What is A Time for Study? 

Queering Dreams' A Time for Study are monthly gathering for artists, organizers, educators, and comrades seeking space & time to discuss & engage with text, audio, and video about topics like abolition, Land Back, disability justice, collective liberation, Black feminism, and more.
No prep is required to participate as we will begin each session reading / listening / watching together the selected text / audio / video. Afterwards, we will take time for personal reflection. Then, we will break into triads with some guides for participation co-created by CieraJevae Gordon with RYSE Youth Center to ensure equity in response & inquiry. Finally, we will come back to the large group to share emerging ideas / questions / insights / connections and select the topic for the next session & identify who will help select the text / audio / video.
Crystal & Jason believe that dreaming & studying together co-create pathways to collective liberation that have been / are / will be made real.

When the 2016 election cycle was ramping up, we, Crystal Mason & Jason Wyman, saw rising authoritarianism and the constant demonization of our comrades by both political parties, especially the Republican one. It produced increased anxiety & depression in both of us as we tried navigating our own complex lives intertwined with trauma, oppression, and death. These feelings of overwhelm, of not being able to respond, got us both dreaming separately & then together. Since Trump’s election, we’ve both been holding Spaces for Dreaming with family, comrades, and neighbors. It’s transformed our being, our relations, our cosmos. And it’s changed our family, comrades, and neighbors, too.

The Texts & Their Selection

Everyone is invited to help select Study Materials through an open process of peer-based consensus building & engagement. For the first Time for Study Session on Sunday, February 27, 2022, Queering Dreams Co-Founders Crystal Mason & Jason Wyman will select the materials. At the end of the Session, comrades are invited to join Crystal & Jason in selecting the next Session’s materials through a conversational, consensus-based approach.

All Session materials will draw from abolition, Land Back, disability justice, collectivism, Black feminism, and / or queer & trans liberation writers, researchers, academics, organizers, and knowledge-and-history keepers. One short source will reference the historical context of what we are discussing. One short source will reference a tactic or strategy related to the topic at hand. One longer source will come from contemporary texts or recordings made within the last 5 years and will offer a more theoretical or political framework.

February Texts 2022

• Historical Context:
  • The Racial History of Criminal Justice in America by Heather Ann Thompson
• Tactic or Strategy
  • Another Mother Tongue, "1974, We Were Five Dykes" pp 191-193 (You can check out a digital copy of Another Mother Tongue by registering for a free Internet Archive account.)
    
• Contemporary  Context:
  • “Live Interview: Police ‘Defunding’ That Never Was and Abolition as a Long-Term Social Project” Interview with Derecka Purnell on Citations Needed Podcast “In this Live Interview from 1/11, we talk with Derecka Purnell, author of 'Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom' about her new book, her personal journey of embracing an abolitionist model and how, in the midst of a full blown reactionary moment over a rise in murders, activists can address legitimate fears of crime and provide an alternative vision to the cruel, failed "lock em up" approach.”

To check out the larger overview, click here. To learn more about how we hold space & time, read our Emerging Guide.

About Crystal Mason & Jason Wyman

Crystal Mason was formerly Co-Director of Queer Rebels and a board member since 2012. Crystal also co-founded Luna Sea Women’s Performance Space and was Executive Director of the Jon Sims Center for the Arts. In Berlin, where they lived for 9 years, they co-owned Schoko Café, a women’s art and culture center. In San Francisco, they were an organizer working with ACT UP and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, and also worked on Electric City Queer TV. Recently, they co-produced the multimedia theater piece Hey, Sailor and created 3 short films: In My Blood, I Know My Soul, and In My Own Hands. In 2016 they created a multimedia performance/installation at Fort Mason as part of the THIS IS WHAT I WANT Festival 2016 titles There is No Other, Fractured And Complete, Tell Me Something True. Find Crystal on Instagram & Twitter.

Jason Wyman is Queerly Complex, an anti-binary social practice artist living & creating on Yelamu, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone land or what colonizers named San Francisco. A mystical convener, Wyman creates spaces for comrades to explore & discover who they be individually & collectively. They work with dreams, value(s), structures, & equity to conjure forms of liberation & healing. Wyman's art-making centers the messy, intangible, emotive, & esoteric bits that make us human. It's resulted in a large-scale, participatory sticker mural with artists Celi Tamayo-Lee & Mary-Claire Amable for the Asian Art Museum, a national Youth Media Network co-produced with Myah Overstreet, a fully immersive installation at Black & White Projects called Be Jason, & numerous zines, site-speciic performances, social interventions, and intergenerational programs. Find Jason on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

Queering Dreams is fiscally sponsored by Independent Arts & Media.