Cook was famously private himself. He had grown up gay in conservative Alabama, a fact he kept private until 2014, the year after the Snowden revelations dropped. In Alabama, his lingering childhood memory was watching Klansmen burn a cross on the lawn of a black family in his neighborhood while chanting racial slurs. He’d screamed at the men to stop, and when one of the men lifted his white hood, Cook recognized him as the deacon of a local church.
