty, and overlooks the fact that, to many of us, the choice of marriage is a highly informed one.

Here are three ways that I find nuptials to be a liberating queer choice — for straight and gay couples alike.

It’s a Choice

Traditionally, marriage may have been predicated on one man dragging a woman by the hair and throwing her at the feet of another man. But it has evolved far from these roots, from women being property to women proposing.

Today women and men are choosing marriage with eyes wide open, having spent years together. Years of arguing and cohabitating and compromising; rupturing trust and repairing it; failing at sex, failing better at sex until getting it righter than a one-night-stand ever could; learning to recognize each other’s emotions and verbalizing them with empathy; surviving deaths and illnesses together; supporting each other creatively in careers and the arts and as parents. We’ve come a long way since the final scene of the 1967 film The Graduate, in which a young couple rails against their parents by breaking up a traditional wedding, only to abruptly commit to each other with blinders on — the way their parents likely did. Now when we say “I do,” we know what we’re getting into. We’re awake at the wheel, fueled by the power to choose.

The word “queer” has always emphasized rousing choice as opposed to sleepwalking conformity. Those who identify as queer might consider this when staking out an “I don’t” posture.

It’s Ironic

Queer sensibility is inspired by the ironic. The Times article quoted the filmmaker John Waters, who said, “I always thought the privilege of being gay is that we don’t have to get married or go in the Army.” The quip grabs attention through its eloquent, provocative irony.

But these days, many couples enter marriage aware of its many ironies. More than ever there exists a queer understanding that weddings are not ends in themselves — or beginnings, for that matter. They are collaborative performances that we stop for on a rocky train ride. This isn’t to say that weddings can’t be fairy-tale bliss, because there’s a glossy theatrical way in which they can. Nor can it be said that weddings aren’t disasters. There’s a backstage (and sometimes an onstage) way in which they always are. But embracing these ironies and multiple realities and negotiating between fantasy and reality — as queer artists and thinkers have always done — is how we make our lives, and our marriages, work.

The juiciest irony of all is the inclusive nature of same-sex marriage, as opposed to its commonly critiqued exclusivity. By participating in marriage, LGBT folks are finding kindred experiences with many straight folks who share in a queer approach to marriage, one that celebrates individuals and individual couples rather than a rigid position, tradition, or dogma.

It Recognizes One of Our Truths

Where there’s queerness, there’s truth. Where there’s queerness, there’s need.

At its core, queerness is not about being deviant for the sake of being deviant or preserving a deviant identity. Queer behaviors, performances, and identities spring from the desire for a life more livable, a life of recognition as we are and not as we’re expected to be. So when we want our primary relationships to be seen, acknowledged, and immediately understood — at Thanksgiving, at the hospital, at parent/teacher conferences, when we need to keep our apartments after our partners die, or at any social gathering when someone simply asks who we are and when we got married — we can appreciate the many ways that marriage allows our truths to be revealed.

As many noted in the Times piece, the law doesn’t change two people’s feelings about each other. I agree. But in our imperfect system, laws are the imperfect means we have to gain crucial recognition of our rights, our dignities, and our truths. One of the most difficult struggles for LGBT folks has been bringing the truth of our lives out from a culturally imposed darkness into light. If being in a long-term relationship with one person is what we want, I can’t think of anything queerer than getting married, to have an event that everyone unequivocally understands to be a “wedding,” by the light of day in front of our families, friends, and communities.

We don’t have to say “I do” to marriage, whether we’re gay, straight, or otherwise. But taking the position of “I don’t” actually stops movement, evolution, and queerness from flourishing.

It’s hot.

So take off all your clothes… or at least the ones you can legally lose in public. A shirt, perhaps? As long as you’re not dining at the Four Seasons, go for it! Guys in New York City do it all the time! And gals? Well…

Last summer — which rivaled this one in its Al-Gore-foreshadowed, end-of-times heat — I was walking on a Manhattan street when I noticed a naked back ahead of me. It appeared to be that of a petite, professional woman. Her shoulder-length, strawberry blonde hair was neatly cut and styled. She wore Capri pants, flats and a small purse over her left shoulder. But unless there were seashells or pasties on the other side, she was completely topless — a fact that the hateful looks of passers-by from the other direction seemed to confirm. Now, the day was a scorcher. Doffing the top is logical, I thought. But is it legal? I didn’t know. I also didn’t know why I cared.

Come to think of it, why did anyone care? The man with the disdainful eyebrows, or the giggling gaggle of teens, or the woman of the hand-on-hip-superiority, dangling cigarette and grave eyes? No one could fathom the woman’s shirtlessness as a right and/or choice, so instead, we all indulged in aggravated confusion. Did she have a costume malfunction on the way to work? (Corporate casual from the waist down, after all.) Were we witnessing a meltdown? Was she insane?

Then I changed the channel from confusion to curiosity. Was she a performance artist? An activist, perhaps? Maybe it’s legal, I pondered, and we’re all the fools! Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding! Yup, with this last thought I was right.

Since 1992, it has been legal for women in New York state to bare their chest in public for non-commercial activity, just as it is for men. Nor is New York alone in this regard: several states have similar laws, and there is a demand for more to follow suit. (Go Topless Day — an annual protest seeking gender equality across the globe — took place earlier this week). Unfortunately, there are far too many people who are ignorant of this law — like me, last summer — and even more people who actively judge and even police women for exercising this right.

Not only did I learn about the law that day, but in under a minute on Google, I also discovered the identity of my agitator-by-default — an activist named Moira Johnston. (Given the legality of bare breasts in New York, it’s worth considering how quickly I found this one particular woman). After reading about Ms. Johnston online, I contacted her via email to pick her brain. She explained that she first chose to go “top-free” during a yoga class because:

“I simply wanted to exercise without a shirt. When other adults responded by complaining, I realized it is an issue that our culture may need to address. I made a choice to regularly demonstrate in public after that experience.”

When I asked Johnston why she thought people often react angrily to her as a top-free pedestrian, she said, “[i]t threatens their sense of the status quo, and is therefore intimidating.” Johnston also added there are many people who “view exposing the female body as an overtly sexual or flirtatious act” and are therefore threatened by it. Her observation poses an important question: Would bare breasts be threatening to us if we hadn’t been conditioned to blame male sexual impulses on the female body, and thus brainwashed to fear female sexuality, since the dawn of time? On every continent, in every culture, and within every major religion? An online video interview with Johnston (which has since been taken down) exemplified this internalized demonization of the body female. While Johnston discussed her choice to be top-free in New York’s Union Square, several pedestrians abruptly approach her, including a woman who cries out, “Jesus don’t like that!”

Really? As a friend of mine quipped, “Did Jesus not breastfeed?” How did this woman know what Jesus likes? Why wouldn’t Jesus like the sight of a woman’s breasts? Was this irritated bystander implying that Jesus liked boys? Or does her statement imply something more complex than even she was aware, something we see in almost every religion that encourages women to cover their skin: namely, that women’s bodies are a malevolent, seductive disruption of male power? But if this was her point, how interesting — disturbing? — that a woman appointed herself the “breast police” while simultaneously, arguably, a victim of the same regime.

The impact of social power on all of our systems — religious, political, psychological — is easily overlooked. If people never challenged the status quo, women and African-Americans would still be disenfranchised, we would have no female rabbis or ministers, and homosexuality and transgender identifications would still be considered mental “disorders.” Yet despite these formerly controversial milestones that are very much today’s “normal,” we still cling tightly, and lazily, to other social norms in ways that unjustly police our neighbors, even within our own communities.

By doing so we also contribute to hate crimes, if only inadvertently. As President Obama recently pointed out in his famous impromptu speech on the shooting of Trayvon Martin, we remain in the dark if we fail to link common prejudice (nervously clutching a purse when a black man walks onto an elevator) to needless violence (Trayvon’s death). Parallel links can be made with a host of minority communities, including LGBT people and most certainly women. Too many times have we heard violent crimes against women explained by the words, “she asked for it.” When we operate from a place of bias, rather than curiosity, we may unnecessarily, even egregiously, take “police work” into our own hands.

But change is on the horizon. After being arrested and detained for “indecent exposure” in May 2012, and repeatedly informing NYPD officers, in her own words, that “it is LEGAL for females to go top-free, just as males may do,” Moira Johnston filed action against the city for false arrest. Nine months later, in February 2013, Johnston reports that:

“The NYPD did send out a notice at 10 consecutive roll calls to inform police that it is legal, and that topless females are not to be subject to punitive action if a crowd forms around them. It is a police officer’s duty to protect the top-free person and disperse the crowd accordingly.”

Can we all agree to send a copy of that memo to the police within us? Imagine a group of women enjoying the summer sun top-free in a public park. Undisturbed. No controversy. No activists, and no breast police. Just people enjoying the freedom they’re entitled to, and the rest of us focusing not on them, but on the option we have to do the same.