Jaime Cortez
Jaime Cortez is a Chicano-American graphic novelist, visual artist, writer, teacher, and performer. Cortez is also known for his role as an LGBT rights activist, and HIV/AIDS prevention work. Early years Cortez was born in the agricultural town of San Juan Bautista, California to working class parents. At eight years old he moved to Watsonville, California. He is the second of three children, with two sisters. Cortez was first introduced to the arts in elementary school but did not take his first formal art class until he was in seventh grade. During this time, Cortez describes his early passion for drawing as a way to cope with feeling like an outsider at school. As a self-proclaimed nerd, Cortez recalls this time as when "nerds were nerds, unlike now, when nerd is a code word for cool." Cortez further recalls that his love of drawing at an early age lead him to steal money from his mother's purse to buy a drawing pad. He filled this drawing pad with comic book imagery, and imitations of advertisements for beauty salons. He moved to San Francisco in 1993 and lived there for ten years among the city's queer Latino artistic community. Education Cortez