In 2025, I will be co-producing a series of Peer Exchanges online and in person for a variety of groups, organizations, and movements. READ MORE about the individual events and then continue reading for a bit of personal history about my work harnessing peer power.
AND...If you would like to HIRE ME to produce Peer Exchanges for your organization, company, or movement, please EMAIL ME at jason [at] queerlycomplex [dot] com
Photos by Don Bowden of American Legal Video Services from Tree of Change's peer-based workshop Audience Development & Community Engagement at AAACC.
2025 Peer Exchanges
Filthy Studios X Queerly Complex
January, March, May 2025 - Invite Only
Filthy Studios Founder Fivestar and Jason Wyman / Queerly Complex are hosting THREE Peer Exchanges about Project 2025, the adult industry, and how we collectively organize to fight for free expression and sexual liberation.
The First Peer Exchange will focus on understanding and making meaning of what we collectively know about the aims of Project 2025 in censoring, legislating, and politically attacking the intersectional issues of the adult industry, free expression, and trans and queer rights. We will be convening performers, content creators, and advocates with the aim of producing a collective resource guide adult industry professionals (and their allies) can use to help inform their neighbors about the issues impacting our communities. The guide will include a summary of the Peer Exchange, some suggested collective actions, articles, videos, or podcasts that provide deeper analysis, and mutual aid groups to support or get involved with. The goal is a more informed, connected, and mutually supportive network within the adult industry that can be activated and nimbly respond to legislative attacks that may be coming from the Trump administration (and as clearly outlined in Project 2025.)
The two additional Peer Exchanges will be shaped after the first one is hosted in early January.
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EARTH Lab SF X Queerly Complex
February, April, June 2025 -RSVPs coming soon.
EARTH Lab SF (Beth Stephens) and Jason Wyman / Queerly Complex are hosting THREE Peer Exchanges at the new 465 Collective Space to harness the peer power of San Francisco Bay Area Queer Artists to co-create survival tactics, tools, and frameworks.
We, as queer / dyke / fag artists, know that our art / work / collections have been, continue to be, and will likely always be censored by domination, oppression, and tyranny. We will think, dream, and work together to develop tactics that ensure our being / art / work survives these attacks. Each Peer Exchange in this series focuses on a different aspect of queer / dyke / fag survival and uses arts-based activities to generate collective wisdom. We will gather our results into an online resource guide with the participants' consent. This guide will feature a summary of the Peer Exchanges, art activities to aid personal and collective exploration, and suggested material and actions for deeper understanding and analysis. We will autonomously and collectively take action to ensure queer / dyke / fag art / artists are more interconnected, documented, and their work shared, so that it / we survive long into the future.
TOPIC ONE: Strategies for Hope and Joy - How do we remain hopeful and practice joy even while under assault? Using the concept of a "recipe card," we will invite all who attend to create their recipe for hope and joy, sharing "ingredients" and "actions" with others. We will compile the recipe cards into a mini cookbook, "The Hope & Joy of Cooking," and publish it via the Culture Tending Commons. Our "cookbook" will be a fabulous outreach and organizing tool, which we will share with other LGBTQIA+ community centers throughout the South and Midwest to convey our collective resources and start strengthening alliances between more rural and urban queers / dykes / fags.
TOPIC TWO: Queer Life Social Security - What kinds of security do we queers need to live (and thrive) in this oppressive world? This question will be the featured topic of our second Peer Exchange, where we will craft our Personal Social Security Cards. We can display these cards should we find ourselves in a place of insecurity or emergency. They will remind us of who we are, what to do, and who to rely on in case of emergency. E.A.R.T.H. Lab SF and Queerly Complex will compile the tactics, ideas, and strategies generated through this exercise into a Queer Security Tip Sheet and publish it via the Culture Tending Commons. We will also be sharing all of our backend organizing tactics so other queers / dykes / fags can facilitate similar conversations and collective knowledge generation in their communities.
TOPIC THREE: Queer Autonomous Zones for Self Determination - What are the shapes-boundaries of your personal space? How do we negotiate spaces for movement collectively? Participants at this Peer Exchange will begin by using masking tape to define the edges of their personal space. We will then use these edges and physical marks to dig deeper into how we take up and move through sites personally and collectively. We will then distill our conversation into maps, charts, and diagrams that inspire conversations about autonomy, personal and political space, self-determination, and movement. We will publish the results (with consent) via the Culture Tending Commons. Additionally, E.A.R.T.H. Lab SF and Queerly Complex will compile all the maps, charts, and diagrams along with the activity instructions and share them with other organizers, teaching artists, and facilitators to aid them in their classrooms, organizing, and conflict mediation.
Stay tuned to Queerly Complex for how to register.
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AAACC X Tree of Change
February, April, June 2025 - Client-facing
As part of Tree of Change with Crystal Mason, we will be working with the African American Art and Culture Complex to host THREE Peer Exchange Dinners for specific communities crucial the the long-term success and survival of the AAACC and Black Artists in San Francisco. Each dinner will bring together a curated group of individuals to tackle pressing issues such as ensuring cultural autonomy, strengthening local Black arts institutions, and queering the archive. Each will embrace a different art form, and art / work created over dinner will be added to the AAACC's #WeAreBlackDreams Archive to guide its strategic planning process in 2025 and beyond. A final report summarizing all Peer Exchanges, art activities, and art / work collected will be co-published on the Culture Tending Commons.
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Culture Tending Collective & Commons
January, April, July, November 2025 - Sign-Up to Get Registration!
Grounding all of these incredible Peer Exchanges with others are ones that the Culture Tending Collective will be hosting for our community of comrades and Culture Tenders. We will begin with a Space for Dreaming and Discerning in January 2025 post the US Presidential Inauguration. The goal is to give our beings personally and collectively space to pause, dream, and be. This will aid us in discerning what paths we may want to cultivate in 2025.
We will then be hosting three different Peer Exchanges on the What, Why, and How of Culture Tending. In the month prior, we will be launching a Culture Tending Art / Media Activity on Culture Tending Commons, our online platform and publication. We will encourage readers to SUBMIT their art / media, and we will use those submissions as a launching off point for the Peer Exchange. After the exchange is over, we will publish a summary of the event with notes, art / media, and actions that can further our personal and collective understanding of the core concepts of culture tending. It is our way of unflattening perspective and cultivating a more plural understanding of how we talk about and experience the behaviors, patterns, and systems of culture tending.
In Fall 2025, the Culture Tending Collective will host a virtual convening inviting all who have participated in Peer Exchanges to help us co-create more nuance and cultural specificity to our model. The conversation, art / media, and relations gathered and tended to will inform our work for 2026.
To stay informed and get invitations to the Peer Exchanges, please SIGN UP at the Culture Tending Commons.
Here's a video produced by the Youth Development Peer Network from 2008.
"Power through a network of peers."
That was the tagline for an organization I co-directed called the Youth Development Peer Network / Youth Worker: Collective. It was founded by Community Network for Youth Development as part of a Learning Circle model bringing people from all parts of the burgeoning Youth Development Sector together to learn from one another. It started with cohort members, and then quickly grew to be its own project. That's when I joined as a participant and then as an Steering Committee member under the leadership of Jen Fornal.
Jen didn't work directly with young people, and so there was a mismatch between the convener of the space and the people for whom the space was convened. We solved that by moving to a Co-Chair model, and I was one of the first two Co-Chairs along with Rebecca Goldberg. I represented those working directly with youth through implementing youth development programs at the OMI / Excelsior Beacon Center at Denman Middle School here in San Francisco.
The Youth Development Peer Network did amazing work that advanced the peer-based praxis of youth development across the Bay Area, California, and even the United States. We were one of only a handful of networks / coalitions within the USA that had direct worker engagement in leadership and strategic direction. Everything we produced brought together all strata of the field (e.g. youth, tutors, coaches, program leaders, managers, directors, case managers, health practitioners, funders, policymakers, librarians, teaching artists, you-name-it) as equal players within the spaces that we held / facilitated. There were no experts. There was just us-all. And together we co-created collective understanding, meaning making, and wisdom.
We were so successful at gathering a network of peers that we became sought after by policymakers across the United States to give our "Stamp of Approval" on Youth Development Competencies and subsequent training and reporting mechanisms. We engaged, and we explicitly stated that our involvement was conditioned on continued involvement in the evolving understanding and meaning making of youth development, which we saw as dynamic and not static.
Everyone, though, was only interested in a very specific and immoveable "stamp" that could determine whether programs got funding or not. And we found our work being used as a measuring stick, which we did not intend for it to become. The state has a way of taking what is collective and turning it into a club that bashes you into compliance. The Youth Development Peer Network did not survive in large part because we refused to participate in the transformation of our work into a club.
I was in my mid-20s and early 30s during this time, and when the Youth Development Peer Network became undone, I too found myself adrift. I had poured years into a distributive, shared leadership networking model for a field I helped form only to have the state and funders shift key directions, which made funding our work impossible. In my last year as Co-Director, I worked for eight months without pay because the City delayed contracts and we only had enough money to pay for one Co-Director, so that salary went to the other Co-Director, Yas Ahmed. By the end of that year with no additional funding and not a single previous funder supporting our distributive work (claiming, "it was too risky;" it wasn't expert-driven;" "we are in a period of contraction;" and "you achieved your outcomes: the field now has standards") we made the difficult decision to halt all operations.
I learned a lot from the Youth Development Peer Network about how to hold and facilitate intergenerational, multiracial, gender-affirming, anti-capitalist space using somatic- and arts-based praxis. Instead of applying it to a field like Youth Development, I dedicated myself to the advancement of a CO-CREATIVE PRAXIS AS ART FORM. Some call this social practice art. I call it, "The Art of Relating to One's Self, Each Other, and the Cosmic Mysteries."
This shift in focus yielded some incredible art, media, performance, and organizing projects over the last 15 years, including 14 Black Poppies (co-founded with Margaret Bacon Schulze), #WhereDoYouBelong Project with OutLook Theater Project, TILT, and a number of other artists and organizations, #StickyQuestions with Celi Tayamo Lee and Mary Claire Amable for the Asian Art Museum, the Alliance (for Media Arts & Culture) Youth Media Network with Myah Overstreet, and now the Immigrant Artist Network co-founded with Rupy C. Tut, Tree of Change with Crystal Mason, and the Culture Tending Collective with Crystal, Vanessa Rodriguez Minero, and Wendy Martinez-Morroquin. Each co-created project is (and has been) managed / run collectively using consensus-based decision-making with all who participate.
Here's a video from the #WhereDoYouBelong Project from 2014.
From Peer-based to Peer Exchanges
In 2025, I am applying all of what I've learned over the last 20+ years of peer-based praxis to a new form called Peer Exchanges. Peer Exchanges are In Person or Virtual spaces where people gather in community to exchange information, ideas, questions, and beliefs around a specific topic towards generating collective knowledge and wisdom so as to unflatten perspectives, unearth roots, discover intersectionality, and cultivate interdependence. Each Peer Exchange is co-created by and centers the communities being gathered.
There are no experts in a Peer Exchange. Instead, every participant offers their own expertise towards making collective meaning of subjects that are intentionally flattened by media, money, and power. The goal is to leave a Peer Exchange with a more complex understanding of both the topic and our peers, so we can engage with the world around us in more nuanced and compassionate ways that lead us towards our collective liberation from shame, punishment, domination, oppression, and tyranny.
Every Peer Exchange results in some sort of documentation of collective insight that will be shared on Culture Tending Commons. Culture Tending Commons is an online portal, publication, and community of comrades dedicated to co-creating and promulgating antidotes to White Supremacy Culture. It is founded by Crystal Mason, Vanessa Rodriguez Minero, Wendy Martinez-Morroquin, and me. Throughout 2025, we will be posting resources co-created by our collective members, facilitating virtual dialogue to deepen understanding and meaning, and sharing adaptations / applications / activities of culture tending strategies, qualities, processes, and tools (aka praxis) that encourage others to use and remix and, thus, co-create their own meaning. It is a space of plurality full of camaraderie, contradiction, and complexity.
As Queerly Complex, I am working with four different co-creators in the Spring of 2025 to co-produce Peer Exchanges for specific groups, organizations, businesses, or movements to generate collective wisdom around a particular topic. I will be working with Filthy Studios, EARTH Lab SF, the African American Art & Culture Complex (through Tree of Change), and the Culture Tending Collective! The insights from each will be shared, and we will be hosting a virtual convening in the Fall 2025 to make meaning of the combined insights across the incredibly diverse communities.
Please sign up for the CULTURE TENDING COMMONS to learn more and become a part of a community of comrades dedicated to promulgating antidotes to White Supremacy Culture.
If you would like to HIRE ME to produce Peer Exchanges for your organization, company, or movement, please EMAIL ME at jason [at] queerlycomplex [dot] com.