Hi everyone. It’s been ages in the works but it’s finally here and my heart is pounding with love and anticipation! I’ve spent much of the last two years thinking about how I wanted to put together this Queer ELT project.
In January 2024, I had this idea come to me when making inclusive materials: we need more real stories and real audio to make the best opportunities for all learners to learn from. Aside from grabbing random stuff from Youtube after hours of watching and sifting through the noise, it became obvious that I needed to figure out a way to do this myself…on an ELT budget. To accompany this realisation, so many times my quest for inclusive materials has exposed a general lack of awareness among ELT about what it’s like to be queer in our lives and in our field. It can’t be reduced to a safe version digestible only to a heteronormative mainstream palette. It also can’t be just one experience. I wanted to share OUR stories, not just my own.
In May 2024, I asked Taylor Veigga to join me on this journey and she said yes, then real work began because then there were suddenly two strong queer brains involved and because it couldn’t just live inside my brain abstractly anymore. I need this push. I need motivation to organise my shit. This is good.
We confirmed our goal: bring together our worlds of queerness and English language teaching in a meaningful way, where we can also bring authentic stories into our language learning classrooms.
So, we thought ‘let’s see who in ELT that identifies within LGBTQ+ community and wants to talk publicly to me and then be the main character of materials for our classes’. This began with a call for participation in September 2024 for anyone in ELT who identifies as LGBTQ+ to be interviewed. We framed dialogues in this way:
More people volunteered to do it than I imagined. I was so happy. What they didn’t know was that I planned to pay them because (said slowly, emphasising each word) queer-people-should-paid-for-their-time. I applied for pedagogical funding from New College, University of Toronto, where I work and it was approved for 8 people. Many accepted; a few couldn’t or wouldn’t. It’s all good. I have leftover funds for materials publication that will end up in our College library, when we get to that part.
But there were so many that it was not possible to offer spaces for one season. With heartache for those we couldn’t take on this time, we also excitedly agreed to create the following Season 1 community (name, youth/current location, self-identity):
Hosts: Tyson Seburn, Canada, gay/queer & Taylor Veigga, Brazil, intersex/bad biotch
Guests:
Anico Perfler, Brazil, travesti
Ethan Trinh, Vietnam/USA, queer
Kanako Suwa, Japan/Thailand, bisexual/pansexual/aromantic
Chad Langford, USA/France, queer
Thiago Mittoso, Brazil, queer
David Munro, Canada, bisexual/queer
Gaye Sevval Cetin, Türkiye, pansexual/bigender
Giovanni Licata, USA/Italy, queer
Elizabeth Coleman, UK, lesbian/queer
You can find many on Instagram or Linkedin if you’re interested. Maybe we’ll share that another time.
Taylor and I split up the dialogues and recorded about 60-90 minutes with each person (…we initially suggested 15-20 mins, which did not happen 😹). We structured them as dialogues—a conversation, sharing ideas and experiences between two people, not a Q&A. They felt informal. They felt like long-time friends meeting. They felt like authentic chats.
We did have a simple structure to try and cover:
name and self-identity, a bit of a background about youth living context and current working situation
experiences of queerness in the past
impact of queerness on life today
a story of queer joy (this one tripped up more than a couple 🤭)
We recorded them over zoom, so yes there is video, but no, we did not ask for permission to share the videos, only the audio and screenshots for promos.
These recorded dialogues occurred between November 2024 and January 2025. Between then and October, Taylor and I met periodically (also on Zoom since there’s only about 8300km between us, oh and to perfect our friendly hosting style…) to talk about the direction of the episodes, the number of episodes, and how we’d produce materials to accompany them. We talked about where to release them. We talked about how much they’d cost if anything. We talked about the levels and how we’d split the work. We had a lot to talk about. We did not make any perfect decisions or concrete ones really. We remained very flexible and open.
After several timeline iterations, we decided to go with what made the most sense instead of fighting what made the most sense:
Episode 1 & 2 thematically on coming out where
is primarily Taylor and I setting up the project and talking about coming out as a queer experience
collects every single guest’s experience with coming out arranged into groups about different common experiences, with us relating to each
Episode 3+ focusing on one guest’s experiences, so
we don’t lose any of the depth and nuance specific to that person’s contextualised experiences
we keep as much of the authentic dialogue as possible, while still creating an engaging narrative for listeners to feel a part of
Over November and December, for the first time ever, I opened Garageband on my Mac, signed up for a sound fx and music library, and started editing the raw recordings to sound more like what I have in my mind.
✨ It’s unpolished. But it’s still got magic wand transitions and Marge Simpson makes a brief appearance.
✨ Some of the audio changes volume levels. I need to think about this a bit more BEFORE recording.
✨ I’ve learnt so much about what not to do again and how to make it better.
✨ I love editing out ums, ahs, likes, and so and and so forths, and pauses. I may have developed an obsession.
✨ This is learning at its core. And I’m so proud.
So here we are, at the series premiere! Deep breaths.
Episodes 1 & 2 (click me) drop today here and will start showing up on streaming services near you soon. A2 + B2 materials accompanying these episodes will follow soon.
Please subscribe and leave a (glowing) review on your podcast player of choice so others will find us. We will need reach. Thank you so much. ♥️
