Bringing LGBTQ+ Voices into the Classroom

When students hear the voices of people who lived through history, something shifts. That’s the core idea behind the Making Gay History podcast, which draws from host Eric Marcus’s 1980s and 1990s interviews with LGBTQ+ activists, leaders, and everyday people. The podcast has since become the foundation for classroom lesson plans that help educators connect their students with history in authentic and personal ways.

As part of a partnership with Making Gay History, NEA and educators across a range of disciplines developed classroom-ready lesson plans and supporting resources centered on podcast episodes. The lessons provide educators with the context and tools to bring archival LGBTQ+ history into the classroom.

Teaching joy

For Chiara Whooley, the lesson on Barbara Gittings and Kay Lahusen, two civil rights activists and life partners, gave her students a new way to connect with history.

Gittings and Lahusen brought their creativity, passion, determination, and good humor to the what was then called the homophile movement of the 1960s and the gay liberation movement of the 1970s. The lesson uses their story to help unlock the power of nonfiction by examining a podcast interview as a primary source. Using the SOAR (summarize, observe, analyze, reflect) method, students build skills applicable to all nonfiction text types.

“Growing up in the 2010s and coming out as queer—while we made a lot of progress politically in society with our rights—there were still so many stories of trauma and sadness,” said Whooley, an English teacher in Washington. “I loved hearing that, yes, these two were strong protesters, but half of it was through joy.”

Whooley really liked working with the text that promoted that joyful message, she added.

Whooley’s students were able to connect with the podcast episode because they could hear real people talking about their lives.

“I remember listening to … Barbara calling out to Kay ‘Get me this,’ and the kids were like ‘Oh my gosh! This sounds like my mom and dad.’ It’s really cool that immediately, even if my students aren’t queer, they [could] relate to them that quickly.”

Watch Whooley in this video, below.

True self and complexity

Alexander Tai, a multilingual language learner specialist and educator in Missouri, built his lesson around Craig Rodwell, a young activist and co-creator of the blueprint for Pride marches. The lesson challenges students with a central question: Do we find our true selves, or do we create them?

Tai explained that the episode on Rodwell fit well into a unit on “true self,” giving his students a chance to see the steps Rodwell took in discovering who he was and to connect those experiences with their own journey at a similar age.

His students were captivated by Rodwell’s choice. “They were very enthralled about how lying to his parents was something that he did. That … cultural background part … was so amazing for me to hear. ‘If I lie to my mom I would get punished’ or in some cultures lying is something that you just don’t do to your parents,” explained Tai. “It was just very eye-opening for me to allow the students to actually engage in the episode and nit-pick at certain things: ‘Why does this work in the United States? It wouldn’t work in my country.’”

For Tai, the lesson underscored a broader truth: “Life is not going to be that easy. There’s going to be complications. I feel like using the Making Gay History episode on Craig truly opened my students’ eyes in seeing that their life journey is going to be discovery and it’s going to be complicated at the same time.”

Watch Tai in this video, below.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1MeATf3eyI&t=3s

Teaching point of view

Joshua L. Rubin, who teaches middle school in Maryland, focused his lesson on an interview with Kathleen Boatwright. In the mid-1980s, Boatwright fell in love with a woman at church, even though she was married to a man, had four children, and belonged to a staunchly anti-gay congregation. The lesson asks students to consider “point of view.”

Rubin saw it as a chance to help middle schoolers practice empathy. One of the hardest skills for his middle schoolers is understanding point of view, especially since the state curriculum often has them studying events from a “thousand years ago,” says Rubin. 

He wanted to give them something more modern and relatable, noting, “even though his recording was [from] 1989, it’s still a conversation that’s very relevant today.”

He chose the parent-child dynamic in Boatwright’s story as an entry point. Boatwright, who was shunned by her family and community, left her husband and children after falling in love with a woman. Her story is framed around that difficult decision to live openly as her authentic self. 

Students were asked to imagine what it would be like if their own mom had to make that choice.

His students’ responses confirmed the impact of the lesson.

“I had one nonbinary student [tell me] … they really appreciated just having a day when they could focus on that part of themselves in class,” Rubin recalled. Another student surprised him with gratitude. “They said ‘thank you for making me think about this,’” he said.

For Rubin, the focus of the lesson was universal. “[It] was less about … queer identity and more about the internal struggle of giving up her kids and living her authentic life,” says Rubin, adding that that’s what connected with his students.

Watch Rubin in this video, below.

Filling the gap in LGBTQ+ Curriculum

While many schools still lack formal LGBTQ+ history content, Tai said his work with Making Gay History filled a critical gap that offered perspectives missing from textbooks and gave him resources to help students grapple with real-life complexity.

“It is important for students to understand that there is gay history out there and it may be a journey for them to understand,” he said.

Whooley echoed this sentiment. As a Seattle educator, she also found personal value in hearing local stories represented in the other archival podcast episodes. “It’s hard to find history on a national scale that’s … set in Seattle or Spokane,” she said, explaining that when she found the Washington-based podcast epidsodes it was “helpful because I know how amazing of a queer community we have in Seattle.”