Why Storytelling?
“When I was a kid I used to love to listen to my family’s elders tell stories around the dinner table. They told stories about love, joy, failures, accomplishments, hardships, journeys, and more. This sharing was most important because it provided opportunities for all of us to get to know each other better and to build meaningful relationships. Unfortunately around so many dinner tables there has been nothing affirming for queer people of the essence of who they are when there were stories shared. Anything related to queerness within our families was either left out of the script or was told in a negative light. My gay grand-uncle never told any stories about him being gay and whatever little was told about my grand-uncle's gayness, was never positive. I would have loved to hear about his struggles navigating in a non-accepting world, how he dealt with the family; of how he met men, where he went cruising; about his relationships. I did not have the benefit of hearing about any of these experiences at that dinner table.”
— Rico Rodriguez
Rico Rodriguez with Queers in Your Ears' event at the ArQuives for the Toronto International Storytelling Festival
Clare Nobbs with Queers in Your Ears' event at the ArQuives for the Toronto International Storytelling Festival
When Queers in Your Ears began organizing their own storytelling events, most of their members at that time had a storytelling background but did not feel represented or heard in the storytelling genre. Queering stories and telling queer stories was their way of making themselves and their communities visible and bringing queerness out of obscurity.
QIYE started with queered versions of stories like "The Emperor’s New Clothes" as well as explicitly queer stories such as Susan Sontag’s "The Way We Live Now", but they soon became braver and more confident about the stories they could tell through the interest their audience exhibited in their stories, as Rico recounts: “I remember the Elders of the storytelling community (...) sitting in front of me as I was telling a story of how I got a cock up my ass for the first time. It was surreal, frightful and weird, but extremely liberating.”
Jeffrey Canton with Queers in Your Ears at The Village at Black Creek in 2025
Telling queer stories has been, for QIYE, a question of visibility and representation but also of connection and perspective-taking. They wanted to make a difference for younger people through representation and thus included the widest range of tellers: Indigenous, racially diverse, trans, gender nonconforming, and gender questioning.
An intimate emotional connection to each member of the audience was crucial as they wanted to create a space for the audience to experience queer stories that they could relate to. But storytelling is a mutual relationship: QIYE’s stage aimed to represent a safe space for people of different ages, different genders and different cultures to tell their stories and be heard.
Clare remembers this encouragement at one of their performances: “Back at BIBT, this year, our theme was 'Dare We Tell the Truth?', and I told 'Truth or Dare'. It was long and more of a narrative than a story. The story was highly autobiographical, less comical than I'm used to, and spoke truths I had been silently holding onto for years. I told in full male drag. It was a deeply meaningful story to me about waking up and being true to the self, taking risks and walking away from 'what if'. It left me drained but exhilarated”.
Conversations between tellers and audience at "No More S#%&!" (2017) at Glad Day BookshopFurthermore, QIYE has taken on the role as a living archive. Through personal takes on events that were happening in Toronto (and elsewhere), queer history is preserved. It has been QIYE’s aim to document facets of queer history before these personal accounts cannot be transmitted anymore through the people that experienced that time. That means melding historic narratives like the HIV/AIDS crisis, experiences of queerphobic violence and discrimination and queer liberation movements with their own stories and making queer history more palpable.
Beyond the “big” moments of queer history, this archive also preserves very personal and situated ones about their families, their lovers and their own bodies. Stories that are equally important to tell.