The conversation is over. My friend and I are sitting in the particular stillness that follows something hard, the kind where the next thing hasn’t become possible yet. I know how to be here. I’ve learned, over years of this kind of work, how to stay inside difficulty without flinching toward resolution, and that knowing didn’t go anywhere when I closed my practice. That was partly the point. The practice closed so that this could happen differently, in the register of friendship rather than the session note, the billing code, the annual registration, the showing up that doesn’t require an intake form.
Which means I also know what comes next. I know how to locate a resource, how to identify which organizations are genuinely adapted and which ones will make someone feel worse for having tried. For this friend, this need, I reach for RÉZO, Montréal’s primary sexual health organization for GBQ men, before I’ve finished the thought. The body already moving toward the answer while the mind is still formulating the question. Something that becomes reflex when you’ve been inside a community long enough, when you’ve given enough of yourself to a particular ecosystem of care to know where things live inside it.
I open the site. The navigation has changed. The page has moved, nested now under a sub-sub-section I have to locate before I can locate what I came for. I find it.
Les inscriptions sont fermées pour le moment.
My body receives this before I do. Something settles low in the chest: not sharp, the specific weight of something already known arriving as confirmation. The body has a grammar for this particular texture of disappointment, has developed it over years and in relation to this specific institution. I stay on the page longer than I need to. Dates à venir. I close the tab.
My friend is still there in the way people stay with you after a difficult conversation. Still needing something. I sit with the quality of not having it to give, which is different from not knowing it existed, different from not having tried.
I’ve known RÉZO since 2017. That summer, I was an outreach worker for their sex worker program, young, newly arrived in this kind of work, learning what it meant to move through communities the state had abandoned and then appointed institutions to monitor. The work itself was real. I was doing harm reduction with people who had built their own forms of survival inside that precarity, and something in me recognized that, was drawn toward it, was learning from it. That part I kept.
There was a supervisor. His relationship to Black men’s bodies was legible to me that summer before I had full structural language for it. The institution had chosen not to have language for it either, which is its own kind of position. What surrounds that kind of behaviour inside a professional context is often more instructive than the behaviour itself. The silences. The way certain things circulate without being named, without anyone being required to account for them. The particular atmosphere of an organization that’s decided its progressive commitments are self-evident and therefore require no examination. I was a young Black worker inside that atmosphere, doing real work, learning two things simultaneously: what genuine care looked like when it reached people the state had abandoned, and what an institution looked like when it housed harm without naming it. You learn things from what an organization doesn’t say. I filed that knowledge somewhere and kept working.
Training, supervised hours, three provincial registrations, insurance, continuing education requirements, documentation, all of it building toward a practice and toward a growing clarity about what the credential required in exchange for the legitimacy it conferred. It asked me to convert genuine care into something auditable, to route what happened between me and the people who trusted me through frameworks designed to make it legible to institutions rather than useful to people. I stayed inside that structure long enough to do real work and also long enough to understand what it was costing. I closed the practice deliberately in order to hold this differently. In the register of community, of friendship, of care that doesn’t require the state’s recognition to be real. I believed the infrastructure for that kind of work existed. That belief is what I was carrying when I opened the tab.
In 2020 RÉZO hired me to lead a community needs assessment. The question was precise: why were Black queer and trans people structurally absent from the organization’s users, and what would it actually take to change that. I consulted 38 people, 21 in individual interviews and 17 through an online survey, with trans and non-binary participants deliberately over-recruited because the existing research on Black MSM health had excluded them as a matter of course. The consultation ran mid-COVID, which meant planned group discussions were cancelled, interviews moved to screens, and anonymity was compromised for participants who weren’t out because payment required a name attached to a cheque. These constraints are named openly in the report because that kind of transparency is part of what makes a document trustworthy rather than authoritative.
What the community described was specific. They talked about walking into RÉZO and feeling immediately that the space had been built around someone else, that the staff’s frame of reference didn’t include the particular ways anti-Blackness and homophobia operated together in their lives, that being Black and queer in Montréal’s LGBTQ+ spaces meant being hyperlegible in some registers and invisible in others. They described the sexual fetishization of Black men as a documented harm operating not at the margins of those spaces but at their centre. They described needing something built from the ground up around their actual experience, not retrofitted from programming that had been designed around a different community’s needs entirely.
The report that came from that process wasn’t a set of suggestions. It required a Board composition of minimum 33% racialized members including at least one Black person and at least one Indigenous person. It required anonymous CVs as standard hiring practice. It required mandatory anti-racism training built into onboarding for all staff and volunteers, with documentation, on a schedule the organization would be held to rather than one it could determine for itself. It required a dedicated support group animated by and for Black community members. A public awareness campaign against the sexual fetishization of Black men inside LGBTQ+ spaces, because the community had named that fetishization specifically and the report took them seriously. The specificity was deliberate. The consultation had been thorough. The report matched it.
The document landed. RÉZO received it, the document they’d hired me to produce, and called it “un point-tournant dans l’histoire de notre organisme.” The report is still linked on the Kominote page. Still available to download. The organization’s own words about what this moment represented are still on the record, attached to the page of a program that’s no longer running, below a banner that reads: Les inscriptions sont fermées pour le moment.
Kominote launched in 2021. Discussion groups, individual consultations, thematic workshops covering sexual health, discrimination, mental health, the specific experience of navigating LGBTQ+ spaces that hadn’t been built with Black queer people in mind. An awareness campaign against the sexual fetishization of Black men. RÉZO had asked what the community needed and they’d said, and then they’d come when something genuinely responsive was offered. The community showed up. Twelve people across twenty-five sessions in the program’s second year. Individual consultations running in parallel. People moving from one-on-one support into the group because the group was what they’d been looking for. They didn’t need to be convinced.
Then political appetite shifted. Funding dried up. RÉZO’s own 2024-2025 annual report opens by acknowledging a reduction of sexual health funding. This is real. RÉZO has undergone significant restructuring in recent years, losing substantial staffing capacity across multiple intervention teams. People lost their jobs. Programs lost capacity. Communities lost services that had been built over years. The organization has been navigating a genuine crisis, not a managed inconvenience, and that context belongs in any honest account of what happened next. It does not, however, determine where the cuts landed. That determination is institutional. The funding landscape is genuinely difficult, and it does not explain what happened next. The Chemsex/PnP project expanded during this same period. It received more than 267 hours of individual accompaniment in 2024-2025, two support groups, multiple staff, detailed coverage across several pages of the annual report. Convive, the Spanish-language group for Hispanic GBQ men, is described in the same document as essential and thriving, 182 members, 12 meetings. Funding pressure is distributed unevenly and the distribution is legible if you read the annual reports alongside the Kominote page. Neither the 2023-2024 nor the 2024-2025 report mentions Kominote. Two consecutive years of institutional silence. In that same 2022-2023 report, the last one to mention Kominote, Chemsex/PnP appears for the first time: a new program still in development, four meetings held.
The page stays up. The report stays linked. Les inscriptions sont fermées pour le moment. Dates à venir. The organization keeps the political currency produced by the consultation, the report, the community’s attendance, and sheds the obligation that currency was supposed to carry. This isn’t neglect and it isn’t bureaucratic failure. Neglect would be passive. What this is, is the active maintenance of a progressive reputation built on work the institution is no longer doing, for a community that came to everything Kominote offered and was not sustained. The box is ticked. The community member looking for a group session finds a banner. RÉZO gets to keep the turning point. The community gets dates à venir.
The summer of 2017 is where this grammar comes from. Not a case being built but a way of reading being learned, through the body, before the language caught up. Black presence instrumentalized to produce legitimacy, to signal progressiveness, to access funding, and then the institution withdrawing once the currency has been extracted, leaving the community that produced it without the infrastructure their presence was used to justify. The needs assessment the institution commissioned and praised and didn’t implement. The program the community filled and the institution didn’t sustain. This isn’t a pattern of failure. This is a pattern of extraction, and it’s been operating at RÉZO for as long as I’ve known the organization.
HoT and Kominote were built under the same federal project funding, the first phase of the Avancer alliance, which ran from 2018 to 2022. HoT followed a needs assessment, produced a guide for trans men and transmasculine people having relationships with men, and became a program. The community it was built for came to it. Kominote did the same. Federal project funding is always time-limited. When that first phase ended, both programs hit the same cliff and RÉZO had to decide what to sustain.
The 2024-2025 annual report describes HoT as being in its fourth cohort, nine people enrolled, with plans to rebuild the group for 2025-2026. Its registrations are also currently fermées pour le moment. The difference is that HoT exists in the report: named, accounted for, assigned a future. Kominote doesn’t appear in either the 2023-2024 or the 2024-2025 annual report. Not to note a pause. Not to signal a rebuild. Not once. Two programs, the same funding origin, the same cliff, the same direction of travel while Chemsex/PnP expanded, while Convive grew, while the annual report filled pages with statistics about what the organization chose to sustain. A community’s needs don’t contract because a program’s enrollment does. The pattern isn’t about one program or one community. It’s about which communities RÉZO decided, in practice rather than in stated values, to keep building toward when the federal money ran out.
Architectural decisions are decisions. Convive has its own dedicated portal in RÉZO’s primary navigation, built into the site at the same architectural level as the main sections. The site exists in three languages, structured partly around this portal. Where something lives in a navigation structure communicates institutional priority as clearly as anything in an annual report. Kominote sits under a sub-sub-page of the services section, below a banner that by now you know.
This isn’t a critique of Convive or the community it serves. The contrast isn’t between those communities. It’s between what the institution decided to sustain and what it decided not to, and what that pattern communicates about where Black queer people actually sit in RÉZO’s hierarchy of commitments, as opposed to its stated one.
In 2022 I presented Kominote’s findings at SMASH. Black queer and trans community members had said what they needed, I had documented it, and I brought it to the conference of the organization that had commissioned the work and called it a turning point. That’s the before.
SMASH 2025. A presenter had used photographs of Black people throughout their slides on sex work and health access without once analyzing what being Black meant for the people in those images, for the statistics being presented, for the disproportionate rates of criminalization and healthcare exclusion the data was already showing. I asked, in the room, why racialization had been absent from a presentation that had used Black bodies as its visual evidence. The answer was that there hadn’t been time to get into everything. I said that was a choice, and that the choice didn’t align with the use of those images. The presenter, a white woman, became upset. A white man well known in the space went to her and said, “en tout cas y’était ben énervé,” offering her comfort by reducing what I had said to a matter of my affect. Not the presentation. Not the question. My affect. A Black trans friend who had been at the conference with me heard it and told me. I addressed him directly and in public. What followed was the organizers moving to calm me down — not to address the comment, not to address what any of it meant in a space organized, ostensibly, around the health and dignity of the communities whose images had just been used as backdrop. The angry Black body was the disruption. Everything that had produced the anger was not.
RÉZO didn’t address what happened in any way the community would recognize as meaningful. Nothing reached the people who had been in that room. Nothing suggested the institution understood what the afternoon had revealed about the space it had built.
SMASH 2026. No sessions on Black people. Multiple sessions on chemsex and PnP, across different framings and angles. The conference that couldn’t hold a question about anti-Blackness in 2025 found no place for Black-specific health content in the following year’s program. The 2026 program is the institution’s answer to the 2025 question, more complete than anything said in the aftermath of that afternoon, more honest about institutional priority than any statement of values on the website.
I’ve been carrying what I know about this institution since a summer in 2017. The specific and accumulated kind of knowledge that builds when a body is right about something before the mind has language for it, that builds through years of acquiring the language only to watch it change nothing. I know what it means when an institution commissions a report, calls it a turning point, and files the turning point. I know what it means when a community fills a program and the program isn’t sustained. The body kept the record across all of it. So did I. The difference between those two things has gotten smaller over the years.
My friend is still there. Still in the particular aftermath of a hard conversation, still needing something that should exist, that did exist, that was built specifically for them and for people like them by a process that asked the community what it needed and received an answer and turned that answer into a program and called the whole thing a turning point in the organization’s history. The report that produced Kominote is still on RÉZO’s website. Still linked from the page with the closed registrations. Still available to download. It describes, in the organization’s own commissioned language, exactly what RÉZO was asked to become and exactly what it hasn’t become. The turning point is still there. The program it turned toward is not.I don’t know what my friend will find when they look for support next. I know what I found when I looked for them. The report and the page are both still there, sitting on the same server, attached to the same organization, available to anyone who knows where to look. The evidence isn’t mine. It belongs to RÉZO. They hired me to write it, they praised it, they linked it, and they left it there, attached to the absence it was supposed to prevent. That is the record. It doesn’t require my anger to be legible. It is legible on its own.
