The pages of this issue are dedicated to resilience—an attribute both delicate and defiant, honed through suffering and softened by love. It is a testament to the fragility and strength inherent in human connection and in art’s transformative power to capture what words often cannot. As I pen this, I find myself drawn back to a summer evening long past, to the living room of my childhood home, where the glow of the television outlined the contours of a world I had yet to fully understand.

It was July 3, 1982. Dan Rather’s voice carried the grave announcement: a “gay plague.” The words, though inscrutable to my twelve-year-old self, lodged themselves like splinters in my imagination. They festered quietly in the years that followed, attaching themselves to the unspoken fears that seemed to shadow the tender stirrings of my own identity. I did not yet know what it was to love another man, but already I sensed its contours etched in danger, cloaked in shame. In those early years, I learned to read faces for signs—gauntness, unexplained fevers, lesions blooming like terrible flowers—and I learned that joy was always accompanied by a shadow.

Years later, as a young man standing in the fluorescent glare of a clinic in Indianapolis, I was gripped by a shame I could not entirely explain. My first HIV test was more than a medical procedure; it was an encounter with years of internalized fear, a reckoning with a world that had conditioned me to see myself as both vulnerable and culpable. The results, mercifully, were negative. Yet the weight of that fear lingered, shaping my interactions and relationships. I waited, as if by some grim inevitability, for the day it would come for me. And in 2018, it did.

By then, I was living in Mexico City, a city of infinite contrasts and contradictions—where beauty and chaos coexist in a dizzying, unbroken dance. After three years of celibacy, I had begun to reimagine intimacy, tentatively exploring its possibilities. But a single night