Rick Oculto:
I was encountering young people who were being beat up, who were being thrown out of their house, who were unable to even walk to school and feel safe during certain times, because they knew that there was nobody protecting them. Within that context, I switched from an individual responsibility kind of perspective to, “Listen, we’ve got to look at the systems that are making them fall into these patterns that are unhealthy for them.”

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and today’s episode comes from Jean Catubay. Hey, Jean.

Jean Catubay:
Hey.

Alec Patton:
What are we going to hear today?

Jean Catubay:
Yeah, I’m really excited for folks to hear this one. For this episode, we talked to Rick Oculto. He’s the education director at Our Family Coalition based out of the Bay Area. They provide support groups, workshops, PDs, and free curriculum for the purpose of advancing equity for the full spectrum of LGBTQ families and children.

Alec Patton:
All right. Let’s hear it.

Jean Catubay:
On today’s episode, we’re here with Rick Oculto from Our Family Coalition. Hi, Rick.

Rick Oculto:
Hi, there, everybody.

Jean Catubay:
We had the chance to meet each other earlier this year. My class was doing a project and our students identified issues that were impacting San Diego and formed groups that would then come up with these action plans to try to implement change in our community. We had a group that was focusing on LGBTQ issues and you were on that panel for them. I will say that, you spent two days with my kids and they just absolutely loved you. There was just such a sense of mutual respect and interest from you, where after the two days, they were just like, “When is the next time that we can hang out with Mr. Rick? He was so cool.” They felt so connected to you. After that day, I was just like, “I have to have him on the show.”

Rick Oculto:
Yeah, of course. I mean, part of that is I am genuinely inspired by your students and just the projects that they’re doing, especially in middle school. Just being able to confidently say, “We want to support our LGBTQ peers, and we want to have an environment that is welcoming to everybody.” It’s part and parcel of why I do this work.

Jean Catubay:
Oh, that is so good to hear. We love a good mutual positive experience. I was just wondering now if we can get into how did you get started with this work?

Rick Oculto:
Sure. I do want to establish a bit about where I am right now. I am the education director at Our Family Coalition. If you’re not familiar with that, Our Family Coalition is an family organization that serves LGBTQ families and children. We were founded in 2002, but we were put together by two… Well, it’s a combination of two queer family organizations that started in the mid-90s. If you’re wondering how I got or how this organization came to be and subsequently how I got to it, this is the beginning of that story.

Now, as far as me, you asked for me to expand on describing myself as a gay cisgender Filipino Bay Area native from San Jose, also a gay gamer and an uncle. Each of those things, I think, that I put into that introduction is really important to expand upon, because I think that when we think about the people that are in these spaces to really affect education or in these spaces that are fun in gaming spaces, there isn’t really a connection about those folks, about the real lives behind the people who do this kind of work.

I’ll go real quickly through each of those different things. Gay, same-sex loving, whatever you want to call it. I’m gay. So there’s that cisgender. For those of you that are not familiar with the terminology, it is… For folks that are born into the gender that they identify with as currently, that’s the term cisgender. Cis, the root of that means on the same side. I’m on the same side of the gender that was given to me, assumed for me when I was born, which is categorically different from transgender. Trans, the root being across from, which people are across from the gender that they were assumed to be when they were born. I use cisgender to describe myself, and the reason that word is really important is because if you didn’t have that word to describe folks that are cisgender, then what is the opposite of transgender? What is the other word, right? Then you have this conversation about normal or abnormal or whatever else.

We need a word for us, so it falls into this categorization of normalcy. That’s that. Filipino, I’m a first generation born here in the United States. Filipino, my parents and my family were all immigrants. My uncle was able to bring over the family because he joined the Navy, the military in the Philippines. For those of you that are part of High Tech High, if you know Miss Judy Asiong…

Jean Catubay:
I love Miss Judy.

Rick Oculto:
Her dad is my uncle. He’s one of my heroes. That’s my family. As a Bay Area native at first, that part of my family, Judy and her dad and her sisters and mom, they lived in Guam in Hawaii and all these different places. When we came over, a lot of his sisters, my mom and my aunts, all moved to the Bay Area around San Francisco and San Jose. That’s where we put down a lot of roots. I think Sunnyvale was probably the first place around there. I’m very much a Bay Area kid. This is where my identity comes from.

Jean Catubay:
I’m also from the Bay, too, and something that’s coming to mind… I know we’re going to get to the other stuff also, but I was just wondering for people who might not be super familiar, what makes the Bay so special? What makes that area so different?

Rick Oculto:
I think it has a real advantage in being basically a port city in a lot of different ways. It’s a port city or a port location, obviously, because of the bay itself. San Francisco and Oakland serve as international ports for a lot of things, so a lot of people come through there, a lot of trade, a lot of that kind of different stuff. But it is also a hub for a lot of different kinds of innovation and I think it was facilitated by that diversity that came through those ports and the ability for businesses to build and innovate based off of those different ideas coming through.

Jean Catubay:
Yeah, it’s kind of like through osmosis almost that people just get that Bay Area swag, right?

Rick Oculto:
Oh, I mean, right. When you ask me what my cultural food is, of course I’m going to go Filipino first because that’s what my family did. But as soon as I stepped out the door, Mexican food, Indian food, Vietnamese food, Polish food.

Jean Catubay:
I will say I cannot find an Indian pizza anywhere outside of San Francisco. I have tried and people look at me crazy like, “What are you talking about?”

Rick Oculto:
Right. Right. Yeah. Well, that’s true, but I’ll give you this. Your California burritos, the SoCal french fried burritos, you can’t beat them. San Diego is the place.

Jean Catubay:
You’re right. But people who went in San Francisco will argue with you about a wet burrito, I swear. I’m always like, “Is it that good?”

Rick Oculto:
Different strokes. Right?

Jean Catubay:
Right. Right. Oh, goodness. Well, I’m sensing a segue now into that last part that we were talking about with the gay gamer aspect. I remember when you met my students. That was the one that you sounded the most excited to share about. I’m wondering, especially as someone who is involved in education, what are the different aspects of gaming and how do they relate to the world of education? Because in my experience, I feel like I know a lot of teachers and people in education who are into games. I just don’t really hear people sharing that passion out loud very much.

Rick Oculto:
Right. Right. Well, I mean, first of all, I come from a really nerdy family. Again, I’m not putting my family in San Diego on read, but they were the alpha geeks. They’re the ones that brought us to Star Trek and to Star War. I don’t know. If it wasn’t for Judy’s sister, Eileen, I wouldn’t know if the rest of us would’ve been so geeky, quite honestly.

Jean Catubay:
Thank you, Ate Eileen.

Rick Oculto:
Yeah, right? She hate that. Calling her ate, she hates that. Thanks, Ate Eileen. Anyway, I was surrounded by all of these different things and the geekiness, that part of our culture, a lot of times, is defined racially about who has access to it, who’s represented in it, and who it’s written for. We’re seeing that in a lot of modern conversations about representation in movies and in video games and in comic books and who should be what and all of this stuff. Well, I grew up with this, and part of my legacy is Star Trek, where they really did push the envelope. It’s nowhere near where it should be now, but the roots of that was really to say, “Hey, look, we’ve got this Russian guy in the middle of the Cold War here on our set. We’ve got this Scottish guy where we know that there is some tension around those issues. We’ve got this Black woman who has a leadership role on the bridge.” Right?

Jean Catubay:
Correct me if I’m wrong, Star Trek is the first interracial kiss on television. Is it not?

Rick Oculto:
It is. It is. Between Captain Kirk and Uhura. And there’s a great story behind that, too. The production company did not want to show that. To his credit, William Shatner was like, “I’m going to ruin every shot so that they could use-

Jean Catubay:
So they couldn’t use it, right?

Rick Oculto:
Yeah. “I’m going to ruin every shot that they could possibly use to use another thing until you have to use the shot where we are kissing.”

Jean Catubay:
Wow, that’s incredible. Will Shatner, what a guy.

Rick Oculto:
Right. Within that context of geekery, this is the kind of thing that I grew up with. I really love games. I love games that are card games, board games, video games, and that has been a consistent kind of thing within my family. Now, video games, that played a large part of my growing up, and I’m going to age myself here. I started with the PC Junior and Ataris. This is before they were considered cool and it was a really fun way to be able to engage in activities that are foreign to me. You talk about video games like… Oh, I believe it was called, oh my God, Spelunker or something, where you were literally jumping across and basically playing Indiana Jones. The part of that is not only argued… I could watch a movie about Indiana Jones. I could read a book about that kind of adventure, but there are very few ways that I can participate without breaking international law.

Jean Catubay:
Of course never. We cannot condone that on this podcast.

Rick Oculto:
Right. This is a really fun way to get into that story. You say that a lot of educators are wary or don’t talk about the fact that they might be into video games, and I think that’s a shame. The reason for that is I want you to think of any sort of media that you use to learn.

Jean Catubay:
Okay.

Rick Oculto:
Now, I want you to think about the pedagogy that you might use with all those different kinds of media to get a lesson across. Now, in any of those media, do any of the media by nature of the media itself require that you improve in order to progress?

Jean Catubay:
No. I feel like it’s very a consumptionist sort of relationship, huh?

Rick Oculto:
Right. Whereas video games, you got to get good. To use a gamer phrase, you have to improve your knowledge, your reaction time, your interpretation of signals, all of these different things in order to progress. The pedagogy there is one where you, as a player, are invested to continue the story in a way that means that you must improve. There’s very few media that’s like this and it’s not some outside force that’s telling me, “Ah, you got to do this.” It’s you, yourself saying, “I want to know and I want to get better.” It takes the lessons that we generally attribute to sports or team play. It takes art, it takes literature, because there’s so many rich story and plot lines now. It takes technology and math. It takes all of the different subjects and turns it into this self-motivated educational tool.

Jean Catubay:
Yeah. It’s so cool to hear you talk about it in that sense, because I think, in so many ways, gaming and education are often, I don’t know, regarded in opposition to each other, when in actuality, I think they compliment one another really, really well. I’m curious to learn more about when did you start working with young people? Because just a clarification, you are not a classroom teacher, right? If not the classroom, when was your kind of first interactions and when did you decide, “This is the path that I want to take”?

Rick Oculto:
Well, the most honest answer I have is by accident.

Jean Catubay:
We love honesty here.

Rick Oculto:
Yeah. Yeah, I got here by accident. When I was younger, I remember in high school, taking those aptitude tests that tell you what kind of job your personality is best suited for. In any case, I will never forget the three jobs that were recommended for me when I took it. The three jobs were a public speaker/politician, counselor therapist/teacher, and priest.

Jean Catubay:
Oh, wow. Okay. You know what? I think I remember you mentioning this when we first met. Yes, I remember now.

Rick Oculto:
Yeah. Those were the three things. The thing for me is coming from an immigrant family, especially… And I don’t know if this is true for other cultures, but it is true of my family. The gold standard for where your kids are supposed to aspire to be was doctor and lawyer at the time. Those were the…

Jean Catubay:
I think that still stands.

Rick Oculto:
Right. Right. Right. Because those are the well respected, high paying professions. For me, having had that test, it was freeing in a lot of ways because I’m like, “Oh, I have been working towards this goal, but I didn’t really like it.” This just tells me, right? It’s not necessarily in my wheelhouse. It’s not something that interests me and it freed me to go and try other pursuits to say the least. My thought process at that point was, “All right. Well, once I graduate from high school, then what I want to do is I want to really learn how to be a therapist.” The reason for that is because in my friend group, a lot of them… Without me prompting, they came to me whenever there was something that was over overbearing or that was difficult or they came to me without fail. I thought to myself, “This seems like a natural inclination. Might as well use it. It’s a talent. You know you want to help people, so go do that.” So I did.

I went to Seattle University up in Washington and my undergraduate degrees… I got a dual major in Spanish and psychology. My thought process behind that was, “Okay, I know I want to help people. I know that doing this therapy thing seems like the right thing for me to do, so I’m going to go into psychology to learn more about the ins and outs of that.” I also thought to myself, “Okay. I want to move back to California at some point. And if I want to really help people, then I need to expand my ability to communicate.” If I want to learn another language, it’s going to be Spanish or Vietnamese or Tagalog or Hindi, any of those California-heavy languages. Because I grew up in the Bay Area, I grew up really close to Mexican families and had really close Mexican friends, so I had always thought Spanish was just this gorgeous language and did that.

I used my degrees and I’m like, “Okay, now I can go and pursue a career and see what’s out there with the stuff that I’ve learned.” I got a job at a LGBTQ Community Center in San Jose. It’s the Billy DeFrank Center and they hired me as the youth coordinator. I was just supposed to run groups with a bunch of LGBTQ kids and that was going to be the beginning of my career. Part of that was to run basically therapy groups with with LGBTQ kids. You have to remember, this was the early-2000s. As I was doing these groups with them, it was becoming incredibly clear that I could not diagnose them with any sort of mental problem. What I was finding is that they were reacting healthily properly to unfair stressors.

If you are burned, for example, and you yell, that’s expected that you’re going to yell. And these kids were yelling because they were burning. The stressors that I were seeing was… On the light end of things, I was seeing that kids were afraid to talk about their sexual orientation or gender at school. I was seeing that they were upset that they weren’t able to bring their dates to dances or proms. That’s heavy, but that’s also on the lighter side of things. On the heavier side of things, I was encountering young people who were being beat up, who were being thrown out of their house, who were unable to even walk to school and feel safe during certain times, because they knew that there was nobody protecting them. Within that context of they’re responding to being burned rather than there’s something wrong with them and that’s why they’re not functioning well, I switched from an individual responsibility kind of perspective to, “Listen, we’ve got to look at the systems that are making them fall into these patterns that are unhealthy for them. What’s the environment?”

I quickly shifted, and it was night and day. I remember maybe seven to 10 people that were coming to those meetings at the beginning, and it was wheel spinning in the mud. They were just like, “We’re sad and we don’t know what to do about it.” If it was a mental health thing, then I could give them strategies for feeling better about themselves, for eating healthier, for all the different things that you might think about, but there’s nothing to do when somebody’s beating you up. So, I shifted and I said, “Okay, if this is the thing, then let’s talk about what you need at your schools to make it a better environment for you.” They started bringing in ideas about what could be better at their school, what needed to be taught, what are some safety protocols that could happen, what are some safe teachers that they could talk to, and they started sharing with one another. Let me tell you, it went from seven to 10 kids to 40 that were showing up on a regular basis, because now it wasn’t, “I’m going to go to this place and talk about how I’m sad,” it’s “I’m going to go to this place and figure out how I can make my school a better place for us. I’m not a victim anymore. Now, I’m an agent of change.”

Jean Catubay:
Wow. What a powerful experience. Do you still keep in contact with any of your former kids?

Rick Oculto:
Yeah. It’s funny you say that. I found another one of my youth who gave a TED talk, and I’m like, “Oh, my God, they’re doing better than me.”

Jean Catubay:
Wow. Not that it’s a competition or anything-

Rick Oculto:
It’s not. But I’m like, “Okay. Okay.”

Jean Catubay:
Oh, my goodness. Well, what a dream, though. In education, that’s what you want that your kids are going to surpass you eventually and flourish.

Rick Oculto:
Yeah.

Jean Catubay:
Incredible.

Rick Oculto:
Yeah, and it’s pretty fun. The youth group, that grew into its own. After I left and grew it as much as I could, it grew even more and became its own nonprofit. Now, one of the youth that was in my programs is the executive director of that organization.

Jean Catubay:
Oh, my gosh. What a full circle moment right there.

Rick Oculto:
Yeah. Adrienne, if you’re listening to this at all, it sounds cheesy, but I’m so proud of you.

Jean Catubay:
Oh, that’s so incredible. What’s the name of the nonprofit that he’s working with now?

Rick Oculto:
I believe they go by They and they are the youth, oh my gosh, youth space in San Jose.

Jean Catubay:
Wow. What a dream. Also, thank you so much for clarifying for pronouns.

Rick Oculto:
Yeah, no worries.

Jean Catubay:
That was the beginning of your career, and I think many of our listeners… I’m wondering, how did your role evolve over the years and how has it changed? Because it sounds like you’re doing a lot of the same work, just maybe more complex or just different in a lot of ways. Maybe it gets easier as time goes by. I don’t know. Wanting to learn from your expertise here, Rick.

Rick Oculto:
Well, yes and no. It’s interesting. I’m going to use social work terms now. I went from a very micro practice, therapy and one-on-ones and group therapy with people to a meso practice, which means that I help those folks figure out ways to engage with the system to make it better for themselves. To now I have macro practice actually shifting and helping shift those systems directly by working with the California Department of Education and with other education nonprofits and with schools and districts. The work has shifted in the degree and actually about the knowledge set, too.

The way that I got into this is because I was helping these kids really figure out what the laws were, what protected them, what they could do in their schools, I became incredibly knowledgeable about what the laws were, about what the schools were responsible for, about what the kids were allowed to do and what they should be allowed to do. I was invited into more forums of talking about what it means to really address LGBTQ representation and rights in all of these different spaces. Through that work, it just evolved, again, from that micro level to this macro level where now I get to talk to. In fact, last week I was just on a conference call with the Department of Education about how to affect these things. What it comes down to is now I’m not just talking about the laws; I’m literally affecting the laws, helping create the laws, and helping implement the laws across the state.

Jean Catubay:
In a really big way, you’re helping to design the ecosystems for education, right?

Rick Oculto:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s really weird to think about because my MO at the beginning is I just want folks like me to be okay. This is why I say it’s by accident. I wasn’t in middle school or high school thinking, “Oh, I want to be this person who’s affecting policy.” I studied psychology.

Jean Catubay:
Right. What this makes me think of is a follow-up question that I have. What advice do you have to classroom teachers about putting together a working knowledge of these policies around teaching LGBTQ+ histories and just about LGBTQ plus topics in general? How useful is it to have a working knowledge of those laws when you’re going into the classroom?

Rick Oculto:
Yeah. These kinds of questions are hard, because the nuance of the different situations that educators might find themselves in are going to translate the words that I’m going to say next differently. Because honestly, what you need to know about the laws and educator is that you are supported to ensure that your student is protected to learn and grow in an environment where they do not feel threatened. There’s all these details around that, there’s all these different laws about the specifics around that. But as long as you are going towards that particular goal, that mindset around how you teach, then for the most part, you’re going to find that the law is on your side, especially here in California. When you’re talking about gender and sexual orientation and around race and around ethnicity, we really want to make sure that there is an environment where our kids, regardless of where they come from or what their belief systems are or who they find attractive or who they love, is only a part of the story that they are supported no matter who they are.

I think that is the larger context for this. That being said, I know that there’s a lot of hesitancy for educators around either going into some of these more hot button topics because of the way that your community might respond to that. This is where I think that the specifics around the laws might help you. It’s good to know, for example, that you are absolutely allowed to talk about LGBTQ issues in the classroom. Nobody can complain about that, right? You’re absolutely allowed to say the words lesbian or gay or bisexual or transgender, even at an elementary school level, because in essence, what you’re doing is just describing a person that actually exists.

I think those kinds of nuances are important for when you find yourself as an educator wondering about what you’re allowed to do, because it’s good to know where you’re protected when those rights of yours to be able to talk about these things are challenged. I would also say that for those of you that are listening that are the administrative part of education, that’s your responsibility. Teachers have a billion things that they have to keep track of. Part of your responsibility as an administrator is to make sure that they can do that job, so know these laws. If you’re a principal, if you’re a superintendent, if you’re a vice principal, if you’re a dean, if you’re any of those other functions, it is your responsibility to know these things. I was just on the phone with the CSBA the other day. I know that those different things shift at a moment’s notice and it’s your job to support your teachers.

Jean Catubay:
Period.

Rick Oculto:
That’s what you signed up for. That’s what you signed up for.

Jean Catubay:
It’s true. It’s true. It’s really affirming to hear you talk about this, because as a Humanities teacher, there are often times where we’re talking about critical history in particular, where certain students will just bring up very… or just more quietly like, “Hey, Ms. Jean, my family doesn’t really believe in that or I might be uncomfortable with this. Can I step away?” Hearing you say that the law is on our side in that regard just makes me feel really comfortable to continue those type of lessons, because that’s what our students need, right?

Rick Oculto:
Right. Right. It’s funny that you bring that particular scenario up, because what we tell teachers to use at that point is just to bring up the fact that, in sixth grade, we talk about world religions, and we talk about the world religions that come from Egypt as ancient religions. We talk about more modern religions around the Judeo-Christian pantheon of things that we talk about. At no point when we’re talking about world religions are we like, “You should join this religion.” We’re letting you know that they exist, that there are people that you’re going to encounter. Especially when we’re talking about things like ancient religions, it’s like at no point are you afraid that your kid is going to come home and be like, “Well, I worship Ra now because we heard about it.” It’s that same kind of thing. Saying that a type of person exists doesn’t break anything. And if it does break something, then that’s not on the teacher. There’s something else going on.

Jean Catubay:
I feel that. You know what? This is making me think a lot about conversations that we’ve had with guests in the past around this idea that, as educators, it is our foremost responsibility to ensure the safety of the most vulnerable in the room. Oftentimes, whether we like to admit it or not, the chaos of the school day just gets us lost in a sauce with it all. I’m wondering from your experience, although you are not a classroom teacher, you are certainly an expert in this area, particularly I think with your background in psychology, is how do we set up the space? What type of norms do we set up with our students to ensure that everyone feels seen and validated? I’m wondering, from your experience, what are the non-negotiables and maybe what are some of things that maybe we should try to avoid?

Rick Oculto:
Yeah. Yeah. When it comes to things like norms, I think that that has to be put into the cultural context of the classroom that you’re talking about. I’m not talking about the cultural context of the community as a whole or the city or even the school. I’m talking about there’s a cultural context for each classroom and how that operates. I think that you have to, first and foremost, figure out what that context is for your classroom based off of who is there and who you, as the teacher, what you want to grow that into or what you want to nurture within that classroom. That’s always my first thing, because some classrooms are going to be disciplined classrooms, some classrooms are going to be free for all classrooms. It’s all different and they all have their uses. They all have their uses. Establish that part first.

Now, we started with the word around norms, and I think that the only real norm that has to be uniform across is that you’re going to be humble, that you’re going to respect one another for the differences that are going to come in, whether that is about socioeconomics or gender or race or religion, any of those kinds of things. You don’t know that other person’s life the way that other person does. So, have some humility, have some respect, have some reverence towards the other lives that are in that room with you. That to me is the first thing for establishing those norms, because again, when we talk about the education code, we talk about what people are responsible for, that is all very important when push comes to shove. But push and shove are not going to happen if we start on the basis of, “Okay, I see that you are different from how I am and that’s okay. If we need to, let’s talk about how we maneuver those differences.”

To me, that has to be the basis of the conversation. There’s so much tension around these differences nowadays, and I think it’s because there is a misunderstanding about erasure, about how we respect folks, and the feeling that you cannot bring your true self to a space because of all of these diversity measures. What we’re saying is that the exclusionary language that might come from things is the stuff that we have to watch, that the irony of being inclusive is that once the exclusive part is put to the forefront, then the rest of the conversation falls to the wayside because it cuts people out. what we want to do is we want to be able to open the doors and say, “You belong in this classroom. You are worthy of being taught and of learning.” It is our responsibility, not just as the teacher, because I think there’s a lot of pressure put on the teacher, but it’s our responsibility as a classroom to figure out what our community looks like so that we can all succeed.

Jean Catubay:
Yeah. I’m making a lot of connections to something that you said earlier with your work with that youth center. I remember you saying that there was some level of co-design with your students, right? About how they wanted the space to look and feel like. My question for you is, especially for teachers who might be a little bit newer to this or might be feeling some discomfort or hesitancy, how much would you advise that we elicit that kind of participation from our students? How much should we say, “What do you guys think?” versus just saying, “This is kind of what it is, and we trust that you trust us enough that we are working in the best interest of everybody else in the room”?

Rick Oculto:
Now, are you talking about in context of the students themselves or the larger context of the families and the teachers?

Jean Catubay:
Oh, I was referring to the first one, but I guess the second is also good, too. Rick, you’re the perfect guest to have on, seriously.

Rick Oculto:
I mean, I’ve been grappling with these questions for decades now.

Jean Catubay:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Rick Oculto:
But when it comes to the classroom, what I would say about that is you, yourself, as an educator, have to recognize that when we talk about including LGBTQ history and social science, what we’re doing is we’re saying that there is a particular part of history in social science that we have ignored, that there is a impoverishment of our education because we have not included these lenses or perspectives before. My non-queer example around this is, “Let’s talk about the Civil War.” We know that there were different battles that took place, we know that there were legislation from the north and the south that had different things to say about this. We know that the primary actors in those different battles, we know all those kinds of things. Up until recently, the voices of the people who were most affected by this, the people who were enslaved, unless you were an “exceptional hero,” like if you were Harriet Tubman…

Jean Catubay:
No mention at all.

Rick Oculto:
Right. There’s nothing about that. When we’re talking about including LGBTQ history, it’s the same thing. We know that, in this century, this particular period of history, that there is a lot of different things that LGBTQ people brought to the forefront. What happens then if we don’t talk about the positionality about who they were and what they were experiencing in order for that to happen? Now, again, to go back to the example of enslaved people, let’s say we’re talking about Harriet Tubman. If you didn’t talk about her gender or her skin color, are you still talking about Harriet Tubman?

Jean Catubay:
Not so much.

Rick Oculto:
Who and what does that become if we’re not talking about the identity and the circumstances by which they came to the decisions and the actions that they took within history? I think it’s necessary to figure out that. That line there is, as far as the students, should you just let them trust you or have them guide you, et cetera? Would you be asking that same question around African-American history? Would you be asking that same question about Asian history? Would we say, “Okay, we’ll talk to them about MLK, but if they really don’t like the part about lynchings, we’re not going to tell them that part.”

Jean Catubay:
Such a clear and succinct analogy.

Rick Oculto:
Right?

Jean Catubay:
Yeah. I heard you use a couple of terms that I’m hoping you could clarify for our listeners. I heard you use the terms lens, perspective, and positionality. I’m hoping after you clarify those, let’s get into some queer history. This is the part that I’m really excited to hear from you about.

Rick Oculto:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Sure. Okay. The first one was lens. When we talk about lens, we basically think about a particular period in history or a particular event in history. What lens are you putting on it to show a particular thing? Because you know that, in science, when you apply a particular lens that you can see different particles, you can see different angles, you can see different refractions. All those kinds of things in science, right? Same thing applies to social science.

If you look at the Civil War and you apply a lens of gender, what are the things that we’re going to discover? What are the things that we’re going to be able to talk about through the lens of gender? We know that as we talk about history and social science, a lot of times that history is taught through a male perspective, a man’s perspective. That lens. If you put a women’s lens on that particular history, then you start seeing interesting things about the Civil War. You start seeing that there were some women that cross-dressed in male soldier uniforms to participate in the war. You start seeing that there are women that provided provisions in ways that men couldn’t because they were not allowed to travel in certain places. There’s all of these different perspectives that you can apply with that lens that enrich our understanding of what happened.

That next point is perspective, which is analogous to lens, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that larger like all of women. You can have the perspective of, for example, Harriet Tubman. What was she experiencing at that moment in time through her different identities for her to get to her abolitionist work? Same thing can be said about Harvey Milk when he was fighting for LGBTQ teachers to be able to teach here in California. What led him to that point, that perspective of that person who’s experienced those kinds of traumas and joys and all those other parts of life? What perspective brought them to where they were at?

The other thing was positionality. Positionality is tricky because it is malleable, depending on the context in which you use it. It is literally figuring out what perspectives are being highlighted at the time. From those perspectives, from the person who held those perspectives, what were they allowed to do in the time and space that they were in? To use Harvey Milk again, as a man, did he experience a certain privilege to be able to say certain things about education that a queer woman might not have? His positionality in that forum would be different. That’s not to say that a woman couldn’t have done that, but how did that change that?

We really want to be able to, again, explore all of the different facets that might affect how that history is being taught and how we understand how that history came to be. If we want to get real modern about this, we can talk about the shootings that recently happened in Atlanta. The excuses that the murderer in Atlanta used was that he was a sex addict and he was not racist, yet his targets were all Asian spaces. In this country, there is a history of exotification around Asian women’s bodies and a narrative about the worth of those bodies. How disposable does it become for somebody who says, “Well, I was addicted to sex and this was the problem, and so I eliminated it”? The humanities lost if you take that positionality of somebody who had access to that type of violence, who had access to that type of language, versus somebody who is considered or deemed and treated less than the narrative of that being forgivable, excusable is something that is proliferated.

Jean Catubay:
Your point about the dehumanizing aspect of all of this just makes me think about how fast things happen in our culture and how very little time we have to actually sit and think about and process what is going on around us. To be honest, the last couple of weeks I have struggled trying to figure out, “How do I make space to really have a meaningful conversation about what’s been going on with my kids?” Because I feel a heightened sense of responsibility to talk about it as a Filipino person who is Asian, right?

Rick Oculto:
Yeah. I mean, it’s really easy to be able to show a clip of what happened to Atlanta and then have a slide about the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese Internment, about all of those different things that have marginalized Asian communities. You can make that throughput real easily.

Jean Catubay:
Right. I feel like this is something that just keeps getting brought up in our conversation is the importance of context. And not only context, but just the building of understanding over time. I think that’s the part that oftentimes is really hard is that aspect of time, because it feels like it’s always running away from us.

Rick Oculto:
Oh, yeah. The thing is I’m not alone in that. The reason that we’re working with the Department of Education right now is that they recognized that the students that were being sent to college, and this is from history and social science teachers in college, were complaining and saying, “You are sending us students that are not prepared for the analysis that they need to do at a college level.” They can recite the dates, they can recite the facts, they can recite the names, but they can’t tell me why the Civil War was important. They can’t tell me why Martin Luther King was significant. They can’t tell me any of the reasons that any of these things happened. When we ask them to look at things like the legal structure of Russia and how that shifted over time, there’s no context as to why those things relate to us and how is a better or worse system depending on how it is applied.

Jean Catubay:
Right. Yeah. I’ve always been super fascinated with this idea of history being those two groups of people versus each other and nobody else was there. I’m wondering, what resources do you recommend for folks who are wanting to explore queer history and teach them to our students?

Rick Oculto:
Okay. Well, that’s going to be different depending on grade level, but I will say that, right now, Our Family Coalition, which is my organization and One Archives Foundation out of USC down in LA, we’ve partnered to create this website called lgbtqhistory.org. On that website, you can find evaluation tools. If your school is thinking about adopting materials or has already adopted materials, you can look over those materials with these guides to see how they meet criteria as we evaluated the books. We’re not telling you what we think of the book, but we’ll tell you what we looked at to come to the conclusions that we came to. The other things that we have on there are lesson plans. If you’re one of those really go-getter teachers that really wants to research and make a thing for yourself, we’ve got a lot of recommendations around primary sources and secondary sources that you can use.

Jean Catubay:
Beautiful. These are all free, by the way, so thank you, Our Family Coalition. Do you have any that are your favorite or that you’ve gotten really great feedback about?

Rick Oculto:
I think the three biggest recommendations that I have… For those folks that really want to figure out… well, not figure out, but want to get a better grasp on theory and why we want to talk about LGBTQ issues in certain ways, there is this great, what do you call it, graphic novel. There’s this great graphic novel called Queer: A Graphic History by Meg-John Barker and Julia Scheele. Again, it’s like maybe a hundred pages long at most, but it is. It’s done in zine form, so it’s easy to absorb of all the different things that happen throughout history that contribute to how we think about gender and sexuality today. Again, it’s not like taking a college course on gender history or any kind of stuff like that, but it gives you a good idea about why certain things are talked about the way that they are.

The other resources that I would recommend is if you want a larger context for queer history in the United States, I think one of the better books that are out there right now is A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski. That is just a general overview about these things. If you want an overview of trans history, of gender expansive history, then Dr. Susan Stryker wrote this book called Transgender History, and it really goes through everything from the cross-dressing laws that were put through the people who participated in the Civil War by cross-dressing to modern things today about how we argue about who is allowed onto a sports team.

I’ve found that, as I’ve grown older, that my patience for reading has dwindled, which is weird, I think. But I think it’s also how I’ve learned how to absorb media. If you are somebody who wants to listen more than read, then there are also a whole bunch of different podcasts that are recommended on the LGBTQ history website as well. I think the two highlights there that I would recommend are the podcast by Eric Marcus, Making Gay History. He was one of the first people to really document queer history, and what he did was he made a podcast out of all of the interviews he did with historical figures. You have primary sources here. Yeah.

Jean Catubay:
Wow, that’s amazing.

Rick Oculto:
Yeah.

Jean Catubay:
I heard you mentioned there were two podcast recommendations, so what’s the second one?

Rick Oculto:
Yeah. Eric Marcus was one of those folks. The other person that I remember reading, because I had to seek this out in college because it wasn’t anywhere else, was Leila Rupp. And she has a podcast, which is more academic, called Queer America Teaching Tolerance. Her and John D’Emilio, who is another historian, just talk about what it means to insert these particular queer lenses in different parts of history. If you wanted a really academic, almost like a class, then this is a great way to absorb that. There’s no homework, so whatever.

Jean Catubay:
There we go. Homework is liberated sometimes. What I’m wondering now is out of your own study, what have you learned about LGBTQ+ history that kind of shook you or maybe left you in awe, something that you didn’t expect and maybe just left an impact on you as a person?

Rick Oculto:
I think the biggest part for me is really the reclaiming of my story as a person of color. What I mean by that is a lot of the gender expansiveness and same sex relationships that occurred through history have been culturally erased. For example, when we talk about Native American traditions, we know that there are about 300 or so recognized traditions in the United States, and about 150 or so of those have two spirit traditions, which means that they recognize gender expansive people within their cultures. This has always been here on this continent for thousands of years. That’s one of the thing. As a personal journey around that, I started wondering about, “Okay, well, if that happened here, did it happen in other places?”

I looked at the Philippines, where my family is from, and found out that bakla, while it is a slur now for queer people, was a title back in the day. Bakla and babaylan were gender expansive, basically shamans within the islands that were both leaders and advisors of different tribes in the Philippines. I got to feel a lot of pride around that because the way that they were seen was really as these conduits between gender and that they did have leadership roles to the point where, through the Spanish occupation, they were some of the last fighters to fight against the Spanish and the occupation.

Jean Catubay:
My mind is [inaudible 00:57:46]. What an incredible piece of history. I’ve never known that before. That just makes me wonder, how much is that in the regular everyday person’s consciousness in the Philippines?

Rick Oculto:
The funny thing is I learned about this and I asked my aunts. I’m like, “Do you know any of this?” They don’t, because it was part of the occupation to erase that culture so that it’s easier to conquer.

Jean Catubay:
You know what, Rick? We’re just going to get off into another tangent. We have a podcast about colonialism, the one about San Francisco. We’re just going to keep going on and on and on. This episode’s never going to end.

Rick Oculto:
I know. I know.

Jean Catubay:
But like all good things, this episode does have to come to an end. I’m wondering, where can folks get in contact with you? I know Our Family Coalition has so many different resources. You have PDs, you have family workshops, and things like that. I’m wondering, what are your personal favorites, what are some fan favorites, and where do you recommend people to go to?

Rick Oculto:
Of the workshops that we offer, you mean?

Jean Catubay:
Mm-hmm.

Rick Oculto:
It’s funny. The fan favorites are around gender, because there is a lot of things that people… Usually, it comes from a place of we don’t know what to do. We just had a student come out as gender expansive. Not necessarily transgender, but just expansive in how they understand gender, how they express gender, and we want to be supportive. That comes from both families and from educators. I think this is why this particular topic has become really popular with folks because those of us who are born right before the 2000s, we have a really binary understanding. It’s really hard to shift. Even though you can see some of the ways that it’s been harmful, it’s still hard.
A conversation that I’ve been in recently is, is dude gender-neutral? Can I use dude to refer to things? Because I use it as a gender-neutral. I know this is an education podcast, but to be cress, if you really think dude is a gender-neutral term, ask a cisgender straight man how many dudes he slept with, and I promise you it is not a gender-neutral term at that point.

Jean Catubay:
I can see that. Yep.

Rick Oculto:
Right. Right. Right. I think that is also popular because of word of mouth. People learn a lot of things around their own ways of navigating gender, no matter how you identify and how it has been detrimental to really understanding how we care for one another or how we could care for one another if we didn’t have rigid boundaries around how those were laid down on us.

Jean Catubay:
Right. Right. Where can listeners reach you at?

Rick Oculto:
The way to reach me is… I mean, email is really easy. It’s just rick [at] ourfamily [dot] org. You can see the work that we do at our main website, ourfamily.org. I already mentioned lgbtqhistory.org. There is a Contact Us sheet where you can request more information, tell us things that you need to, or even request a workshop on that website. I think the project that I am most excited about, and it’s going to sound like I’m pandering… I’m totally not.

Jean Catubay:
It’s okay if you are. You’re the guest.

Rick Oculto:
Is really working with the students. In a lot of ways, I miss having that hands-on experience being the youth coordinator at the LGBT Center. But when I was able to work with your students and really see how they were approaching the ideas around how to be inclusive for their LGBTQ peers, I don’t know if it was clear on the Zoom call, but I was tearing up. I’ve told my friends about this. When I was growing up, my context for LGBTQ issues was that people died of AIDS and that the boys would play Smear the Queer on the playground. That was my middle school. We’re looking at your students who are also in middle school who are not playing those games, who are not saying those things, who are not saying that that’s the only way to be gay, and instead are saying, “We see you. We want you to be part of us. We know that sometimes you feel like you’re not, and we want you to know that this is your place too.” That’s a message people my age never heard.

I get very excited about the things that I do with your students. My interns right now who are all college students, I’ve worked with a few high school students, and the way that they are really engaging in creating resources around history… It’s like it’s providing water to somebody who has never drunk water before. They’re so eager to learn and to share. I don’t even have to do anything. There’s no task mastery anything that I have to do, because they’ve never heard this. They’ve never seen anything that affirms who they are in this way. They’re so motivated to make sure that the folks that are coming up, your kids and the kids that are younger than them… My nieces and nephews don’t know a world where queer is anything but just part of everyday life.

Jean Catubay:
That’s a whole word.

Rick Oculto:
It wasn’t a pander, but I know it sounds like that.

Jean Catubay:
We’ll edit it so it doesn’t sound so pandery.

Rick Oculto:
Great.

Jean Catubay:
Well, Rick, I absolutely love the time that we spent together. Thank you so much. We’ll have our other podcast coming up. Okay?

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed and produced by me, Alec Patton, but this episode was hosted and produced by Jean Catubay. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. We’ve got links to all the resources Rick talked about in our show notes, so check those out. Thanks for listening.