CITY HALL — A queer, transgender performance artist is suing the city over the right to bare her breasts in bars and other venues serving alcohol.
Bea Sullivan-Knoff filed a federal suit against the city Wednesday charging sex discrimination in allowing men and not women to bare their chests under the current liquor-license law.
"There's no place for this law," Sullivan-Knoff's attorney Mary Grieb said in a news conference at City Hall on Wednesday outside the offices of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who is also named in the suit. "It treats women and trans people differently from men for no good reason.
"There's no reason men can be topless in an establishment and women can't." she added.
Sullivan-Knoff said it was essential to go topless in some of her performances to express her "vulnerability," as a woman and as a trans person, and to "reclaim my own empowerment onstage."
In an earlier statement on the suit, Grieb said, "In 2016 in a city as diverse as Chicago, there should not be an ordinance reflecting 19th-century ideas about sex and gender. Moreover, Ms. Sullivan-Knoff is a 23-year-old engaged in the very difficult task of making a living as a young performance artist, yet has been prevented from performing deeply personal pieces due to the city’s transphobic and blatantly sexist ordinance that should be an embarrassment to a modern city in the 21st century."
The suit cites language in the city's liquor-license statute stating: "No person licensed under this chapter shall permit any employee, entertainer or patron to engage in any live act, demonstration, dance or exhibition on the licensed premises which exposes to public view ... any portion of the female breast at or below the areola thereof."
The suit charges that "reinforces archaic stereotypes and overbroad generalizations of the impropriety of women’s breasts versus men’s breasts." It cites state and federal equal-protection statutes, as well as the First Amendment.
The Law Department declined to comment on a pending lawsuit.
According to the complaint, Sullivan-Knoff has been prevented from performing a piece in Chicago in which she appears onstage wrapped in a sheet and with a paper bag reading "Touch Me" over her head. After dropping the sheet, audience members are then given five minutes to touch her before she removes the bag.
"It was very much an act of bravery and vulnerability on my part," Sullivan-Knoff said, adding that responses to the piece were "over the moon."
Sullivan-Knoff rejected the proposal to make men cover their chests as well. "That would be going backward, which is not what we're looking for," she said.
Grieb said the suit sought to end topless restrictions on performers, employees and patrons at places with liquor licenses. She said it was not about public nudity, adding, "That's a separate case."
Sullivan-Knoff's assertion that breast-shaming is sexist and dated is echoed by a growing movement called "Free the Nipple," which has been endorsed by feminists and celebrities who want to stop the sexualization of women's breasts.
For more neighborhood news, listen to DNAinfo Radio here:
