2. Kraven Magazine

By Fernando Velez

Read from the Magazine Edition

Before there was a Queen... there was a magazine.

THE STORY BEHIND THE PUBLICATION THAT GAVE BIRTH TO THE HEROES NO ONE SAW COMING. 

After Telemundo, I ended up working at a clothing store in New York, making less than nine dollars an hour. Months passed and I would sit behind the counter with a notebook, doing the same math again and again, trying to understand how long it would take just to buy a laptop. At Telemundo, I had everything provided for me; a car, a computer, a big budget and suddenly, I had none of it. At my current salary, even the most basic tools felt unreachable.

I remember thinking how fragile dreams become when survival takes all your energy, and how easy it is for creativity to be pushed aside when all you’re doing is trying to make it through the day.

Around that time, I was also in an abusive and toxic relationship, emotionally and physically. It slowly drained me. The last time he physically abused me — an incident that had involved the police and him being taken into custody — my best friend from Orlando, Mike, called me and said, “You already have a ticket. Come back. Come home.” A few hours later, I left New York. I didn’t have a concrete plan — just the certainty that I needed distance from everything that was breaking me.

I went back to Orlando completely exhausted. My friend looked at me, handed me his car keys, gave me some money, and said, “Go to Miami for a few days.” He knew Miami was where I had once felt alive—close to Telemundo, close to creativity, close to the part of me that created instead of survived. He wasn’t trying to fix my life. He was reminding me of who I was.

And it worked.

Those few days changed everything. While I was there, I applied for a job and was hired immediately. A few days later, I moved. I was back in Miami, working as a server, planning my next step, slowly coming out of the depression I’d been in.

While living in Miami, I picked up several gay magazines, hoping I could find articles that might help me feel better. Instead, something began to bother me. Every gay magazine I saw seemed limited to bodies, sex, and party scenes. You could only find them in very specific places. They weren’t allowed in luxury buildings, high-end restaurants, or hotels—spaces associated with power, elegance, or ambition. It felt as if queer culture was only allowed to exist in corners, never in the center.

I kept asking myself: What if there was a magazine that didn’t reduce us, but reflected us with dignity? What if queer identity could exist naturally in the same spaces as art, culture, and refinement?

At work, I would hide and take notes. I read Oprah’s magazine every day like someone studying. My mind was already moving faster than my hands.

I wasn’t just reading – I was breaking it down, imagining how something like that could exist for us. It felt like the magazine was forming in my head long before I had the courage to call it real.

Eventually, my ideas became too big to stay inside a notebook. I started talking about them – to friends, to people I met, to anyone who would listen. I didn’t have an office or a studio, so conversations became my workspace. 

The idea was to create a queer magazine that, if someone applied even three of the articles to their life, they could see real improvement. I wanted to build more than just a publication — I wanted it to be a resource that shared knowledge with the community and helped bring people closer to becoming the best version of themselves. I believed that a stronger community could generate the change we were all searching for.

At first, I gathered a group of people who seemed to share the same vision. We met at a wine bar in Wilton Manors. In the beginning, it felt almost easy. But as time passed and reality showed up — the cost, the hours, the pressure, the uncertainty — things shifted. Some people got scared. Some realized how demanding it was. Slowly, they stepped away.

I felt like a door had closed directly in front of me. In that moment, I understood that not everyone carries a dream, and mine had been planted in me for a reason. It was not anyone else’s responsibility to follow it, and it could not depend on other people committing to it.

If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. I wasn’t going to give up on mine.

The next time I showed up at the wine bar, I arrived alone — but determined to continue. That night, the owner handed me a check. He became my first advertiser. It felt like confirmation that I needed to keep going.

So I did everything.

I organized the first photoshoot. I entered events as a server or as press just to gain access to spaces I couldn’t afford. At one event, I saw Swarovski dresses that were going to be displayed on Fifth Avenue, and somehow I convinced the designer to let me use them for my first fashion editorial.

My former coworker and neighbor, Nery,  would sit with me for hours calling businesses, trying to sell ads. Then I would go door to door around Miami with one page, one idea, no portfolio—just a twenty-two-year-old asking people to believe in something that barely existed.

I designed everything myself. A friend in art school would sneak me in so I could use their computers.

Everything seemed to be moving forward, but it was my first time self-publishing, and the reality of the costs nearly stopped me. Even with a few advertisers, printing in the U.S. was absurdly expensive. I had promised a physical magazine, but I had reached a dead end.

Still, I couldn’t stop talking about the project. One day, while explaining my situation to friends, someone introduced me to a person willing to lend me exactly the money I needed for printing.

I printed the first issue.

That issue brought more advertisers. A week later, I paid him back. For the first time, I felt that this was not just imagination—it was something real that could work.

The second issue is the one I consider the true beginning. The first was a test. The second was commitment. I planned a full photoshoot, gathered models and photographers, and created a release party called The Forest of the Forbidden. I turned the bar into a jungle, filled it with plants and live animals, and watched people connect to something that had only existed in my head months before. The magazine was now being accepted in buildings where others had never been allowed.

I walked back into the same restaurant where I had once been told to stop dreaming and return to the floor. This time, I placed my magazine there. That moment stayed with me: I wasn’t imagining anymore. I was building.

By then, I had fallen in love with a flight attendant. After months of dating, I decided to move to San Francisco—only to arrive and never hear from him again. He never came to pick me up at the airport. 

I was emotionally devastated, but instead of leaving, I chose to believe that being there had a purpose. If I was going to rebuild again, I would rebuild bigger. The magazine that started as something local in Miami could no longer stay local. It needed to exist everywhere.

Expanding nationally meant I needed more writers. I used every tool available—even placing a message in my Grindr or Adam4Adam profile that read, “Looking for writers for a new queer magazine.”

One of the first people who responded was Brennan. Without either of us realizing it at the time, he wouldn’t just become my official first writer – he would become an essential part of Kraven’s foundation and a friend. From one writer, to two, to eventually more than ten writers across the United States, Canada, South Africa, Vietnam, the UK, Spain, and Puerto Rico, the project began to grow beyond anything I had originally imagined.

After several issues, the reality of running a magazine while simply trying to survive began to wear on me. There was a moment when I was ready to give up. I decided to tell Brennan first, because he had been there from the beginning.

But that conversation changed everything.

Instead of agreeing, he offered to become my magazine’s partner — to take on more responsibility and help carry the financial burden the magazine had placed on me. Once again, someone appeared at the exact moment I needed support or more than that, someone who believed in me and what Kraven could become.

And for the first time, Kraven was no longer just me. I was building something with someone who believed in what it could become. Because of that, the dream didn’t end — it entered a new phase. Another domino.

Many times, life – and the system I was born into – almost stopped me from continuing my dream. But because of community, because of people willing to believe while still bringing their own perspectives, the dream kept moving forward.

It became a domino — one fallen domino leading to another.

The magazine was one of the first dominoes.

What I didn’t know at the time was that something much larger was already beginning to grow. I wasn’t trying to build anything big, I was simply trying to keep something alive that had already required more sacrifice than I thought I could survive. One issue became another, one person became a team, and each step forward happened because someone chose to believe instead of walk away. 

That first domino’s impact kept being felt long after I thought it would stop, and without Brennan’s belief, it never would have continued toward what came next — the comic.