10. The Place where it all aligned.

Read from the Magazine Edition


By Fernando Velez

I was living in Los Angeles in the summer of 2025 when I began to feel that my chapter there was ending. I had moved to LA believing that proximity to the industry would open doors, but living there had opened the wrong ones.

I was walking on the edge. I needed drastic changes in order to survive and release this universe.

It was there that I learned I don’t break. I can withstand pressure, instability, financial stress, anxiety, and temptation. Even in chaos, my creativity sharpened. I developed new projects I never thought I would create, like the games.

It may have been one of the most difficult times of my life, when I often felt I had to choose  between myself or the universe — and I kept choosing the universe over my own comfort. But at the same time, it was the place where I found a sense of community, and the powerful bonds that come from chosen family. People who accepted me with my scars, helped me heal, understand myself, and held me accountable.

LA showed me what it means to belong — to have friends come over and work with me on the game, to test it again and again, to join me at Comic-Con. To have people around me who believed in me.

I finished the graphic novel there. I expanded the universe. Even with anxiety present and drugs close, I stayed connected to my purpose and to the world I was building.

But the cost of staying — financially and emotionally — was growing. I had to use my apartment deposit to fund the comic because, like always, I was willing to stop at nothing to make this happen. I also had to step away from environments that were pulling me in a direction that no longer aligned with who I was becoming.

Leaving meant giving up the apartment of my dreams and a community I love deeply. I left knowing the chapter had given me everything it was meant to give.

I didn’t know where I was going next.

Before I could decide, life shifted. For years, I had stayed within flight distance of San Francisco because my best friend was aging. Over time, I had become his family, visiting him every month for almost a decade. Right before I moved out of LA, he had an accident and suddenly needed care. I put everything on hold and returned to the place where The Queen’s Heroes was born — not to create, but to be there for him.

For two months, hospice became my second home. I fed him when he could no longer eat. I held his hand when his body could no longer move. It was painful to watch someone I deeply loved fade away a little more each day, knowing the time we had left was running out.

I met Stuart years earlier while living in San Francisco. He lived close to the gym we both went to, and I would often stop by for a cup of coffee. Over time, we became friends. His wisdom and unconditional love became one of the most important lessons of my life — that we get to choose who we love. Not only romantically or sexually, but the people who become family simply because we decide they matter.

I could have walked away long ago. But because I loved him, I stayed. I visited often and made sure he always felt cared for. And now, as my life begins another transition — one that would eventually bring me here, to Mexico — he became part of the chapter that was quietly closing.

While he was still present, he told me he had never met someone who dreamed so passionately, and that after his passing, he wanted to gift me something so I could go after my wildest dreams.

In many ways, we became each other’s heroes — a reminder of what happens when we choose love and compassion. When we choose to show up when things are difficult, especially when someone needs it the most.

In his final days, I had a trip planned to Mexico City. For me, it was meant to celebrate the end of the campaign — but the campaign never happened. I had to stop everything to take care of Stuart.

The trip was with my friends from LA, and I was supposed to arrive early, but I kept moving my flight, trying to give Stuart more time to leave this world with me by his side. I postponed it for as long as I could.

But my friends had already arrived, and I could no longer delay it. When the nurse told me, “Go. He doesn’t want to die with you here,” Waiyen flew in just before my flight so Stuart wouldn’t be alone.

That night, we held his hands and spoke to him. His body could no longer hold his soul, but we could tell he was listening. We could feel it — as if he was crying. He could have been one of the many who die alone in hospice, forgotten by people, part of a generation that fought so hard for us to have rights, yet one we so often place an expiration date on when they grow old.

I waited, hoping he would pass before I left. I didn’t want him to die without me there. But my flight was leaving in two hours, and I had to go.

That was such a difficult moment — the dim light, the piano version of “Moon River” playing softly, one of Stuart’s and my favorite songs from our favorite movie. And I had to walk away from my friend of fourteen years — fourteen incredible years that had taught me what true friendship really means. My body felt so heavy. It was the last moment I would ever see him.

Three hours later, while I was mid-flight to Mexico City, Stuart passed away. That night, a chapter closed.

When I arrived, I felt free and exhausted at the same time — free from watching someone I loved suffer, yet drained beyond words. I was standing in a city untouched by my past or my fears. It was as if it wanted to show me something.

I had an amazing time — from the food, to the museums, to the dancing. It’s a vibrant metropolitan city, full of culture not so different from my own, filled with kind, happy, honest people.

After briefly returning to San Francisco and sitting in Stuart’s apartment, everything felt heavy. The apartment was so quiet, so cold. The city was a constant reminder of my struggles — of the battles I’d had to fight there.

Stuart had paid three months of rent for me to stay after he passed, to give me time to figure out where to go. But staying didn’t feel right. It was time to resume my path. What would Fernandito have wanted?

When I was sixteen, I used to watch Puerto Rican actors travel to Mexico to film telenovelas with Televisa. Back then, I dreamed of going to Mexico to study acting. But how could I move to another country depending only on myself? Instead, I had moved to Orlando.

Years ago, before moving to LA, I wanted to launch the comic book in Spanish. That’s when I came to Mexico City for the first time. I instantly fell in love with the energy — the cafés, how welcoming people were, how art felt like part of everyday life. It was the perfect place to be inspired to write the comic into Spanish. But then a producer asked me to move to LA instead. I couldn’t live anywhere else if I wanted to pursue the deal.

But now, I could go.

I had only my luggage and a universe on my shoulders. I was sober. More mature. Mexico City felt like a place with no triggers — a place where I could carefully choose new connections, focus on my well-being, and reconnect with the version of me that had been lost during the years of survival.

Mexico City would be an empty canvas. A place where I didn’t have to live among my past. A place where the villain couldn’t reach me. A place where I could transform — not just to launch an entire universe, but to become a new version of myself.

At 3:30 in the morning, I booked a one-way ticket to Mexico City. 

The first morning, as I woke up to go get a coffee, something in me felt different. I felt at peace — calm, happy, lighter. I woke up into another Fernando, one who no longer lived in fear or anxiety. I was finally present. So I sat in a park, pulled out my computer, and started planning what this chapter would look like: who I wanted to meet, what I wanted to do, what my healthy routine would be, and how I could connect with the local culture and queer entrepreneurs here in Mexico City.

Two years earlier, I had written two songs for the comic book during a moment of vulnerability. I never thought I would actually produce them. I just needed to get the emotions out, so I wrote them and put them away. But then while sitting on that bench, someone arrived nearby and began playing the violin. That’s when I thought, I can produce the music here. Latin artists are some of the best vocalists in the world, and there is so much talent in this city.

After that, I decided that if I never produced the song, I would at least place it inside the comic book. So I started working on new pages — imagining the final scene as a music video that might one day exist beyond the page. And if it never did, at least the lyrics would live inside the story.

Then in December I met Christopher, and from the first time I showed him the books and the universe, his mind instantly connected with it. He had spent almost a decade working in PR and marketing — from Sony Music to Motorola — eventually opening his own agency, Believe, in the past three years. It was love at first sight with the universe. Someone who could elevate the project and, together, help form a new team to launch this universe. He had an incredible mind — his views, his logic — combined with his own unique creativity. He felt like a missing piece of the puzzle.

That’s when I understood why life had brought me to Mexico City.

He saw the project and understood the vision beyond what I had been able to see while being so busy creating it. As a queer Latin PR entrepreneur and artist, he didn’t see this as just a project or a set of products, but as a movement. He believed in the impact this new queer cinematic universe could have — not only within our LGBTQ community, but in representing with honor the Latin community that has helped build this universe from the very beginning. From the first team of artists in Venezuela to now, the new generation of artists here in Mexico City.

Mexico became the place where my life and my universe could finally move forward together — an empty canvas. A place where the boy who once filled notebooks with impossible worlds could finally sit down — without fear — and begin to make one real.

And from Mexico city the dream became reality.