Welcome to our eleventh annual Queer issue. At this time of crisis, grief, and rage, we present six queer narratives of characters fighting for identity and recognition. Turkish writer Nazli Karabiyikoglu offers a harrowing tale of exorcism and defiance. In two tales of self-transformation, Brazilian journalist Chico Felitti reports on a couple obsessed with facial modification, and Filipino fiction writer R. Joseph Dazo finds a young man who channels heartbreak into body art. Peru’s Juan Carlos Cortázar eavesdrops on a thwarted attempt to fulfill a lover’s dying wish. Chilean graphic novelist Gabriel Ebensperger draws a boy’s growing realization of not fitting in. And Russia’s Natalia Rubanova sets a romantic triangle to Schubert.
