Category Archives: nudity ban protests

STAND UP FOR BODY FREEDOM – NUDITY BAN PROTEST – SATURDAY, MAY 17 @ 12 NOON @ JANE WARNER PLAZA

Please join us for another protest against the San Francisco nudity ban the day before Bay to Breakers. If you have any friends who are coming to town to join Bay to Breakers nude please let them know about our protest. I strongly encourage you to go fully nude at bay to Breakers despite the ignorant comments made by the SFPD chief of police who thinks he is above the law. Nudity is legal at Bay to Breakers.

We really need to help Scott Wiener lose in the next election which is right around the corner, so please join us as we expose the ugliness of his legislations, his corruption and hypocrisy.

Help us spread the word and make noise to let the City know who is in charge, let them know it is NOT Scott Wiener. By the way, to learn more about Scott Wiener’s Republican puppet-master Thomas Coates who has attempted to eliminate rent control in the whole state of California Google their names together: “Thomas Coates + Scott Wiener”.

It is currently legal to be topless (or topfree) for women in San Francisco. So please join us and take your top off or take it all off!

Whether you like to be naked or not please join us – we love you all!

Here is a video of the past protest on International Women’s Day, March 8:

Nudity Ban Protest on International Women’s Day – March 8, 2014 – Jane Warner Plaza, San Francisco from gypsy gypsy on Vimeo.

We need your help – please donate to help us pay our lawyer who is representing us in the Federal lawsuit against the City of San Francisco. (go to upper right corner of this page to donate)

SPEECH BY GYPSY TAUB at the nudity ban protest on May 17:

Dear friends, dear body freedom supporters,

Police State is here in case you haven’t noticed.

San Francisco chief of police Greg Suhr announced the other day that nudity is not OK at Bay to Breakers. It is interesting to note that our chief of police is now above the law.
When the infamous nudity ban was passed against the will of the majority we were all promised that the City would allow nudity at city-permitted events. This exemption was waved like a flag every time concerns were raised about freedom of expression and our long standing tradition of tolerance and liberation. However, as it turns out, the promise to allow nudity at city-permitted parades was nothing but a smoke screen to cover up the real agenda of sexual and cultural oppression and gentrification.

As soon as the nudity ban was passed strange things started to happen. Bay to Breakers, the biggest city-permitted event that was nudity friendly, lost their sponsor. What a strange coincidence! And then Gay Pride Parade started expressing anti-nudity sentiments and saying that nudity wasn’t welcome there any longer. Another strange coincidence!

I personally applied for event permits 8 times. Not once was a permit issued. Every time a new ridiculous excuse was used to deny the permits including the argument that nudity is illegal – catch 22. We have also been told that the streets of the Castro are too narrow for 20 nudists to march on. We have been told that our events were unsafe for cars. In other words, the sky is the limit when it comes to lies and corruption at the SFPD and the office of the City Attorney Dennis Herera who are working together. Their conspiracy against our constitutional rights becomes very obvious from the way the City Attorney lawyers behave at court hearings in our federal case against the City.

On February 1st we were having a protest and one of our protesters, Gameli Anumu, was literally assaulted by a group of police officers who threw him on the ground, handcuffed him multiple times behind his back, shoved his face into the concrete numerous times and threw him in the police van without offering him any medical help even though he was bleeding– all because he didn’t get dressed in 5 minutes. Not only was that an act of terrorism on the part of the SFPD, it was also a blatant violation of the 1st amendment that guarantees us freedom of artistic and political expression. The nudity ban does not apply to constitutionally protected events because the US Constitution is above any state law or city ordinance. But apparently the chief of police Greg Suhr believes that he is more important than the founding fathers. He also thinks that he has the authority to create new legislation as he goes. Who elected Greg Suhr and who gave him such authority? Even the mayor can’t just make up laws based on his personal ignorance. Even the mayor shares his authority with the Board of Supervisors. However, our chief of police Greg Suhr feels that he is above the mayor, above the Board of Supervisors and above the founding fathers. And most importantly, he thinks he is above the people of San Francisco. Greg Suhr needs to resign for violating the constitution and for his abuse of power.

And now a few words about Scott Wiener, another self-proclaimed tyrant who thinks he is more important than the founding fathers.

While running for Supervisor, Scott Wiener and Mark Farrell were both bought off by a wealthy Republican real estate developer Thomas Coates. Please Google their names together! A few years back Thomas Coates donated $1 million to abolish rent control in the entire state of California. Then he gave $200,000 to 4 supervisor candidates, 2 of whom were elected – Scott Wiener and Mark Farrell. Wiener and Farrell are selling our city to the highest bidder. Now our city is getting gang banged in every orifice by big developers and big tech industry wallets – Google bus being just one example.

The power brokers have created a great loophole around campaign contribution limits that are supposed to be $500. Third party-run entities have been created and unlimited amounts of money are now being donated through the so-called “election committees” which also makes it much harder to trace who the donors are. This loophole practically turns our government into a corporate whore house. This is why we got a Wiener up our assets.

Our dying city is getting taken over by fascism and greed. San Francisco desperately needs our help.

We all need to wake up and get involved. We need to take back our power from the power brokers, from the Supervisors who have sold us out, from our fake mayor, from our fake Judges, our vile and corrupt injustice system and from all the fake people who have moved to our city out of boredom and are now trying to crush our free spirit. Everyone who has moved here with the intent to turn San Francisco into a big shopping mall and Disney Land needs to go back to where they came from. We don’t need ignorant people who are proud of their fascist world view to come to San Francisco and attack us for our freedoms that we have spent centuries cultivating. To every prude who flips out about a nude person I say: “Get out of San Francisco and move to a deserted island because nobody on this planet deserves to be subjected to your abuse.”

By the way, I strongly encourage you all to ignore the self-proclaimed illegitimate tyrant Greg Suhr and to go fully naked at Bay to Breakers tomorrow! It is stated very clearly in the anti-nudity ordinance that city-permitted parades are exempt from the nudity ban. Know your rights and don’t back down!

The nudity ban will go down in history an ugly attempt of the ruling elite to crush free spirit, to destroy our constitutional rights and to reverse the cultural and spiritual progress that has been made in San Francisco since the Dark Ages.

Many people don’t seem to realize quite how deep and how destructive body shame is. Having lived with it all their lives they don’t know and can’t even imagine what life would be like without it.
Can you imagine never having been told that your genitals are dirty, nasty and something to hide and be ashamed of? Can you imagine if we were never forced to wear clothes and were free to decide for ourselves how to dress?

We are used to not having certain freedoms as children, like freedom to drive a car, freedom to travel on our own and other freedoms that would endanger our lives. It is natural to expect that children are too young to enjoy certain freedoms. However, when we grow up we are able to drive, travel, work, marry etc… But there is one very basic freedom that we are NEVER allowed to enjoy in our society – and that is the freedom to choose how to dress. Well, sure, you can decide whether you want to shop at Target or Wallmart – based on how uninformed you are about their human rights violations. But you certainly cannot choose to dress in a way where your genitals and in case of women your breasts are showing.

We go around condemning societies that force women to wear burkas, but how are we any different? We have no choice in how we dress just like those women. It’s just that their dress code is different from ours and somewhat more extreme. But all the laws and all the traditions on this planet that enforce any kind of dress code are in essence mind control operations designed to pump so much fear into our souls from the time of birth that by the time we are adults we function like programmed robots with no will of our own.

The criminalization of the human body becomes an integral part of our lives like the sun and the wind, like death and taxes as they say. By the time we become adults we have long since abandoned our dreams of freedom that we had as kids as we were ripping off the diapers and the clothes that parents insisted on putting on us. By the time we become adults the criminalization of the human body becomes second nature because we already feel like criminals when we are naked.

We have forgotten who we are. We have forgotten why we are here. We have forgotten that we have the power to live our lives in dignity and to control our own destiny. We have forgotten that we were born to be free.

The time has come to free our minds from body shame and to free our bodies from the imprisonment and the tyranny of the dress code created by somebody else. It is time for us to start making our own decisions about what we choose to wear or not to wear. It is time to expose and abandon this ridiculous nasty idea that human body is a crime unless appropriately shamed and well hidden.
When somebody tells me at the beach that my body is nasty I tell them that their mouth is nasty. Attacking people for being nude is not any different than attacking black people for their skin color or attacking gay people for their sexual preferences. These kinds of attacks are nothing short of hate speech. It’s time to recognize this unacceptable psychopathic behavior for what it is – it is a form of aggression, it is a form of hate speech and it is criminal. No one has the right to attack and threaten me or you for what we do or do not wear.

I have noticed that people who have strong opinions against body freedom always express themselves in a totally psychotic and violent way. They act just like racists and homophobes – they feel that they are so above the rest of us that they can just dump all their emotional garbage on anyone they feel is unprotected. They attack the people they feel are the most vulnerable – the nudists, the gays, people of color, the homeless. There is an international word for such people – they are called fascists. It is exactly that kind of mentality that created the concentration camps and the gas chambers.
Please let’s not let them have their way. Let’s all stand up for ourselves and for each other. If you witness a fascist attacking someone who looks vulnerable and unprotected – please say something. So often people recognize the ugliness of fascism, so seldom do people actually speak up or act against it. Please take your power back! We are all in this together. You are not alone. There are many of us on this planet who believe in a future of dignity, freedom, love and compassion and who are willing to do whatever it takes to create that future for all of humanity.

We have plenty of good friends, neighbors and strangers who believe in a free world and who are tired of oppression. Let’s drop our fears and become active in standing up for what we believe in on every day basis.

We live in difficult times, the times when the struggle between progress and oppression has intensified to the point of an outright war. The fight for the future has become ugly and bloody. Some really want to see humanity suffer and die in agony. But the rest of us who represent the majority, want a beautiful future based on principles of peace, honesty, dignity and freedom. The vast majority of us dream of peace. The vast majority of us dream of a clean, healthy green planet. The vast majority of us want to be free from the thousands of years of war and oppression.

Living in our times can be challenging and even frightening. Fear of the unknown and fear of our own shadow can be unbearably painful. Let’s forgive ourselves for everything that went wrong in our world. Let’s forgive ourselves for every time we didn’t stand up for what we believed in, for every time we fell short of our own moral principles. Let’s be kind to ourselves and each other. Forgiveness and understanding will make us stronger. Let’s face our fears and let’s move past them. Let’s trust in the love of our mother, the Universe. Let’s trust in our own love. Let’s not despair and let’s not give up! Let’s make a commitment to a beautiful future and let’s stand strong.

It is the darkest before the dawn. The dawn is near. Our dawn is near. This is the birthing of the new world, the world that we dreamed of together. Let’s desire it with all our hearts and believe in it with all our might –and we can transform the darkness and walk out into the light. Do not despair, brothers and sisters, for as long as we are true to ourselves and as long as we come from love we are going to win because nothing in this world is more powerful and long lasting than love.

PROTEST SPEECH BY RUSTY MILLS:

In case you wonder why we go to so much effort to denounce this city’s political establishment — the Board of Supervisors, the mayor, and their henchmen in public office — I’ll tell you why.
In February of 2013 it became illegal to be naked in public in San Francisco. Our city’s politicians criminalized this harmless activity because of the complaints of a few sexually-troubled social climbers. The politicians, led by Supervisor Scott Wiener, ignored the opinions of the countless other people who considered public nudity a colorful, free-spirited part of the San Francisco scene. Instead, Wiener and his cohorts created a law that made criminals out of innocent, freedom-loving urban nudists.
Wiener’s anti-nudity law was designed to placate the most neurotic, irrational element of San Francisco society at the expense of everyone else. It catered to well-heeled real estate tycoons worried about the reputation of the neighborhoods where they had invested their money. Wiener’s Law also catered to chronically angry neurotics who are always looking for minority groups to oppress. It catered to a handful of small-business owners who were worried about the effect of public nudity on their most vocal conservative customers rather than on their customer base as a whole.
So our politicians decided that money and irrational attitudes should prevail over freedom and merriment. They decided that the the rights of prudes should prevail over the rights of people to choose their own mode of dress. They decided that prudes and rich people should be able to outlaw anything that they personally don’t like to look at.
That is why we denounce our city’s politicians and consider them to be a poison to the social well-being of San Francisco. For the sake of San Francisco’s future, we urge you to rid the city of these toxic politicians at the next election.