Longreads Best of 2020: Profiles
All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad.
At
GQ, Mosi Secret offers a moving portrait of Joe Louis Cole, Larry Barbine, Rev. Joey Crutcher, Selwyn Jones, Jacob Blake III, and Michael Brown Sr., who are the fathers and father figures of Michael Brown, Terence Crutcher, Daniel Prude, Rayshard Brooks, George Floyd, and Jacob Blake all Black men who were killed by police brutality.
Their lives were transformed by the worst kind of news, a blow that left everything that followed so suddenly and painfully different. Not only have they suffered the abrupt and traumatic loss of their loved ones, but often just hours after being stunned by tragedy, they grieve before news cameras. They are transformed from ordinary people into symbols of this country’s injustice, symbols onto which so much meaning other than their own is projected. How easily could that parent have been me, grieving my child, the thinking goes. And yet these fathers endu
‘In his suit, with his pigtail and his montera, he was pure potential: he could be masculine vanquisher or gold-embroidered fairy. He was both, actually, at all times, and nobody who came to see him fight thought any less of him for it.’
R.A. Frumkin on fame, queer identity and Ernest Hemingway.