Ron Nyswaner Talks About The History, Politics And Sex In “Fellow Travelers” — And What It Means For Today’s LGBTQ Movement

Ron Nyswaner, the executive producer and writer of the Showtime limited series Fellow Travelers, says that he feared there were three strikes against getting it made: “It’s period, it’s political and it’s gay.”

At a recent Washington, D.C. screening, though, he summed up some of the initial reaction to the completed project: “They love that it is period, that it is political and that it is gay.”

The eight-part Fellow Travelers, based on the book by Thomas Mallon, centers on the romance between the extroverted State Department official and cynical war hero “Hawk” Fuller, played by Matt Bomer, and idealistic aspiring Senate aide Tim Laughlin, played by Jonathan Bailey, a relationship that started during the McCarthy era of the 1950s and extends to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.

Their chemistry is apparent from the moment they meet, briefly, at an election night party during the heavily closeted 1952 Washington, D.C., just as the federal government was embarking on an effort to root out homosexuals from its ranks. That so-called “lavender scare” mirrored the red scare, as Joseph McCarthy (Chris Bauer) and Roy Cohn (Will Brill) targeted “subversives and sexual deviants” in the federal government.

Rife with their own hypocrisies, McCarthy and Cohn are memorable but supporting characters of Fellow Travelers, as the focus remains on the love story between Hawk and Tim, with the miniseries unabashed in depicting their sexual encounters and exploits.

“They represent two human beings who have opposing world views, and they are not about being gay and not being gay,” Nyswaner said in a recent interview in Washington, D.C.

“Hawk’s worldview is that nothing matters. There’s no such thing as democracy. There is no God. …And Tim is coming to Washington saying, ‘No. That is why God put me on Earth is to make the world a better place.'”

Fellow Travelers debuts on Paramount+ with Showtime on Friday and the premium channel on Sunday, and the network has marketed it with a series of screenings, including one in D.C. at the MPA. Guests included Mallon, executive producer Robbie Rogers and Eric Cervini, the author of the book The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual Vs. The United States of America, about the life of Frank Kemeny, who was dismissed from his government job in the 1950s and became a pioneer gay activist. Bomer was not there, given the restrictions on promoting movies during the SAG-AFTRA strike, but he was honored several nights before at the Human Rights Campaign’s national dinner.

The series shifts between different eras, with the first episode flashing back and forth from the early stages of Fuller and Laughlin’s relationship and three decades later, in the 1980s, when Hawk, a well-established diplomat during the Reagan era and with a wife and children, learns that Tim, who has long since shunned him, is dying of AIDS.

Nyswaner, who was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay for Philadelphia, read the book about a dozen years ago and credited Anonymous Content founder Steve Golin for optioning it for him. But the project languished for a bit as Nyswaner worked as writer and co-executive producer for Ray Donovan and writer and executive producer for Homeland.

At one point, he admits that “self doubt just overtook me and I thought, ‘Politics. Period. Gay. No one is ever going to make that,’ but that is what writers do. We talk ourselves out of our best ideas.”

But Rogers, who with his husband Greg Berlanti produced the feature My Policeman, which Nyswaner wrote, read Mallon’s book and told him he would be “crazy” to walk away from the project. Rogers brought in Bomer to the project, and then Dan Minahan joined as director and EP. “Then, from that moment on, things just moved forward,” Nyswaner said.

Nyswaner said that one of his inspirations for Fellow Travelers was The Way We Were, the 1973 classic that also features the McCarthy era as one of its backdrops for a love story destined for separation.

“That model of two people who really aren’t suited to each other, or could have made each other happy, they’re powerfully drawn to each other and for some reason, we want it to work out for them, and we know it can’t,” he said. “That’s delicious. That’s the best kind of love story.”

In contrast to Mallon’s book, the miniseries expands the story of Hawk and Tim across several decades, tying in cultural milestones. Nyswaner said that his life “somewhat corresponds” to the history.

“I wasn’t an adult in the ’50s. I was born in the ’50s, but I came of age in the ’60s, came out in the late ’70s, disco and danced, did cocaine, and then faced the AIDS crisis,” he said. “I grabbed on to that, and I said, ‘I want AIDS to be part of the story.’ I’m going to go into the ’80s. We are talking about an LGBTQ love story. We have to talk about AIDS.” (Nyswaner wrote about his own experiences in the 2005 memoir Blue Days, Black Nights).

Nyswaner said that “every episode is footnoted” with historic research, whether it be McCarthy’s speeches or moments from congressional hearings. The dramatic license came in the private moments of the historic figures, “but they have to coincide with the events that actually happened with the characters.”

A challenge in doing a research-intensive project, Nyswaner said, “is not to be derailed from your compelling narrative,” citing what he calls the Homeland rule: “If it doesn’t move our story forward, it has no right to exist.”

That meant leaving out certain scenes, like one that would have captured a spat between the notorious Cohn and a handsome hotel heir David Schine, who Cohn had brought on as a staffer to McCarthy’s communist-hunting committee.

Cohn’s efforts to secure special treatment for Schine when he was drafted to the Army became a centerpoint of the televised Army-McCarthy hearings, and marked the start of McCarthy’s downfall. “Obviously there was a relationship between [Cohn and Schine] that was rather obscure. I don’t believe that it was ever consummated. I just believe that they each got somewhere in being in the presence of the other,” Nyswaner said.

Another delicate balance was in conveying the nuances of the closeted gay environment of sixty-plus years ago.

Nyswaner, who grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania, said that when he pitched Fellow Travelers, he would start by saying, “I never heard the word homosexual spoken aloud until I went to college. And that told me that not only what I was, my inner self was not only bad, it was the ‘unspeakable thing.'”

When, during the production process, someone would ask about a 1950s character’s gay ‘identity’ Nyswaner said, he would tell them, “Stop. There is no ‘gay identity.’ There were other people who had sex with people of the same gender. But they weren’t a community yet. They were trying. There were bars and clubs, but they hadn’t yet found that identity.”

That said, Hawk and Tim and other gay men of that era “didn’t view themselves as victims,” Nyswaner said. “We are not doing victimhood here,” he said. “They are going to suffer, but they are not victims. They don’t view themselves as victims.”

What surprised him about that 1950s D.C. era, he said, was “there was hidden gay culture, and it was fun, and there was sex. And there were people who refused to be bullied, even though the bars were raided and being caught could mean the end of your career. People would not be frightened into not being who they were.”

Many of the initial reviews for the miniseries have emphasized its erotic sex scenes. Nyswaner said that David Kamp of Vanity Fair told him that the sex in the series “is ‘groundbreaking, even for Showtime.’ That’s my epitaph.”

He said that just as they wanted to tell the truth about McCarthy and Cohn and Schine, he wanted to tell the truth “about what sex was like between two gay men when there is a power imbalance. And it’s actually really fascinating, and that is really sexy.”

As much as Fellow Travelers delves into a bygone era, there are ample connections to the present day, he said. For instance, Cohn went on to become a mentor to Donald Trump.

During his D.C. visit, Nyswaner also attended the recent the Human Rights Campaign dinner, as the advocacy organization has declared a state of national emergency due to the spate of anti-LGBTQ+ laws proposed or passed in states across the country, with many targeting the transgender community. As much as there has been gay and lesbian acceptance, with same-sex marriage codified into law, “we actually have to stand up for the people who aren’t quite there yet, our trans brothers and sisters,” Nyswaner said.

He said that Fellow Travelers should provide a bit of a reminder of the real-life impact of demagoguery, depicting the destroyed careers and shattered lives of the lavender scare, when some of those targeted as sexual deviants committed suicide.

The lesson, he said, is that demagoguery is “real. Let’s pay attention to it and let’s stop it now. Democracy is fragile. McCarthy had power. And he had power to destroy lives. And valiant people kept trying to stop him. And that’s also encouraging.”

He also has some guidance on how to counter it.

“Getting on social media and expressing to people who think just like you is totally useless,” he said. “Get out of the bubble in which we live, where we all feel comfortable because we surround ourselves with people who think like us, and get out on the streets and reach out to people who don’t think like you.”