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Joseph McCarthy, whose pursuit of national purity exposed his own moral degradation, wasn’t the sort to grant dignity to his enemies. “If you want to be against McCarthy,” he reportedly told the press, “you’ve got to be either a Communist or a cocksucker.” The Wisconsin senator’s right hand during his Red-baiting years was his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, who in turn recruited a pretty-boy hotel heir named David Schine. That the threesome spearheaded the Red Scare of the nineteen-fifties, as well as the accompanying Lavender Scare—which sought to rout gay men and lesbians from government service—didn’t stop rumors from circulating about their own sexual inclinations; the playwright Lillian Hellman dubbed the trio of bachelors “Bonnie, Bonnie, and Clyde.” By the time Cohn died, from complications of AIDS, in 1986, he was nearly as infamous for denying his own queerness as he was for his prosecutorial viciousness. McCarthy, too, was the subject of whispers—he was no stranger, allegedly, to Milwaukee’s gay bars. They wouldn’t be the last men to persecute their peers to deflect from their own apparent proximity to the closet, but they may have been the only ones to do so in such flamboyant fashion.
McCarthy and Cohn are secondary characters in the remarkable new period drama “Fellow Travelers,” on Showtime, a generation-spanning romance between two ambitious men who first find each other amid the hunt for “subversives and deviants” in Washington. (The title derives from the real-life McCarthy’s term for Communist sympathizers.) When Hawkins “Hawk” Fuller (Matt Bomer), a mid-level State Department official with a Bronze Star to attest to his manliness, meets the milk-sipping, charmingly priggish Tim Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey) at an Election Night party, the attraction is immediate. Unlike Hawk, who aspires to climb the ranks and cap a respectable if undistinguished career with a luxurious posting abroad, Tim is yet another young idealist who’s come to D.C. to make a difference. Hawk, though far from a McCarthy ally, gets Tim a position in the Senator’s office—a staggering opportunity for the devoutly religious young man, who excuses his hero’s “rough tactics” as necessary for the greater good. It’s not long before Tim learns that Hawk’s gifts are always meant to be repaid.
The series’ creator, Ron Nyswaner, who adapted Thomas Mallon’s 2007 novel of the same name, jumps between time lines, deftly weaving together Hawk and Tim’s decades-long ardor with the historical events that follow: the Vietnam War, the assassination of Harvey Milk, and the AIDS crisis, as the federal government’s treatment of the L.G.B.T.Q. community shifts from targeted hostility to malicious neglect. But it’s during the Eisenhower era that “Fellow Travelers” is at its most absorbing, when the D.C. gay scene is functionally segregated, and solidarity is contingent at best. Constant surveillance heightens the risks of intimacy—and the furtive thrills of bathroom hookups. As much as Hawk despises McCarthy and Cohn, he’s just as prepared to betray his associates to keep his own image clean; the difference between their mode of self-preservation and his is only a matter of scale. It doesn’t seem to occur to him, until he meets Tim, that other men are available not only for cruising but also for love. Throughout the series, people in Hawk and Tim’s orbit grapple with what queerness means, and what it can be. A lesbian friend, Mary (Erin Neufer), advises Tim that “hiding a part of yourself and killing it are two different things.” Marcus (Jelani Alladin), a Black man burdened by his father’s dream for him to become the “Jackie Robinson of journalism,” distances himself from the gay movement—and elides his sexuality in his writing—in order to focus on race. His skittishness is a chronic disappointment to his on-again, off-again boyfriend, the drag queen Frankie (Noah J. Ricketts), who has no desire to pass as straight the way Marcus does. Tim comes to embrace the word “gay”; Hawk insists on “homosexual.” Each individual’s relationship to his identity is both a question of philosophical sweep and one of brute survival.
The eight-part miniseries benefits from its fairly novel (and thematically complex) historical backdrop, but it develops into one of the year’s best dramas through its rich characterizations. The casting of the leads is a particular achievement. Bomer, with his broad-shouldered athleticism and blandly handsome matinée-idol looks, channels Don Draper, whose besuited virility was all the more beguiling for his stoic unknowability. (For Hawk, like the “Mad Men” protagonist, the faultless masculine surface is all performance—though Draper never kept his heart rate down during a polygraph test by picturing Mamie Eisenhower.) But Bailey is the showstopper as Tim, a born zealot who’s at ease only when armed with a clear sense of purpose. As young men, Hawk and Tim tell themselves that, however much they love each other, they want other things more. Hawk’s cynicism and his desire for a traditional family life, including a wife and children, put him at odds with Tim, whose need to belong, if not to surrender, to something greater than himself can be met only temporarily with sex. The latter’s yearning for the sublime undergirds his tortured relationship to Catholicism; with his willowy frame, floppy hair, and bespectacled visage, he has the makings of a modern martyr. It’s no surprise that, as he grows older, he flips from the radical right to the activist left. The most compelling question the series asks is who, or what, will finally consume Tim in the way that he craves.
Tim and Hawk’s affair is both satisfyingly unpredictable and magnificently erotic, their trysts tinged with mid-century camp. (The heat between Bomer and Bailey, stoked in part by the gleeful creativity of the sex scenes, certainly helps.) During one of their early meetings, when Tim announces that he’s departing for noontime Mass, Hawk makes his interest explicit by leaning in and half-whispering, “I’ll spend the rest of the afternoon picturing you kneeling in prayer.” Tim’s answering smile says it all. Once the complications of reality set in, the push-pull dynamic becomes irresistible not because you’re rooting for them to be together but because it’s impossible to decide whether they should stay that way. Unlike most great onscreen love stories, this is a romance in which one person is fundamentally unworthy of the other—and yet it’s undeniable that they’re each other’s best chance at happiness.
The supporting cast is nearly as strong, though the time-line hopping and the old-age makeup don’t always work to their advantage. Allison Williams, who plays Hawk’s wife, Lucy, is out of her depth as the gray-haired society matron who is finally forced to confront Tim’s indelible role in her husband’s life. The historical figures are among the most impressive, even if the series’ investment in their contradictions is perhaps more than they deserve. Will Brill embodies Roy Cohn brilliantly, full of the wounded, howling humanity implied by the epitaph on Cohn’s eventual AIDS-quilt panel: “Bully. Coward. Victim.” Chris Bauer is unrecognizable under heavy prosthetics, save for his bald pate and bulldog growl, but he manages to get at the oblique flirtations that McCarthy allowed himself with unsuspecting staffers. It’s in those fleeting moments of stolen pleasure that you can see what might have been, if these men had been motivated by anything other than fear. ♦
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