The Journey of a Bisexual Pansexual Educator: Gerilyn Brault's Experience

Bryan: 0:27

Teaching While Queer is a podcast for 2S LGBTQ+ educational professionals to share their experiences in academia. Hi, I'm your host, Bryan Stanton, a theater pedagogy and educator in New York City, and my goal is to share stories from around the world from 2S LGBTQ plus educators. I hope you enjoy Teaching While Queer. Hello everyone and welcome back to another amazing episode of Teaching While Queer. I'm so excited today to have Gerilyn Brault on with me, because not only is she fantastic, but I had the privilege of working with her when I worked at SeaWorld in San Diego. Hi Gerilyn, how are you Hi?

Gerilyn: 1:12

I'm great.

Bryan: 1:13

Awesome, tell me a little bit about yourself. Introduce yourself to the audience, as it were.

Gerilyn: 1:18

Yeah, so my name is Jeryln Brault, my pronouns are she, her, hers, and I identify as part of the bisexual pansexual community. I am a professional actor and director in San Diego and I teach currently at Miracosta Community College in Grossmont College, and I teach in the theater department. So I teach acting Shakespeare. I've done makeup, intro to narrative theory, intro to theater lots of big nerdy theater things.

Bryan: 1:51

I love nerding out on theater things and it's so funny because I know so many theater teachers. There are tons of us on this podcast, I bet. And so I have to be very careful about not being too nerdy, because I will go into like the weeds and then I don't want people to be like, wow, that was really just about theater.

Gerilyn: 2:09

Well, yes, I also have ADHD, so I'm like don't get me on an ADHD theater tangent, we won't get done All right, folks, we are going to do our best to stay on task today.

Bryan: 2:22

So, jeryln, let's take a trip back in time. Can you tell me what it was like for you growing up as a queer youth?

Gerilyn: 2:29

Yeah, for me it's really interesting. I didn't come out until I was in my 30s and I think a large part of that is bisexuality. Pansexuality was just not part of my vernacular growing up so I didn't even know there was a community I could belong to. But I knew I said a lot of people my age saw Sailor Uranus in Sailor Moon back in middle school and that day that I first saw her in a suit was like oh, oh. So I always credit her with my awakening, as unconscious as it was.

Bryan: 3:13

I'm going to just say like we all have that moment right. We all have that awakening moment. Mine was Devon Sawa in Casper, Like when Casper came to life. I was like oh, oh, oh, boys, huh, all right then.

Gerilyn: 3:29

Right, well, and that was my first time seeing a mask woman and it was this oh. But I just kept thinking but I also like men, so tra-la-la Most of my life. But I found myself constantly wondering and like why am I so comfortable with that idea? But I'm not gay, like I just was so lost and it took a very long time for me to even like meet a bisexual woman. I was in college, at Miracosta, when I was a student, when I met my first bisexual woman and that kind of blew my mind. But I like, looking back, I know it influenced everything about me. And also being in theater, which has a supportive community around queerness, I had been surrounded by the queer community my entire life. So it just took me a long time to get the courage to publicly come out in the community and I think a large part of that was I didn't see enough representation of the spectrum of sexuality. So I then became inspired to be out and very open with my students because I wish I had seen me earlier.

Bryan: 5:01

I agree. I think that there was a time, especially in our lives when we were younger, where bisexuality was like stigmatized in a sense, that it was like you can't be bisexual, you're either straight or gay.

Gerilyn: 5:14

So either it's a stepping stone, or like it doesn't exist, right and it is really interesting because we do still see that and so much of that is rooted in the patriarchy, as so many things are, because of the assumption that bisexual men are really gay and that bisexual women are just going through a phase and will end up with a man creates the man as the goal, and so it's really interesting that we are still working to dismantle that.

Bryan: 5:45

Absolutely. Can we dive a little bit into your identity? You had mentioned like bisexual, pansexual, so were those things like inclusive for you, or do you find yourself evolving as the terminology evolved?

Gerilyn: 6:00

That's a great question I always considered. I've always said I'm attracted to healthy masculinity, not toxic masculinity, but it and that doesn't know a gender. So when I was first coming out as bisexual, I thought that that included the trans community and the non-binary community, and to some people that term still does, which is why I still use it. But also, getting people to wrap their heads around the concept of bisexuality is so complicated that I tend to gravitate towards the more known word out of education fatigue. But the more and more common pansexuality is, I think it's important that I use both to also be inclusive, and so I'm using the term that people are most familiar with, but also starting to use that term combined with pansexuality, so that people feel they could ask me like, oh, I don't know what that one means. And yeah, it's an interesting discussion within the bisexual community, because some people are like well, bisexual does mean pansexual, and other people are like by means too. So it's an evolving topic and I do feel like eventually we'll probably really merge away from bisexual into pansexual for those of us who are open to all genders. So I'm just using it more and more.

Bryan: 7:35

I think there's an interesting thing that you're talking about here, because I have the same experience. I'm a non-binary person, or I generally identify as queer, and I'm married to a man who is cis and also I am also attractive to healthy masculinity, so for me that includes transgender men, and so I find myself also falling upon the pansexual spectrum, because I don't think that people commonly associate like the idea. I personally believe that trans men are trans men, so like yes, it's almost sexual, but at the same time and they're non-binary, and that person they might identify as trans, non-binary or somewhere else in the spectrum. So it really comes down to the person and that healthy masculinity that you're talking about. And so I think it's so interesting because I think that we will get to a world where it's almost like multiple sexualities, because you can have, like I'm attracted to men and I'm attracted to masculine women and I'm attracted to trans men and like all of these genders that exist, and so I think it'll be interesting to see, like, just how the evolution continues, especially since it's changed so much. Since I was a child, like these terms didn't even exist.

Gerilyn: 9:06

So I mean, it's changed so much in the last like five, 10 years as a college teacher. Seeing these students so comfortable exploring gender and sexuality in a way that I don't think I could have even comprehended at their age is so exciting.

Bryan: 9:21

Yeah, absolutely. And how do you see, like, as a college professor, how do you see your experiences as a bisexual, pansexual person showing up in the classroom, as far as just the environment that you're able to create for your students?

Gerilyn: 9:36

Yeah, one of the first things I do is in my introduction day, like here's the syllabus I also give a little bit about me, because I think that being open because I am in schools, that I'm protected to be open I think it's very important that I am. So I just tell them on the first day. I say and I am out and about proud, bisexual, pan sexual, so if you need someone to talk to, I can be someone for you. And then I also disclose because I'm in the disabled community and I think that's really important. And being open on the first day invites conversation, but it also invites a safe person. So I have had students talk to me before they've talked to their parents and talk to me before they've talked to their friends because they know that I am open, and so they've just got someone they can cling on to while they're doing the self-discovery, and that's like community college. I feel like it's such a privilege because the average age is 18 to 20. So we're helping these students become adults and that is a privilege I do not take lightly.

Bryan: 10:51

That's one of those things that my husband and I have toyed with for the past several years that like, once our kids are growing, to like take on foster children who are 17 and kind of like help them through that 20, to like get established as adult and specifically, focus on the queer community, where some of those folks are outed from their house just for being out of the closet, and so I love that you focus on that age range and that you consider it such a blessing, because I think that there's some people are like I just teach community college, right it's just community college, and so I love that you have such a positive take on that, because it really is. I see the most transformation with my students during their senior years, like I can literally watch a child change into an adult from the beginning of their senior year to the end of their senior year, like once all the college applications are done. the second semester rolls around and all of a sudden these, like little budding adults, come around. And then and then they go on to folks like you who are able to nurture them in a more adult fashion and to treat them more as equals. And I think that it's such a cool age because it really is the work of becoming an adult.

Gerilyn: 12:09

Yes, and there's also a safety in the transition. I mean, I was a student of community college. I know firsthand how much I love community college. But also sometimes we do have minors in our class and then, but their parents have to sign consent that like, yes, they are an adult and they will be treated like an adult in this class and so they're taking a college course, and so, like a parent can't email me about a grade or something, I can't discuss that with them, I can't discuss anything. And so there's there's also like with some of our 16 17 year olds that come, we do a summer Shakespeare conservatory. So we've got sometimes we've got 15, 16 and 17 year olds in that program as well, and it's really fascinating when they realize that no, you're in a college course, we, we can't disclose anything to your parents. And all of a sudden somebody's like can I use he, him pronouns and like having that freedom to finally do that because of the protection that college gives. And I'm so aware of that privilege as I look at what's happening in so many other schools around the country which wild to me is.

Bryan: 13:25

It's also in, like your backyard, so you're in.

Gerilyn: 13:27

San.

Bryan: 13:27

Diego, california, and, like Chino Hills, is an hour and a half away and they've got a school board that's just as conservative as some of the ones that I worked for in Texas.

Gerilyn: 13:38

Yeah, well we've got. One of my friends is the drama teacher at Temecula high school and that story starting to gain traction because on stage blog made a post about it. But he offered Angels in America as one of the many shows the students could read in his drama class because it was in the library and approved by the school to be in the library and one parent complained and he's on week 14 of leave.

Bryan: 14:09

That's insane to me. Here's the thing that I find interesting is it's just like when I was a kid. I don't recall parents deciding what was happening in my classroom. Like my parents didn't ask questions. They just asked me if I like, if I got everything I needed, you know, and if I got a bad grade, they would ask me what am I going to do to make it better? I don't recall my parents being so involved in what was going on with the classroom. And what drives me crazy specifically about this story is that it's like there was already a process, but people are so afraid of theater. It's not always about reading, because my children in middle school were reading books that were about date rape. Yeah, and that was perfectly fine, according to everybody, because again we're going back to patriarchy, right. But if there was a story that even just had a gay character in it, the school board or people from the community would be an uproar about it. And it's like it's one of many offerings. You're not required to read it. If you don't want to read it, don't read it. But now this teacher is on leave for 14 weeks.

Gerilyn: 15:24

For doing nothing wrong, and part of that is like as many school boards across the country it's happening. There is a movement from a small group of people like Moms for Liberty who are using the protection of children as the cover for political control, and they know that people don't pay attention to who's on an election for school board. People just kind of leave that blank or just vote and they found the in. They don't have power in much of the rest of our legislation as far as this state in California goes, but they can have too much power in the school boards now and it's terrifying.

Bryan: 16:17

Yep and that same thing. The thing is that, like these, large groups are nationwide and then they target specific communities. And what's wild to me is that just recently, like a couple of days ago, a woman was killed in Lake Arrowhead, also in California. Folks like a very liberal state killed in Lake Arrowhead for defending the fact that she had a pride flag on her business. She was a cis het woman, married to a man, and was killed just for supporting the LGBTQ community. And what's wild is that these same groups are now posting about teachers having pride flags in their classrooms. As you saw what happened here, you better take your pride flag down. And that, to me, is frightening, where people are literally advocating for the death and the hurt and the hurting of individuals based off of a similar.

Gerilyn: 17:15

Yeah, it's the combination of the swelling hate and this small movement finding its way in and also our gun legislation puts our country at a specific risk, and that's something I was a student at Purdue University in my grad school when somebody brought a gun on campus and killed someone and there was a that same semester a student was upset with his grade and threatened to kill the teacher and we were all put on high alert. And there's something about like with the college age yes, we often don't have to deal with the parents, but we also have to deal with students old enough to get guns legally. And so there is this constant and I think it is part of the fact that I was at a school that had a shooting and a disgruntled student threat that I'm constantly aware of that threat and, unfortunately, that threats getting higher and higher. I used to teach dual enrollment classes, which were college courses offered to high school students, and I said for the first time I don't know if I would accept that if I got offered that class because I just were not. I don't feel protected to be as open as I am on my college campus if parents are involved and I know so many parents are supportive and wonderful, but those who are vocally against queer people I feel very threatened by.

Bryan: 19:02

Yep, I would agree. I think that it's a really hard time because it's like when things are good, you don't vocalize it. When things are bad, then people go off the handle, and what we need is more allies being vocal, and I just posted something about like there's a new study coming out where, right now, lgbtq students are at the highest rate of feeling unsafe in schools, justifiably so, based off of everything that's happening around the country. And I'm just sitting here going you know what. This is not a queer people problem. This isn't everybody problem. Our responsibility as educators, administrators and whatnot is to make safe spaces for students on campus. Students should feel safe, no matter who they are. No matter who they are. That should be the bare minimum of what a campus whether it's college or high school, elementary, middle school, what a campus provides, and I'm just tired of it being like oh hey, welcome to the campus. Queer person, can you take the rainbow banner and like, be the out and proud person out in front keeping these kids safe? Because at my first school, when I started teaching, that was kind of my role and when I left that school district, I got emails from people that were like and Facebook message like. They found me to say my kid wasn't at the high school yet, but she felt safe on her campus because you were there in the district and I'm just like, like I really appreciate you, but I cannot bear that burden by myself. We need more people standing up to say that everybody should be safe on campus. Like that's what I don't understand.

Gerilyn: 20:51

I really feel like everybody should be on board with children, shouldn't feel unsafe as well yes, well, and I also think that you know, when I was in in college and we had this moment of gay marriage was legalized and Obama was a black man, was president, and I think the the intrinsic optimism that lives within American culture came to our, our downfall there, because I think we just thought things were fixed and I think those of us who like to cling to the optimism and the hope of it all were like oh, we finally made it, we finally made it to an equal spot and in. Instead, the opposite is happening and we, the fear that those who hate, have their their running with it and they're gaining so much power through it. And it's that's always the way with hate is you gain power through fear and and, unfortunately, using children as the shield is working and we need people who know better to to speak up and, yes, it should not be on just the queer community to be doing this, because we're tired of it.

Bryan: 22:29

Yep, I know it's the same thing when it comes to racial discrimination and what not. Yes, black people do not need to be the shield that the banner waiver for the black community in their school, and the same thing with Mexican people or Honduran people. Peru, wherever you're from, like you shouldn't have to represent everybody disabled. The disabled teacher on campus shouldn't have to be the only person advocating for the disabled students. And so what's wild to me is that these people are gaining power through school boards, through local elections and whatnot, and they know how powerful history is and so they're erasing it. Because if we paid attention in the 80s to people like Anita Bryant, who started the Save the Children Foundation, which all of this is piggybacking off of, it has been 40 years and it's the same hate and the same vitriol being spread, but nothing has changed. Like we're, still here.

Gerilyn: 23:31

They've played the long game in several things and we're seeing the end results in so many communities. We're seeing Roe v Wade. We're seeing that people are using the religious freedoms that Roe v Wade is kind of opened the door to to attack gay people also we're seeing that they're trying to pretend discrimination right.

Bryan: 23:54

And then we're saying that didn't even have like a real story and they're currently.

Gerilyn: 23:59

The Supreme Court is going to be looking at the Americans for Disabilities Act in a way that really scares the disabled community because those protections only came in in the 90s. So it is just. But I totally agree with you. I joke that people who say they're in against indoctrination are really only in favor of their indoctrination versus what I would argue is that most of the indoctrination that they are claiming and fearmongering about is really just education and representation.

Bryan: 24:37

Right, well rounded education, not just one viewpoint.

Gerilyn: 24:42

Yes.

Bryan: 24:43

The thing that gets me is it's like, if we can't teach about all those things, what are you? What are you so worried about? If we do, what is the end result? Are you worried that you're going to be treated the way that maybe you or your ancestors treated people like? Obviously, if you don't want to be treated that way, then maybe it was problematic and we should learn from that to not have that behavior. I don't know. Okay, I'm going to get us back to the topic hand. I told you stay focused, because I can get real heated about this all day long. So, as a theater educator, how do you see queer works showing up in your classroom? Do you have a lot where you are choosing works for your students, or do you find that your students are coming in with queer content that they get to explore?

Gerilyn: 25:34

Well, it's really interesting because I always say the foundations of Western theater are queer, because drag is the foundation of Western theater. There were and again stems from patriarchy. Women weren't allowed on stage. So every female character in ancient Greece and ancient Rome and Shakespeare was played by a male actor. So because I teach a lot of Shakespeare, I do like to remind them of that that even when a female is speaking in a Shakespeare show or an ancient Greek show, the audience is aware that a male was portraying that female. So any discussion of gender is already layered in a way that in modern times we forget about, because we do cast female identifying people as female identifying characters. But that wasn't the case, and I like to point out in plays like Toth Knight and in, as you like it, where there is a female character dressing as a man and another man is falling in love with that person he thinks is a man, until the very last scene where it's surprise, I've been a woman this whole time and he's like, great, we'll get married. He had to have been questioning his entire world view and his sexuality up until that point because he's ready to marry this person the minute he finds out he can. And so you know I don't end up teaching because of the nature of the student learning outcomes and things. Most of the things I do talk about are the classics in my Shakespeare class, but I just like to constantly remind them how queer Shakespeare is and I mean, even the idea of sexuality was so much looser in the Greek and Roman times too. I mean, we talk about Shakespeare, julius Caesar. I played Mark Antony in college and I remember researching and I was like, oh, he is bisexual. He has documented BCE historical documents saying that he was with men and women.

Bryan: 27:56

This, while to me, how people are like this queer thing is so new and I'm like you just need to read a history book. Like there's so much documentation that exists that proves that it's not Right.

Gerilyn: 28:09

Well, and how much queer erasure there is in history where they're like they never married, but they did live with their best friend.

Bryan: 28:15

Yes, the infamous best friend.

Gerilyn: 28:18

Yes, they shared letters so often.

Bryan: 28:21

When I did my undergraduate recital in classical vocal, I did a recital called Gone but Not Forgotten and it was all queer composers, people who were within the queer community, and I got a lot of backlash on YouTube about like including people like Bernstein and whatnot. And now there's this biopic coming out where it's like Bernstein is admittedly bisexual, so like people just didn't wanna see what was right in front of them and they just wanted to accept that because he married a woman, then he was not bisexual.

Gerilyn: 28:58

Yes, we see that still happening, particularly with bisexual women, who are celebrities that marry men. They get constantly asked so are you no longer bisexual?

Bryan: 29:13

It's just like yep they just turned it off. I put that ring on and it just turned right off.

Gerilyn: 29:16

Yeah, Well, and they usually say are you no longer heterosexual once you get married? And the question is that, yeah. So I just think being open and really helping the students realize how much queer culture is within the foundations of theater and also I always have students in the community I mean that's kind of the nature of theater, is it's been a safe community for so long that people gravitate towards it. But what I really love is creating and fostering a classroom where just everybody feels supported, cause I know sometimes, particularly because of patriarchy, men who identify as straight get really worried that they will be misinterpreted and when they take theater classes. And so trying to get them out of that fear and just be like be a friendly human and you're fine.

Bryan: 30:29

Be a human. What a weird concept.

Gerilyn: 30:33

Yeah, and some of the plays that I have do involve the queer community I do. What I tend to do is try and find or guide students towards pieces for their identities. So in my classrooms it's a lot of finding age appropriate things, so finding characters in their twenties, but also seeing what they want. With any of the non-binary students I always ask, hey, in scene assignments, if I can't find a non-binary character, is there a gender preference you would like? Or if I've got students that are transitioning or are already identifying as trans, to honor that. But also, since I have a lot of background and voice and speech work, I might always ask them, hey, do you have any vocal goals that I could assist with? Do you want to train your voice to speak in a lower register or a higher register, and how can I support that? And if they're comfortable, how can the entire class be supportive of that? But of course, it's a private conversation with them. And, yeah, I keep hoping that we, as the both programs that I work at, do more and more queer pieces. I think, understandably, we all became very hyper focused on racial representation and I think that in some respects, particularly in theater departments, we got too laser focused on that and the other representation that we should also be working on in tandem kind of that shelved. But I'm seeing that starting to change recently. I think we're starting to look at representation more holistically and I hope that continues.

Bryan: 32:33

I hope so too, because I think there's just power. There's so much power and representation and seeing yourself on stage, on screen, like it's almost self affirming in the fact that, like you and other people like you truly exist and what you are going through isn't just an anomaly.

Gerilyn: 32:53

Yes.

Bryan: 32:55

So talking about anomalies and kind of just like affirmation and kind of representation, if you were to have a conversation with a teacher who's headed into the classroom for the first time and they weren't sure how to really go about being their authentic selves, what advice would you?

Gerilyn: 33:15

give. The first thing is a good little Google search and searching to see if the school has already posted anything in support. For example, mira Costa College that I am a part of has something called the out list, where faculty and staff can volunteer to be on there as like. Yes, we are out at Mira Costa and it has our contact information and so students can reach out to us. I've had community events reach out as well and so seeing if, has your school ever made a statement of support or does it have something like the out list and check their social media? Do they post in Pride Month? Yes, just because those are protected ways, you can do research without outing yourself if you're not sure. And then I would always say as much as we have a love hate relationship with professional development weeks, it is a great way to be yourself in a teacher surrounded space, and there's something lovely about community of teachers and you could find within that freedom of like. There's not parents on campus, there's not kids on campus. It is the teachers, and that's just, if there's any hesitation using the community of support, that are the teachers.

Bryan: 34:58

I love that because both of those things are like dipping your toe in the water Before you jump in full speed. Right.

Gerilyn: 35:06

And you know, three, four years ago I would have been like post everything, put the flags up. But I'm just hyper aware of the conservative religious right shift that's been occurring and we're not as safe as we used to be. And so that is the harsh reality of if you're starting in a new environment, if you can't find evidence that the school and the school system is already supportive, it is a dip your toe in, as, and I always say, like you and I have said, allies need to speak up so much. Because if you ever feel like your life is not safe if you are out in your school, then my wish for that person is that you have community at home that can support you if you are not safe enough to be out, and I still hope that you were able to find that little kid that needs you and somehow express to them. But I also recognize that we're in a new old world.

Bryan: 36:17

Yeah, it's on a loop right now. They say, those pendulums are swinging and it really is like a wide swing.

Gerilyn: 36:26

Yeah, and it's like the two parties of swimming in complete opposite directions.

Bryan: 36:32

Yeah, it's almost like that little like pendulum ball thing that sits on a desk.

Gerilyn: 36:37

Yes, and they're snapping.

Bryan: 36:39

Hit each other and fly way far back, yeah, and then, as we go into another school year, what do you think the educational community can do to make schools more inclusive for LGBTQ?

Gerilyn: 36:58

Right off the bat, I think of libraries and I think of representation in the resources you use, and you know, I understand, that book banning is so in fashion right now. But just looking at what you use in the classroom, not only for queer people but also for people of all abilities and people of all races, are you only using books by white male authors? Is there something you can do to put an author of color in your work? Or a theorist that identifies as female? Or, if you're talking in a history class, do you mention Americans with Disabilities Act and all the work they did in the 70s, 80s and 90s? But again, you could do everything by the letter of your school, like Greg Bailey did in Temecula, and you can still be put on leave right now. So you do what you can and then you find the parents that support you.

Bryan: 38:10

I agree.

Gerilyn: 38:12

That's so depressing.

Bryan: 38:16

I read about that and knowing now you've provided me with more information, knowing that it was already on a approved list, it was in the library and readily accessible, and that just blows my mind because it's like there's no winning. I mean, I had forms that I filled out before I did any shows, saying like will this show have explicitly sexual content? And I'm like I treat these children like they're my children. Do you think I'm going to put them on stage like having sex? That's real gross, man.

Gerilyn: 38:52

And also it is the struggle to increase representation in theater especially is there's often language and content in modern plays that some people don't deem appropriate. So we're getting better representation for people of color and for women and for queer people in plays, but often their material is too adult and so there's also kind of part of me that's like I think those shows are valid, but there's also this little part of me that's like, hey, modern playwrights, is there a way we could tone down the language, just like write that piece and then write a piece that you could do at a school.

Bryan: 39:38

All right, this message goes out to Becky Albertalli who, like, creates all this wonderful like nonfiction, no, sorry, fictional high school queer stories that are not sexual yes.

Gerilyn: 39:53

You need to team up with a playwright honey and start getting these things on stage Like I would love to see, like I even hope, the play or love Simon as a play, and these things are explicitly not sexual, just being about quote unquote sexual orientation. Right, because that's even a struggle just with adults for theater is some of these patrons really don't like language, and so it is hard sometimes to want to tell these beautiful queer stories, but if they're dropping the F word every five lines I can't put it up. So, yeah, there's a, there's an interesting. So that's my, my plea to to theater is we need more, we always need more representation, but if we could also be mindful to also be thinking about I'm going to write a representative show that is family friendly.

Bryan: 40:55

Absolutely, because all audiences should be able to enjoy queer things, not just explicitly adult audience because queer stories are families, so they can be family friendly. I'm going to be having some articles coming up about queer family and theater, so spoiler it's specifically about how there's so many musicals that that are dealing with queer family but then, like, there are very few plays that are about queer family and it's just like that. Again, representation is important. I am a part of a queer family, I am a queer parent and I can't watch myself in a play right now, but there are several musicals where I could. I could be a drag queen or I could be a trans person, but that or I could be an overbearing dad in a musical about children who are doing a spelling bee. Very typical Like these are all the roles that I can have, but you won't ever see me in that space, like it's not yes it's not a realistic depiction of queer family now.

Gerilyn: 42:06

I was just in a diversionary theater which is the third oldest queer theater in the country is down in San Diego, and I just had, head over heels, the musical and so many of us were realizing that that was the first time that our queer stories were told through joy.

Bryan: 42:22

Yep and y'all, that's a fantastic musical, even if you're not like a theater person, you're like it's a go-go's guys, it's the go-go's it's their music from the 80s put into a story?

Gerilyn: 42:34

Yeah, and so I just think yeah, and then just encouraging storytelling of joy. We don't need to always trauma dump Our history. Yes, our history has trauma, but there has been joy throughout it and I think that's also something that, as an educator, I do like to focus on the joy of the community, because we do history folks, we do love to focus on pain and focus on the traumas that got us there, but there's also so much to celebrate along the way, and I think that goes for everybody.

Bryan: 43:08

I think, if you teach literature if you're an English teacher, or social studies or whatever. Whatever you're teaching, I mean math might be a little bit hard, but maybe you could do a word problem about. You know joy, but like where? Where can we find those stories for everybody that show off black joy and queer joy and disabled joy? Like where?

Gerilyn: 43:31

can we?

Bryan: 43:31

find those moments to show those things off, because I've just taken two classes back to back one focus on disability and accessibility in theater and one focus on queer theater, and the overwhelming majority of plays were about trauma.

Gerilyn: 43:47

Or the queer person dies at the end.

Bryan: 43:49

Correct, or if it was a play for accessibility and inclusion, it was about a disabled person being angry, which there is. There is a lot of room where disabled people feel like, yes, I am on stage and seen right now because I am angry, yes, but I don't want those folks to also forget that they have moments of joy. And where can we see that? On stage, and it's not anger 100% of the time and yet.

Gerilyn: 44:20

so to like circle back to what I hope for educators is just to evaluate the stories that you were telling in your class and, yes, even in math, if it's a family in your work, in your problem. Just seeing what, what are you representing in your room and just constantly searching for ways that keep you safe as an educator, that you can increase representation.

Bryan: 44:48

Yes, absolutely so, geraldine. We've reached the part of this interview where you get to ask me a question, so I am all ears.

Gerilyn: 44:58

So I actually do have a question that I ask anybody who teaches high school. Right now we are noticing at the community college level particularly in theater, where we teach vulnerability as part of our curriculum, and especially after the pandemic, you're noticing a difference in social-emotional development. Then I know some of my colleagues have been teaching for 40 years and they're like we don't know how to help them. And so, as somebody who is seeing them burgeoning into the adults that we then receive with love, what can we do at the college level to help foster this generation of students that's growing up so aware of all the bad and growing up in this world? How can we, as college professors, help them?

Bryan: 46:00

This is such a double-edged sword because that same conservative community is now going from queer people or groomers to social-emotional learning is grooming, so it's like I'd say catch 22. It really sucks to be an educator right now.

Gerilyn: 46:17

Yeah, my mom works in child development and there are areas where, as she teaches, she cannot say the word social-emotional development. Yeah, right.

Bryan: 46:27

It's wild, and especially after the pandemic, because isolation changed what that means for everybody.

Gerilyn: 46:34

Isolation and yet being connected to the world at the same time was such an interesting duality.

Bryan: 46:40

Absolutely so. My biggest advice and the things that I do to kind of like check in with social-emotional health of my students is one I do check-ins and that could be like a simple like. Sometimes it's a QR code on my screen where they can just use their phone and give me like a what's the weather like today and I've got like pictures of like sunny, rainy, hurricane, tornado, like different things. Would you care to share more? Do you want me to have a conversation about this later? Sometimes I focus on mindfulness and I do a lot of what we do in theater is our goal is to use the human body to give human emotions and because we are doing that, we also have the ability to use the human body to relax human emotions. So that means breathing exercises and visualizations and things to get my students into a mindset to at least be able to take their baggage and leave it at the door. So when they walk into the room, we'll do a breathing exercises and body relaxation and things like that to allow them to kind of be in this space and connected to this space, which also gives them the ability to have a social-emotional check-in, because they'll be able to be like oh wow, I was really feeling a whole type of way and I didn't realize that I was just holding on to it. So those are kind of two things that I walk in. Leading with is like I do a check-in and I use Google Forms because I think that they're easy. There are lots of other resources out there that you can use. It can even just be like a how you doing today Thumbs up, yeah, thumbs up, sideways, thumbs down, and sometimes I'm a very empathic person so. I can feel and many of us in the arts are, I can feel when the energy is off and if there isn't a collective issue, I will cancel the lesson for the day and we will talk about what the issue is and figure out, like, how do we move forward from it, because we have a collective feeling that needs to be addressed before we're going to get any productive work done. And so I think those three things are like easy to implement things and I know, especially for the high school and middle school, elementary level, we've got timelines and we have schedules and we have to be hitting these certain markers. But taking a day or 30 minutes or 40 minutes of your time and talking with your students about something that they are feeling is, one, going to create a stronger relationship between you and your students so that they're going to feel comfortable talking to you when they have those moments that they need some help. And two, it's going to show that you actually care and therefore they're going to learn more, because people don't want to listen to you if they don't think you care about them. Does that answer your question?

Gerilyn: 49:44

It does. Yeah, that's really. That's helpful. I think that when you use the check-in in my classes it's harder when I do asynchronous online, but my in-person classes I can for sure implement that easy.

Bryan: 49:56

And I think asynchronous. Online is like, I mean, allow the option and if people take it, then they take it, and if not, they don't. You know, you put it out there that you want to check in with people.

Gerilyn: 50:08

No, I think that's great. Yeah, I could even just do a Google form. That's just there on the page they're like if you need to talk to me about anything, here you go.

Bryan: 50:17

Yep, absolutely. And I say get as creative as you want. I'm talking about weather and I absolutely stole that idea from professional development from somebody else. And sometimes I do like what color are you today? And I try to get creative with what we're doing, like in your class. It would be like how are we feeling today? Are we like Juliette? Are we like Lady Macbeth? Like, what are we feeling?

Gerilyn: 50:43

today. What's the TikTok audio vibe today?

Bryan: 50:46

What is the TikTok dance of the day?

Gerilyn: 50:48

Like how are you?

Bryan: 50:49

feeling, but just getting an idea and trying to be as abstract as possible, because I think the hardest thing right now about getting people to be vulnerable is that they're afraid it's gonna be used against them, and we have to be comfortable not getting all the information upfront and just knowing like I'm just not feeling it today or I'm mad today. I'm like I think that a good follow-up question that we can have with students is do you feel like you can that? Do you feel like tomorrow's gonna be different? You know, do you feel like you can get out of this slump or whatever? And I think those are things that need to be asked, because I think that a lot of times we might find, especially in young people, that it feels like the end of the world right, and they may not feel like there's a lot of hope. They're just gonna go through feeling crappy, and we have the ability to help them not feel that way.

Gerilyn: 51:53

That's great. Yeah, I love that.

Bryan: 51:55

Awesome. Well, I've really enjoyed talking with you and I hope that you have an amazing day, and I just wanna thank you for your time and thank everybody for listening or watching our podcast today. Goodbye everyone.

Gerilyn: 52:08

Bye. Thank you, brian, for offering this podcast.

Bryan: 52:12

Oh yay, thank you. I hope you're all enjoying. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Teaching While Queer. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, make sure to subscribe, wherever you listen to your favorite podcast, leave a review, and that would help out tremendously. You can also support the podcast by going to wwwteachingwhilequeercom and hit support the show. Thanks so much and have a great day.