Jaime Cortez is a Bay Area cartoonist and prose author. He wrote and illustrated Sexile/Sexilio, the ground-breaking graphic biography of Adela Vasquez, a transwoman who fled Cuba as part of the Mariel boatlift and became an important trans and HIV activist in San Francisco. It was published as a bi-lingual flipbook by AIDS Project Los Angeles in 2003 and is one of the first prominent trans narratives in comics.

Cortez recently followed this up with the highly acclaimed Gordo, a collection of semi-autobiographical prose stories about growing up as a queer, fat, Mexican kid in California's farm worker camps and farm towns in the 1970s. The New York Times Review of Books says, “Cortez’s world … is an irresistible mix of childlike desire, piercing observation and ridiculous, but relatable, shenanigans, including wrestling matches and the plundering of a porn collection, along with more serious matters, such as final goodbyes, the spinning acrobatics of masculinity and questions of what it means to truly love someone.”