Esquire Magazine's "An American Boy" Cover

Submission 9,725

Overview

Esquire Magazine's "An American Boy" Cover refers to the controversy surrounding a cover feature article by Esquire Magazine profiling a boy named Ryan Morgan, a white American middle class male from West Bend, Wisconsin. The article and cover received criticism from social media users who felt the choice to feature the story of a white American male did a disservice to more underrepresented voices in American society.

Background

Posts about Esquire's March 2019 issue began spreading on Twitter on February 9th, 2019. That day, Twitter user @DebJannerson^[1] tweeted about it, saying the story was "as bad as it looks," highlighting a part where Morgan discusses his time as a pro-Trump high school student. The story covers how Morgan negotiates life during "the era of social media, school shootings, toxic masculinity, #MeToo, and a divided country." It is available to be read on Esquire's website.^[2]

Developments

Twitter saw some posts about the story the following day, but it was not until February 11th, 2019 that it began receiving mass attention. That day, Daily Beast reporter Will Sommer tweeted about the story, gaining over 100 retweets and 580 likes (shown below, left). User @fransquishco sarcastically tweeted "finally, the representation we've all been waiting for," gaining over 1,700 retweets and 9,800 likes (shown below, right).

On February 12th, Esquire tweeted a link to the article.^[3] They later posted an article written by Editor in Chief Jay Fielden defending the cover and the decision, arguing against echo chambers.^[4] Twitter user @watsontots argued that Jay Fielden arguing for featuring the young boy's story on the basis that it was an important voice to be heard was hypocritical as Esquire had infamously killed their story from the children allegedly molested by Bryan Singer. Reporter Ashley Feinberg posted screenshots of since-deleted tweets Fielden sent which some speculated to be to Bari Weiss in which he complained about the "Jacobins" coming to "guillotine" him, referencing the backlash from the political left against him (shown below, right).

The backlash, which also covered how the article was released during Black History Month, was covered by multiple news outlets, including MSN,^[5] Huffington Post,^[6] and Yahoo.^[7]