I started working on Queer Eye in season three after watching the first season, becoming obsessed, and cold-messaging an executive producer on LinkedIn. Somehow, this worked.

I came on as a clearance coordinator, became an associate producer for Queer Eye: We’re in Japan!, and eventually worked my way up to producer. Over seven seasons, the show took me to Kansas City, Tokyo, Philadelphia, Austin, New Orleans, Las Vegas and Washington, D.C.

My job as a producer was basically to meet our heroes, get to know their stories, and then work with the showrunners, producers and Fab Five to ask: what can we do in five days to help this person reach emotional catharsis and, ultimately, change their life?

That meant building story through the show’s five verticals — fashion, food, culture, beauty and design — while preserving the hero’s authentic experience as much as possible.

I directed backstory packages, wrote network outlines, conducted interviews, field produced the Fab Five’s field trips with our heroes, and worked on the floor with talent to hit the story beats we needed while keeping the experience genuine for the person at the center of it. At the end of the week, I sat back down with the heroes for their final interviews and talked with them about how the experience had impacted them.

The first episode I lead produced is still my favorite: we took over a Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity house in New Orleans and used the week to talk about brotherhood, masculinity and what it means to actually show up for your friends. It ended with a bunch of fraternity brothers sitting around a fire, saying things to each other they’d never said out loud, sobbing and hugging. Reality television!

Over the years I got to know a former Vegas showgirl finding her way back to the stage, a poker dealer at the Aria who taught me poker while I sat with him in the hospital after triple-bypass surgery, a librarian committed to making libraries cool again, a firefighter and single mom rebuilding her life, and a live-aboard boat captain raising the cutest kid on earth. And many, many others.

Queer Eye was nominated for — and often won — the Emmy for Outstanding Structured Reality Program throughout my time on the show. Season nine was the first year my name made it onto the ballot. We won. :)