Ron Nyswaner on ‘Fellow Travelers’: ‘I love love stories about people who basically are not meant to be together’
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President Joe Biden sent out a proclamation earlier this year declaring April 27, 2023, as the 70th anniversary of the Lavender Scare. It was the height of the Cold War and the blacklist seventy years ago as Senator Joseph McCarthy was hellbent on ridding the country of Communists with his witch-hunt thus destroying countless lives in his wake.
It was in this atmosphere that President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an executive order banning LGBTQI+ Americans from serving in the federal government. Some 5,000-10,000 people were investigated, interrogated and lost their jobs because they were considered a threat to national security and according to Biden’s proclamation “unworthy of public trust. Employees who were fired under these policies often lost future employment…even relationships with their families. Many endured poverty and public disgrace. Some took their own lives as a result of the trauma they had to bear. “
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The Lavender Scare is the backdrop for the new Paramount +/Showtime limited series “Fellow Travelers,” based on the 2007 novel by Thomas Mallon. “Fellow Travelers” the series spans four decades-from the Lavender Scare to the AIDs epidemic in the 1980s. The complex love story revolves around Hawkins Fuller (Matt Boomer), a handsome, ambitious State Department employee and Tim Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey) who, by contrast, is a devoted Roman Catholic, anti-Communist who gets a job with his idol McCarthy (Chris Bauer).
Recently, series creator/executive producer/writer Ron Nyswaner (“Philadelphia,” “Homeland”) discussed “Fellow Travelers” with the Washington Post’s senior national security writer, Shane Harris. “I love love stories about people who basically are not meant to be together, It’s the attraction of opposites. Hawkins Fuller is a survivor, and he finds ways to enjoy his life, which for him means often having sexual pleasure with anonymous strangers. He sort of seems fearless. The only thing he fears is love because then he’d have to show a bit of weakness. Tim Laughlin has the opposite worldview that we’re put on Earth to make the world a better place. And he has a mission.”
Nyswaner noted that to him love is “high stakes in a way because there’s always a danger to being in love. To raise the stakes by putting that relationship at a time when your life and your career could be ruined simply if someone saw you coming out of a particular apartment at a particular time.”
He learned in his research that in the 1950s, Washington, D.C. was the center of the world. “United States was tasked with its allies with rebuilding Europe. If you were young and wanted to make a difference, you went to Washington, D.C. One of the things that happened if you were gay was it would be suggested that you immediately pair up with a gay person of the opposite sex. So, a gay man arrives, someone will say ‘I’m going to introduce you to my friend Mary. She’s lesbian and the two of you should be out on the town. You should go on dates; you should always be together. You should never ever be out with just you and a guy having dinner in a restaurant. That should never happen.”
The series, he said, “isn’t just a LGBTQ story. All human beings experience grief, loss, heartbreak, love joy. So, we are connected to, I hope, a bigger human experience. I kept saying on the set, there are no noble victims in ‘Fellow Travelers.’ There are no victims at all, actually in ‘Fellow Travelers.’”
Since he wrote “Philadelphia” 30 years ago, Nyswaner has found it much easier to pitch a LGBTQ show. “For me, where we are now, and I tried to do in ‘Fellow Travelers,’ is that we allow gay characters to be as complicated and flawed as their heterosexual counterparts. I was experiencing that for a while that if I was trying to pitch or write LGBTQ characters, people wanted them to be noble. They wanted them to be the righteous ones who were victims of society. When good people are the victims of the bad society -that bores me completely. So that’s where I think we can be now. I kept saying about Hawkins Fuller when there was any pushback, would you be saying this about Don Draper or Tony Soprano or Walter White? I mean, why can’t Hawkins Fuller because he’s a gay man, be complicated like those gays. What are you trying to protect? You’re just making him boring. And as you can see, I won the argument.”
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