This new issue of Balam focuses on Chosen Families as the main theme, making a journey in 280 pages where we manifest the experiences, stories and bonds of imperfect families. What are imperfect families? They are all those who do not enter into the history of a system that has rejected, denied and made invisible the realities and lives of families of sexual dissidence.

In this issue we see families that build and inhabit a safe space, of overcoming, an empathetic and free refuge where the words “rejection” and “shame” have no place. “This is what Balam No. 8 magazine is about: real families, not perfect ones. We are going to meet and recognize ourselves in imperfect families, in families of rejection, in colonized families, in future families, in racialized families, in stigmatized families, in families that survive and reinvent themselves outside the norm; in families that learned to unlearn the ways of relating and loving: the chosen families.” Letter from the Editor in Chief

PHOTOGRAPHERS Anne-Sophie Guillet (BE), Archivo Honduras Cuir (HN), Archivo Memoria Trans México (MX), Benoit Rousseau (FR), Clifford Prince King (US), Dana Balajovsky (AR), Enantios Dromos (BR), Fotos dos Outros (BR), Gê Viana (BR), Kasa Loka (AR/ES), Laíza Ferreira (BR), Leonard Suryajaya (US), Lucas Cordeiro (BR), Mariette Pathy Allen (US), Matheus Morani (BR), Nídia Aranha (BR), Ode & Ibrahem Hasan (BR/US), Óscar Sánchez Gómez (MX), Otras Vidas (CL), Sabelo Mlangeni (ZA), Sunil Gupta (UK/IN), Tadáskía Willan Oliveira Morais (BR)

Editors Luis Juárez and Ventura Profana