Connor Garel, Freelance Journalist Profile

Articles

Newish Jeans

2 weeks ago | ssense.com | Lawrence Cortez |Connor Garel

A dear friend recently shared with me a memory from his adolescence. At 14, just as he’d started thinking about sex (which is not to say having it), he sprouted a large cyst on his scrotum, a rash that kissed his inner thighs, and, like all reasonable people with access to WebMD, determined that he had testicular cancer. “You been getting your dick sucked?” asked his stepfather, pride bloating his voice.
Justsmile Magazine - Crashout!

1 month ago | justsmilemagazine.com | Connor Garel

Ten minutes with Carl Fischer, 25, a motocross racer from Henderson, Nevada, 15 miles outside of Las Vegas. He steps off the track, filling Justsmile in on what brought him to the sport, what makes him go fast, and how he recharges his battery. How and when did you get into motocross? It started when I was really young. My first dirt bike ever had training wheels on it. Before I could really even balance super well, I had a dirt bike. I rode for a couple of years, then I started growing up.
Nickel Boys Star Ethan Herisse Is Ready to Step Into the Spotlight

1 month ago | anothermag.com | Connor Garel

PhotographyMartine SymsStylingJulie RagoliaTextConnor GarelLead Image This story is taken from the Summer/Autumn 2025 issue of Another Man, which is on sale internationally from April 24. Ethan Herisse was not expecting a callback. The chemistry read, he thought, had gone well enough by most metrics. They gelled. It felt good.
Hollywood Has Finally Caught up with Colman Domingo

Feb 17, 2025 | anothermag.com | Rahim Fortune |Raphael Hirsch |Connor Garel |Styling Raphael Hirsch

PhotographyRahim FortuneStylingRaphael HirschTextConnor GarelLead Image This article is taken from the Spring/Summer 2025 issue of AnOther Magazine:I hear Colman Domingo before I see him – as I rise through the arteries of an old building in Brooklyn. His laughter, deep and low as thunder, spills into the hallway as the lift doors slide open.
Breaking the Rules of Gay Fiction, One Riotous Page at a Time

Jan 24, 2025 | thewalrus.ca | Connor Garel

In one of many hysterical vignettes collaged in Johnny Would You Love Me if My Dick Were Bigger, a 2015 not-quite-memoir by the writer-artist-dancer-musician Brontez Purnell, our hero, a Black gay American waiter bored at work, anatomizes his discontents with dating another writer.
Justsmile Magazine - Vecinos

Nov 27, 2024 | justsmilemagazine.com | Connor Garel

This story appears in Justsmile Issue 5, How Do We Belong? Two brothers, newly arrived at the brittle cusp of adulthood, lean against a cobalt blue car in a rundown parking lot, confronting the camera’s gaze. One wears a hairnet, a gold chain, a self-protective posture, and a leather t-shirt resembling a bulletproof vest; the other sports a big white shirt with room to grow into, long dark trousers with room to grow into, and cradles a baby, presumably his own, that underscores his own youth.
To Look Without Flinching: Mustafa

Nov 25, 2024 | justsmilemagazine.com | Connor Garel

This story appears in Justsmile Issue 5, How Do We Belong? The eye does not see what it doesn’t want to see. What it has no use for. The social worker, the police officer, the crime reporter, the “revitalizing” developer: each materializes in all their supposed virtuosity and sees only the chaos, the menacing statistics, the procession of distrustful glances, the disadvantaged poor. But they do not see the people.
The miseducation of Mk.gee

Sep 9, 2024 | dazeddigital.com | Connor Garel

Taken from the autumn 2024 issue of Dazed. Get your copy here. The miseducation of Mk.gee began with a technological error, a musical discordance. He was nine years old and it was the golden age of pirating, when YouTube-to-MP3 converters reigned supreme and streaming apps had yet to reach their cultural zenith, cornering the listening market and bending it around themselves.
30 Classical-Music Performances We Can’t Wait to Hear This Fall

Aug 30, 2024 | vulture.com | Kambole Campbell |Alan Sytsma |Connor Garel |Sarah Mathews

The fall concert season begins not just with the customary Beethoven and Bruckner but also with a great polychrome explosion of music from Latin America.
The Message at the Heart of Glen Greenwell’s ‘Small Rain’

Aug 29, 2024 | vulture.com | Sarah Mathews |Connor Garel |Anna Hezel |Lewis Gordon

The author explores the tender side of long-term partnership amid a health crisis in his best novel yet. Small Rain is out September 3 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Small Rain is out September 3 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. On a muggy July afternoon in Iowa City, I went grocery shopping with the writer Garth Greenwell. We hit up the town’s 1971-founded co-op armed with a short list from his partner, the poet Luis Muñoz.