Composting Traditions, How Very Queer

Jason Wyman
3 hours ago
5 min read

REFLECTIONS ON JASON'S BIG DUMP - NOV 2025

I love iterating on art, media, and other "content" I've created with so many fagulous people over decades of spinning on this planet. The process of reflection and introspection is one I feel incredibly comfortable in. Looking through notebooks, opening up old folders on the external, time-traveling through photo albums, each time I go on that journey I see something different. It always inspires me to think even more deeply, widen my gaze just a bit more, consider differing possibilities and manifestations.

I am pretty sure this is all thanks to my insomnia. I wake up way too damn early for most folks. So it's frequently just me, my coffee, and Jupiter hanging out as a few drivers speed through the intersection. It's a perfect time and space for pondering. Just make sure you're ok with questioning what you know and believe (about yourself, others, and the cosmos.) Being curious isn't always easy.

Sometimes I find myself overwhelmed by the totality of it all. All of the things that make me me. All of the art I have had a hand in co-creating. All of the relations tended over a lifetime that still show up time and again. All of the injustices that are faced and experienced by all of my relations. All of the ways in which domination and conformity breed punishment and oppression. All of the accountabilities I have failed in being accountable to. All of the dreams of liberation still possible for Us All. All of it.

One practice that helps me make meaning out of it all is by remixing what's come before into different media, art, experiences, or objects that expose or reveal or queer the connections or juxtapositions or intersections or tensions betwixt what may appear divergent or similar or discontinuous or aligned. Remixing is a form of dreaming, and both are a traditional queer way of art-making.

Tradition (or a rejection thereof) is something I constantly question as a queer raised within a German & Swedish Catholic family. Many of the traditions of my blood are tied to the appropriation of other ancestral (and frequently stolen Indigenous) traditions. Catholicism ruled my childhood, and its masses, prayers, saints, and calendar of holidays still pump through these veins. I can still recite the Lord's Prayer, and I know all the Holy Days between Ash Wednesday and The Ascension. Tradition conceptually is Catholic.

As someone who's gender/queer, I've been deeply questioning / exploring my own gender and sexuality since I was 18. I've bucked what "men" are supposed to wear when working in public schools. I talk openly about the fluidity of my sexuality with those who ask. I embrace feedback (even when hella uncomfortable) about my presence or way of being so I can be in right relations as best I can. My husband and I even renegotiated the contours of our relationship and of our relating to one another after 15 years of monogamy. Reexamining and then iterating on my own being is part of my practice. It's always been so. I mean I came out while in seminary to be a priest.

I've come to understand in retrospect and through books like Another Mother's Tongue, So Many Stars, and Queer As Folklore that my practice of reflection and introspection and iteration is also a form of remixing and dreaming. It is part of a tradition of peoples across cultures, lands, histories, tribes, and formations that has always danced between many genders and many sexualities, taking some pieces and discarding others. These peoples offer others visions of who we can possibly be free from the confines and strictures of conformity. I am among that lineage, and while within it I am forming my own way of being.

Jason's Big Dump is a fun way for me to revisit and remix what's come before and try out new forms of media. For November 2025, I decided to make an interactive PDF. I had never tried my hand at the Adobe's interactive features, and I wanted to give subscribers something unique that would act as a portal to the broader Queerly Complex Cosmos.

The design parameters for interactive elements along with trying to ensure maximum readability (and accessibility) provided wonderful inspiration. I was able to craft something that feels bold, personal, and revelatory of a lot of the relatives that make possible my big dump and my cosmos. I exported it. Tested it on my computer. Check! I sent it out to all subscribers.

Then, I went to open it on my phone. Dang it! Interactive PDFs only work on computers. Mobile Adobe Acrobat doesn't do interactive links. What I made didn't completely materialize in the way I imagined.

This was an opportunity to discern how I wanted to respond to my own personal disappointment. How could I hold my own being accountable to that which I desired to be? I took the time to ponder rather than just react to the moment, which (let's be honest) was about to be a bunch of beating myself up for missing a bar I set myself.

And that's how this post came to be. It is my response to failure. It is a demonstration of remixing yet again. This time as png images with image descriptions and links embedded below. It is my attempt at moving towards more accessibility (rather than less).

I am certain that I'll learn something about my being or my practice or the limits of these technologies or my capacities after I hit publish. There will be failures. And this will not be and is not a final version of anything.

Instead Jason's Big Dump is just that. A Dump: something that will become fertilizer for something else still to come. Material to be remixed. I'm excited to see what grows and blooms and gets created from the compost. As I was reminded at Magnifera, the October installation at 465 Collective by Adrienne Rene Weiss and Lydia Daniller: composting (traditions) is queer & sacred, and it must be constantly mixed for it to give life.