How to Explain Those Topless Pride Parade Photos to Your 6-year-old

Every closet has its skeletons, even the one you came out of long before you created this inquisitive child who will soon be thumbing through your photo album of ACT UP, activist, exhibitionist antics. Be prepared to answer when she or he points to the squares of electrical tape covering your nipples in that Pride Parade picture circa 1986, and asks, “Why Mommy? Why?”

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

1. Renting a storage unit for story artifacts you’re not ready to toss (or admit), could save embarrassing and awkward moments in your parenting future. “Be Prepared” may be the Boy Scout’s marching song, but it doesn’t hurt a lesbian either when she’s considering where to stash her blasts from the past.
2. Practice honesty in everything you do, except when white lies work better. If your child is used to topless women at music festivals, use honesty. Six-year-olds are surprisingly sophisticated. If you’ve become a neo-conservative, white collar capitalist who is preaching change from within, you could dodge this bullet by talking up your poverty-stricken early years when you couldn't even afford a shirt on your back or a roof over your head.
3. If you choose honesty, take this opportunity to explain the inequity involved in men being able to go shirtless in public without electrical tape, while women are weighed down by the patriarchal yoke of maidenly modesty. It is never too soon to raise a radical feminist who questions authority.
4. Embrace yourself. If you want your child to accept himself or herself, warts and all, do the same. Gaze at your topless Pride Parade photo—look how young and full of enthusiasm you were, how little tape it took to cover your nipples before two years of pregnancy and nursing took over.
5. Smile, and after your little one goes to bed, ship any other embarrassing evidence to another state.

Tips & Warnings

• If honesty is your favorite policy, but your child has yet to witness a topless woman in a Pride Parade, it might be time for a talk, to prove that you weren’t crazy and an embarrassment to your friends. It is also a good opportunity to discuss the folly of youth, how the past catches up with you, and to ask your kid not to bring the photo to Show and Tell.
• If you’ve chosen the white lie, be prepared to offer the same lie every time your child sees news coverage of Pride Parades each June, and to muzzle old friends and relatives who go on at length about your radical past.
• Expect to be told white lies in the future when you ask your 16-year-old why her skirt is on backward when she comes in after midnight from her date with Brad.
• Teaching your child to question authority means teaching your child to question YOU. Following rules may be traditional, conservative and tame, but handy when YOU are the one enforcing the rules.
• You are your child’s first teacher. Expect some after effects of your explanation, including painful experiments with electrical tape, public nudity and playground confrontations when classmate Billy goes shirtless.
• What goes around, comes around, you rebel-with-a-cause. Don’t be surprised if your little angel becomes a devil for organic farming, marches for reproductive freedom or lives in a Redwood tree when they turn 18.