“Community Outreach” originally appeared in Trans Survivors Zine: Healing in Action, published by FORGE.

Big gay non profit is rough with me. Breaks my limits hard and soft alike. Apologizes with day-old bagels and wilted cream cheese in the breakroom, left over from a mandatory training about pronouns. They tell us that we’ll get through these trying times together, and that now is the time for us to come together as a community. 

Is it good for the community, for us to get fucked together, side by side by side? It’s a sacred act to witness what the destruction makes of someone just like me. My Domme takes a beat from being a terrorizing pain top to be terrified, to be terrorized by what she loves being taken from her: lover, family, friends, work, ‘mones, community, life. 

It’s a sadistic scene gone too far, the kind that would make anyone safeword. There are no safewords in big gay non profit. 

It’s all about community and how community is so important. And it’s true because we’re all we have. And it’s exhausting because how long can we keep passing the same $20 back and forth before it crumbles into dust? It’s also confusing, because no one can define what this nebulous community is.

I recently found out the organizer of a t4t sex party works for the same big gay nonprofit as me. They saw my partner beating me with a heart shaped paddle and smiled sweetly, telling us what a beautiful couple we make. 

Are we community? 

Are we coworkers?

 Are we an HR nightmare ménage à trois?

 Is now a good time to mention my partner also works for big gay nonprofit and it’s where we fell in love?

Is it good for the community, to get fucked? To barely make rent in exchange for the privilege of hearing liberals tell me I’m doing SUCH important work during these trying times?

I get a break from holding space to find there are no spaces left to hold me, nowhere to go where the community isn’t also escaping to.

The bagels taste like shit but I eat them anyway. My world crumbles in my hands but I show up with a glue stick. I am nothing if not a resilient masochist.  

Rocky Halpern (they/he/she) is a Queens, NY based writer, social worker, clown admirer, and tenderhearted Pisces rising. Their work has appeared in A Public Space, Glassworks Journal, Uncharted Magazine, and other various publications. Rocky is the 2019 recipient of the Bette Howland Nonfiction Award. Find Rocky on instagram @rockyehal.