experience, even from police and doctors. (An older female friend of mine who was raped in 1970 once told me that she tried to talk to a psychiatrist about what happened. He sighed and said, "Really, do you think that's important?") Rape Victim Advocates has always been a network of volunteers who are on-call to come and talk to rape survivors, but since 1974, it has also developed from a fragile activist group into one with funding and political presence.
And on a somewhat different note, S&M community organizing is really quite good. A lot of people don't realize that most S&M community dungeons (unlike the professional dungeons run by sex workers) are nonprofit organizations, kind of like community centers. (No, seriously.) People don't just go to community dungeons to do S&M -- they also go to community dungeons for discussion groups or educational workshops, to learn how to perform certain activities safely.
Much like Jane, the S&M community has also created a network of necessary references: the Kink Aware Professionals list. If you've read my work before, you've probably read about this list, because it had a huge impact on my life and I like to spread the word. S&M activists in San Francisco realized, years ago, that there was a need for lawyers and doctors who understood their lives and wouldn't stigmatize their choices, so they wrote three names on a piece of paper and passed it around. Now, the Kink Aware Professionals list is an international online directory hosted by the nonprofit National Coalition for Sexual Freedom.
Again, it's not like there are no problems in the S&M community; people gossip, people backstab, people fuck up. There's little vetting process for educators or for people who list themselves on Kink Aware Professionals, and a lot of people run kink classes at least as much from a desire for status as from a desire to educate. But still, I think the S&M community is engaging in positive activism... more than a lot of us even realize.
This was a lesson that really hit home for me when I spent a year in Africa working on HIV mitigation. One of the reasons international aid is so complicated is that figuring out how to help a community that's not yours is incredibly hard. A lot of well-meaning Americans (including myself) go abroad with little understanding of how hard it is. The reality is that assisting with, for example, public health in a foreign place entails learning the social fabric of that country in a way that outsiders can only do with tons of sustained effort... and we're still unlikely to be as good as someone who grew up there. One of the reasons -- maybe the biggest reason -- I left was that it was so obvious to me that I was a better activist in the USA... even when I wasn't trying to do activism. (When I was there, I received one letter from an American girl asking for advice on how to do African activism. My advice to her can be summarized as, "It's harder than you think, and you might consider staying home where you're awesomer.")
When HIV began destroying the gay community, the most effective and important measures to curb it came from people like Richard Berkowitz, the actual gay activist who wrote a safer sex pamphlet on his home typewriter and then distributed it by hand. They saw a need and they did something about it. Just like Jane. Just like S&M educators.
You are probably already part of more communities than you might realize. If you go to a university, you're part of that community. Whether you live in a city neighborhood or a
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