City of God
Photo by David Seibold via Flickr Querido Gil, I’d like to think you and I had twin moments in our LA adolescences, albeit decades apart. LA’s endless web nurtures self-understanding, lets you gather a self, bit by bit. I have lingered in photobooths, cheek-to-cheek with others as we wait to see our love materialized in a chain of our own faces. Waiting for the moment of recognition, as if the image were a map that located us somewhere in time and space we could point to and say, Look, there’s you and me.
When I Google your name, Gil Cuadros, almost every image that comes up was taken by Laura Aguilar, your friend and fellow artist. Laura, who led me to you. In scouring the web for nodes of her life, I find you in her gaze, you so often in front of her lens. Your loved ones tell me you met in an art class at Schurr High School. I like thinking of you, two East LA baby queers, assessing each other over the split ends of paint brushes and worn plastic trays, trading images under the red light of the dark room. Together, you trekked across freeway interchanges to a bookstore in Pasadena or exhibitions on the Westside, inscribing your interests, your
