It’s Pride Month, and yesterday was Juneteenth and Father’s Day. Today, we’re on the Gemini-Cancer cusp, transitioning from a season of identity exploration, impulsivity, and intellectual curiosity to one of sanctuary and feeling, of caring for ourselves and others. This issue is well timed, though not by virtue of planning. (Our web editor is leaving for vacation tomorrow.) Still, who’s to say it isn’t fate?

This issue is an awesome repository of queerness; it’s overflowing with bright, slick gems of queer being—of bodies coming into contact at the fingertips over a shared cigarette; of a curved spine like a silver spoon cuddling my tongue; of first kisses innocent the way animals are innocent and holy as blood.

This issue wonders and is fiercely curious, about family dynamics and life stages, what it means to be a child or a parent or both. It questions the adolescent mythology of the all-wise and all-knowing—the mother who knew when to fold, when to cut her losses and leave, but I never saw her walk away from anything, and the father who knew how a lot of things worked but was wrong about God and coffee in the living room.

This issue is a celebration and an interrogation and an indictment of culture, open letters from who we were to who we’re fighting—some against all odds—to become. With student debt dangling from our ankles, eyes closed against the overdraft fees, we are exhausted. By police and politicians and billionaires, by walls and camps and cages and cells, by our dwindling bodily autonomy—what little we may have had to begin with—and tenuous holds on our mental and emotional health, we are exhausted, but we’re here.

I’m so glad you’re here.