Rainbow Crew is an ongoing interview series that celebrates the best LGBTQ+ representation on screen. Each instalment showcases talent working on both sides of the camera, including queer creatives and allies to the community.
Next up, we're speaking to Fellow Travelers creator Ron Nyswaner.
Ever since topless set pics of Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey frolicking by the sea first whipped up a frenzy, friends of Dorothy Britney have been desperately clamouring to see more of Fellow Travelers.
While we're happy to report that there's no shortage of eye candy across this thirty-five year long romance, don't just come to this story for the view. As Fellow Travelers writer/creator Ron Nyswaner tells us: "Everything in the show is carefully designed". That goes for the nudity, which is very much welcomed, but also the power dynamics captured by each sex scene as Tim and Hawk's love evolves throughout each decade.
Nyswaner's adaptation of Thomas Mallon's book isn't just concerned with gay intimacy though, as important as that is. By including historical touchstones from real life, Fellow Travelers brings the queer community together in a far broader sense as well, connecting us to our own often-overlooked and deliberately censored past that we share across time and space.
Digital Spy caught up with Nyswaner to discuss gay history, the discourse around sex on screen, and why Fellow Travelers is a story of queer survival.
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Fellow Travelers is technically a work of fiction, but so much real queer history is woven through this story in a very tangible way via TV clips and newspaper headlines. Why was it important to include all that in this love story?
Our show is meticulously researched. So for example, everything that Roy Cohn and Joseph McCarthy say as characters, if they say it in public, they actually said it.
Thomas Mallon is a great novelist, but he's also a great historian. This book led me to dive into research on the Lavender Scare, which I didn't really know existed. Everyone who I know knows about Joe McCarthy and the anti-Communist purge. But Roy and McCarthy also led the purge of homosexuals.
It was an official purge. It wasn't subtle. It wasn't subtext. There was an executive order that said if you were a sexual deviant and we investigate you, you cannot work for the federal government. Thousands of people were fired, far more than people who were suspected communists, and often their families were notified: "Your son or daughter is being investigated as a sexual deviant."
Everything that you see in the show with the FBI coming into somebody's apartment, opening underwear drawers. Every question the FBI asks? Those are all documented. That's a piece of our history that people should know.
Then there's also the AIDS crisis, which isn't in the book, but I wanted to address it because it was such an important part of my life. These two parallel times are very dark times in LGBTQ history.
It's very important for me to say this: These are dark times that we survived. That we fought back in. That's why we're making the show. We're not showing people being victimised by bad people. We're showing people who survived and fought back in both cases, and that's what's important about the show.
Fellow Travelers moves beyond the original story by expanding into later decades beyond the '50s. Can you talk us through that process of adding new plot lines and deciding what to keep from the source material?
I love Mr Mallon's book. We've talked about this and together, we both accept and celebrate the fact there's a book reading experience, there's a show watching experience, and they don't have to be the same thing. So I love the essence of the book, which is Hawk and Tim's relationship in the '50s.
McCarthy and Cohn aren't quite as prominent in the book as they are in the show. When I started reading about Roy Cohn and his obsession with David Schine, and how that basically led to the McCarthy hearings, which are about homophobia? To me, that is a part of LGBTQ history and American history that people need to know about. It fascinated me. So that was part of the expansion to go deeper into that.
And then I just was obsessed with Hawk and Tim. I didn't want their story to end in the '50s. I wanted to keep living with them for three more episodes. So that was the motivation, to go to the the AIDS crisis in the '80s, and then what happened in between.
We have them meet in 1968 and then again in 1979. Then we looked at what was happening in the world and in our country then that we could tie into those episodes. So it was really just wanting to spend as much time with Hawk and Tim as possible. Through that 35 years of history, we take Marcus and Frankie and Lucy along as well.
I also wanted to explore the marriage of a closeted man to a straight woman. We get to really explore that when we get into episodes six, seven and eight.
A huge strength of this show is how it portrays gay sex so authentically throughout. There's no shying away from the love these two men share. However, it's safe to say that sex has been the biggest talking point around Fellow Travelers before it even came out. Do you feel that discussion overshadows other key aspects of the story or is this an important talking point in of itself, raising visibility of queer love in a very physical sense?
I love that we're talking about the sex in the show. Like everything in Fellow Travelers, it was carefully designed. There's not much in our show that is accidental. It was carefully designed because we wanted to do a love story that is based in power.
Oscar Wilde said: "Everything in life is about sex except for sex. Sex is about power." Every scene in the show is a negotiation of some kind, but especially the sex scenes are about the exchange of power.
My experience is that great love stories are love stories where the desire is not equal. Somebody wants somebody more and that actually was in Thomas Mallon's book, that Tim was the one who loves more and wants more while Hawk is the one who is reserved and keeps pushing back. But we yearn to have them together, even though they're really not suited to each other.
Tim brings out some emotion in Hawk, and Hawk energises Tim, gives him passion. We really want to embrace that and then take that dynamic into the sex scene, so it's about the unequal desire that they have, and the unequal power that they have.
But even in the pilot, Tim starts to realise: "Oh, this guy desires me. I can get something I want." He wants to go to an event. "I can get it if I give him sex." That was our operating rule. It's an exchange of power.
There's been a strange, puritanical backlash against sex on screen in recent months, so I love that Fellow Travelers is arriving now at this point in time with such an unabashed approach to sex. What are your thoughts on that discourse? Why would you argue that sex is integral to storytelling?
Saying sex isn't necessary on screen would be like saying sex isn't important in life. That's not true of my life. and certainly not true of most people's lives that I know.
I'm a sober man now, but there was a period of my life where I did a lot of drugs and had a lot of sex with people that I probably shouldn't have been in a hotel room with. That desire can lead us to great places of celebration etcetera, etcetera, but it also can lead us to some dark places. I think that's such a huge part of human life. Why should we not examine it?
I have no sympathy with that way of thinking.
Watch Fellow Travelers on Paramount Plus
Looking back, is there a particular queer film or TV show that really resonated with you on a personal level?
Well, this is a weird story. When I was eleven years old, I was in a movie theatre in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, and there was a poster for The Boys in the Band. They showed that beautiful hustler character poster, and I was overcome with some weird emotion or feeling that I now know was sexual passion [Laughs].
That was actually my coming out to myself, looking at that poster. Then it wasn't until I was in college that I saw that film.
The people that have changed my life are the real people that I have met along the way. People who fought in the AIDS crisis. People like Calpernia Addams, a trans woman who I wrote a movie about in 2003 called Soldier's Girl. The people who are living heroic lives have inspired me. I've had many, many of those in my in my life.
Fellow Travelers premieres in the US on October 27 and a day later in the UK via streaming platform Paramount+.
After teaching in England and South Korea, David turned to writing in Germany, where he covered everything from superhero movies to the Berlin Film Festival.
In 2019, David moved to London to join Digital Spy, where he could indulge his love of comics, horror and LGBTQ+ storytelling as Deputy TV Editor, and later, as Acting TV Editor.
David has spoken on numerous LGBTQ+ panels to discuss queer representation and in 2020, he created the Rainbow Crew interview series, which celebrates LGBTQ+ talent on both sides of the camera via video content and longform reads.
Beyond that, David has interviewed all your faves, including Henry Cavill, Pedro Pascal, Olivia Colman, Patrick Stewart, Ncuti Gatwa, Jamie Dornan, Regina King, and more — not to mention countless Drag Race legends.
As a freelance entertainment journalist, David has bylines across a range of publications including Empire Online, Radio Times, INTO, Highsnobiety, Den of Geek, The Digital Fix and Sight & Sound.
