Next Steps
8/14/2025
Dear Community,
Thank you for your patience with us as we continue to work on next steps and attempt to keep you as informed as possible, and an understanding acknowledgement to those who are not feeling patient, but are receiving this anyways. We want to keep you up to date on how we are confronting our place and responsibility as individuals and as an organization within the NYC rope scene. Our hope is that with consistent transparency, accountability, and realignment we can rebuild trust and spark deeper participation in what Temple means and how it is run.
Temple as an entity, and us as individuals, are focusing our work to be about building better boundaries and agreements for what Temple is, its mission and expectations, and how to respond when hurt and harm inevitably happen. This includes decentralizing and sharing power, interrogating our biases and blind spots, not making excuses for our mistakes, and taking action in response by creating better practices that can help us support those who were, or might be in the future, harmed by our choices.
To start, we are going to share how classes and events will be running in the near future, as it is the easiest piece to clarify. The core team of Temple will be downscaling some of our offerings to focus on accountability and restructuring how we operate in leadership. Our consent and basic safety classes for new folks and beginners will continue while the core curriculum classes will slow down to individual capacity. However, local, national, and international teachers, who are scheduled to teach at Temple, would be harmed financially for actions that they are not responsible for if operations were halted. All information is being shared to allow both instructors and participants the opportunity to make informed choices about working with Temple, and to ensure they are not penalized by our situation. We also welcome community members who have interest in offering classes, facilitating community oriented events, or hosting The Hang to reach out, as we recognize that cutting all programming would create a vacuum in learning and practicing opportunities for the larger scene.
We are working with a community member named Blue, who many of you know. For those that do not; Blue is a white queer trans abolitionist who studies communication, assists with community conflict, and is a leather/rope freak. They have consented to being named as part of our process and are open, within their capacity, to answer questions you may have related to their work with us. You can reach them here. Blue is offering us guidance on approaching accountability and creating better practices for the organization.
What follows are the active steps we are taking thus far - this is long term work and what we are sharing is not the ending, but the process as it looks right now.
Incident Reporting: We are finalizing details for an independent third party to handle incident reports, so they don’t come to us directly. Temple will be working primarily with Emma (EdD (they/them) a consent educator, trauma-informed researcher and training developer and t4t freak) and Pink ( LMSW (she/her) Social Worker, play party producer, program development and evaluation nerd, and slutty, kinky pervert) on our reporting process as a third-party provider; and they are also going to support us in reviewing our policy and procedures in terms of response and handling of incident reports. Additionally we are working to gather community organizers, professional mediators, and mental health practitioners who can take part in receiving, processing, and responding to reports in the long term, utilizing their expertise to support those submitting reports to Temple, while always keeping in mind the need for them to understand kink environments and dynamics.
Mediation/Facilitation: we hired a professional mediator to facilitate conversations between any/all of us with anyone harmed directly by us, while at Temple, or as a result of our actions towards them or broader community. We have two dates on the calendar with Logina and Katarina of Queering Existentialism to start what we hope will become an ongoing series of intentional, mediated gatherings with the community. Initial dates are September 24th, 7pm, and October 19th, 3pm. Sign up details will follow as we establish a location for the gatherings. Community members can also choose their own mediator to facilitate conversation with us.
At this time we are not seeking any facilitated process that involves Bear directly, though we hope they will engage meaningfully in accountability work on their own. We are however, open to discussing retaining a mediator to also support community members who are interested in mediation with Bear.
Website Interface: It has come to our attention that navigating how to report incidents or other feedback/requests/suggestions is not clear or direct enough via our website. We will be updating the interface to be more accessible, including adding transparency around how any reports or other communique is processed. Importantly, none of us are professional web designers and would love and accept any help from knowledgeable community members to increase UX.
All emails concerning community input or participation are directed to Masha and Beth, a communication and mediation professional.