RON NYSWANER: No one in Fellow Travelers will ever speak his or her truth because human beings don’t know their truth. The great thing about us human beings, and the great thing to write about, is that we go through life discovering, if we’re lucky, our truth, or being misguided about what is our truth, and often just living in the dark. And then every now and then, the door opens, we learn something, maybe we’re a slightly better person for that.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome to another episode of We Disrupt This Broadcast, a monthly podcast where we interview the creative minds behind some of our favorite stories on TV, exploring how they’re made, why they keep us captivated, and what they have to say. I’m your host, Gabe González, and today we’re focusing on a show that our team can’t stop talking about– Fellow Travelers, a Peabody Award winning limited series adapted by Ron Nyswaner and based on Thomas Mallon’s 2007 novel of the same name. Fellow Travelers begins against the backdrop of the Lavender Scare during the McCarthy era in the 1950s and spans until the height of the HIV AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.
The drama is anchored by a long running romance between two men, Hawkins Fuller, played by Matt Bomer, and Timothy Laughlin, played by Jonathan Bailey. It’s a love story that’s messy, heartbreaking, and really steamy. I’m not sure if you can tell, but I’m feeling very much in my wheelhouse. Alongside their friends, who include a journalist for a Black-led publication named Marcus Gaines, played by Jelani Alladin, and a drag performer named Frankie Hines, played by Noah J. Ricketts, Fellow Travelers explores characters forced to reckon with keeping their relationships and their identities a secret to avoid dangerous consequences.
After the break, we’ll talk to screenwriter, director, and the creator of Fellow Travelers, Ron Nyswaner, on the importance of including historical truths in his script, why we deserve imperfect queer characters, and what network executives had to say about just how much sex they wanted to see on the show.
We’ll be right back.
RON NYSWANER: Welcome back! Today, we’re diving into Fellow Travelers with creator Ron Nyswaner. Ron is an Academy Award, Emmy, and BAFTA-nominated writer whose film credits include My Policeman and the groundbreaking film Philadelphia, as well as TV credits that include the 2015 series Homeland. From what I can guess and what I’ve seen in his work, he is also as much of a queer history nerd as I am, so I’m particularly excited to have him on this episode. Please welcome Ron Nyswaner.
Hey, Ron, how are you?
RON NYSWANER: Hey, Gabe. I’m great. I’m glad to be here.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Awesome. Thank you. I am in particular excited to chat with you. I actually, I host a comedy show in New York called The Lavender Scare, which is focused entirely on games that touch on my favorite moments in queer history. And your show has made it so much easier to explain to people what that era is.
RON NYSWANER: Wow. Oh, wow. That’s great. Oh, I’m glad we did something useful. That’s terrific.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Thank you so much, truly. Fellow Travelers kicks off by situating viewers in two different time periods, when it feels like the queer community is in crisis. We’ve got the 1950s, when McCarthyism led to things like the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare. And we’ve got the 80s, this sort of post-Stonewall era, just as the LGBTQ community has to start grappling with the HIV AIDS epidemic. Why do these eras feel important to bookend Hawk and Tim’s relationship in the series?
RON NYSWANER: Well, you know, the book is set almost exclusively in the 1950s, which I was born in the 1950s, but I wasn’t old enough to be aware of anything that was happening, but I certainly had come out in the late seventies and then very soon after the joy of the late seventies, so the disco and all that came the crisis of AIDS and that I really connected to.
And there was something about thinking about Hawk and Tim having had a relationship that lasted for 35 years seemed really immediately intriguing to me. And I just thought that the AIDS crisis, which is, you know, where we were dying because of the government’s indifference to us, it was a perfect sort of bookend to a period in American history in the Lavender Scare, where the government was actively, instigated by federal law, actively persecuting and destroying the lives of homosexuals. So those two things seem to be very naturally connected.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: When we see Hawk and Tim, it seems like they’re on quite similar paths, right? Trying to work in government or adjacent to government and live at least publicly a closeted straight life. But by the 80s, we’ve seen that their paths have sort of deviated, right? Hawk has chosen to live in the closet a bit and, you know, have that white picket fence dream with the wife. Tim has started to live openly and is working in service to support the LGBTQ community. Do you think that dichotomy is still presented to queer men today?
RON NYSWANER: Well, first, let me, Gabe, let me just say something about Hawk and Tim in the 50s. I don’t really think they are choosing to liven closeted lives. There was no choice. You know, this is what I, you know, on the set and in the writer’s room, I would explain to my younger colleagues, there was no gay community. There was nothing gay. There was no gay identity. There were bars that you could go to and other places you could go to find people to have sex with.
And people did, of course, make music and, you know, have joy in very private ways, but it was never a choice. Gee, I think I’ll live like a straight person. If you wanted to have a life where you could get hired for jobs, not be persecuted, not thrown in jail, you live just a straight person. And I, you know, I was very much inspired by Gore Vidal’s book novel, The City and the Pillar.
And you know, it was in the days when there were people identified as people who liked having sex with people of the same gender, as opposed to I’m part of a community. And what begins to happen with Hawk and Tim, you know, over the eighties is that, you know, Gay liberation. And Tim responds to it, Hawk doesn’t. So I think today, look, we cannot really honestly say it’s just like it was.
I mean, you know, if you go on Amazon or Netflix, there’s a menu, LGBTQ menu of all the content that you can stream with gay people and about LGBTQ things. So it is not the same here, at least. You know, I do get on social media, I get responses to fellow travelers from people in other parts of the world who say, you know, I’m writing to tell you how much I love your show. And if I was found out by telling you that I’m gay, I would be put in jail. You know, so there are some places where just being gay is illegal.
You know, is there backlash? Are we entering, is our entire nation facing I think one of the most terrifying moments in our history, on the edge of losing democracy? That I think all of us are looking at are facing something that is where we’re going to have our freedoms curtailed. I mean, we’ve already lost reproductive rights. So yes, it does seem things are getting darker, but it’s certainly not the same.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Absolutely. That said, you’ve talked a lot about wanting to bring more of the eighties into the series adaptation of the book. What does it feel like to bring to life a historical moment that feels more personal, something you can remember?
RON NYSWANER: Well, there’s our historical research. There’s Mallon’s novel, this terrific, beautiful novel. There’s the contributions made by my fellow writers. And then there’s my personal life. And I always encourage students, you know, that we find ourselves in some material that we’re working with. I discourage them from writing literally about themselves. I mean, nobody wants to see a show about a 60-ish television writer named Ron, you know, and my travails, my romantic ups and downs. I can’t imagine anything more boring than that. But I can find myself. In the show and in Hawk and Tim. So my personal life is woven through it.
And I do think that for me to be able to say, for example, episode seven, you know, I have felt tremendous grief. I’ve been in recovery from drug addiction for 25 years, but I nearly died. I have sometimes said that I had drug induced seizures on four different continents. You know, so I came close to losing my life many times. I contemplated suicide frequently. So for example, of the grief that Hawks feels in episode 7 when his son has died, you know, I knew that grief very well.
But I’m also, oddly enough, in some people’s eyes, Christian. You know, so I connect to Tim and the need to have some connection to God. And I have found a way that my, I love being a homosexual. I just love it. I love everything about it.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Likewise, yes.
RON NYSWANER: I’ve reconciled also my love for, just like Tim, my love for God.
CLIP: Fellow Travelers
If we’ve sinned, all God asks is that we be sorry for it. Is there a particular sin weighing on your mind?
I’ve had carnal relations.
That’s a serious sin. Are you in love with the young woman?
It’s not a woman.
Even for the gravest of sins, if you are sincerely sorry, God will forgive you and make you pure.
But that’s the problem.
What is?
When I committed this sin, I felt pure. More pure than I felt in my entire life. So how can I be sorry for it?
GABE GONZÁLEZ:You mentioned a bit about the research project in adapting the story from a novel to a TV show, and it doesn’t seem like there are many historians or official documents pre-Stonewall that chronicle queer life accurately. So I’m curious, how did you approach your research for adapting Fellow Travelers into a television series?
RON NYSWANER: Well, our research was very wide and, you know, there are some fantastic books. I mean, there is a book called The Lavender Scare and there’s a great book by my friend, Eric Cervini, The Deviant’s War. We dove into McCarthy and Cohn, everything, for example, that Joseph McCarthy, the characters and Roy Cohn say in the show, if they said it in public, they actually said it in public.
CLIP: Fellow Travelers
The executive order that president Eisenhower will sign tomorrow will expand security investigations to all branches of government, facilitating the coordination of the efforts among various agencies, including the state department’s M unit, the FBI’s sex deviance investigations unit, and the Washington, D. C. Police Sex Perversion Elimination Program. Those accused and investigated will be judged by their trustworthiness and whether they have committed criminal or immoral acts that would leave them susceptible to coercion. These are people the rest of us consider sad, sick, even pathetic.
RON NYSWANER: So it was a wide look at history. You know, I’ve been told that I told a love story through three and a half decades of gay history, and I said, well, I think the Lavender Scare, the persecution of Americans is American history and the AIDS crisis is world human history. You know, it’s not LGBTQ history. You know, and in the same way on the set making the show, I would say to people, we’re making a show about human beings: grief, love, despair, having your heart broken are not restricted to us. You know, that’s how we connect to everybody.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I do want to talk a little bit about the intimate scenes in the series. I loved them, but they took me on such a roller coaster. And the sex between Hawk and Tim is very intense, both emotionally and physically.
RON NYSWANER: Yes.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: But the scenes are so meaningful to the way we understand how love and relationship dynamics were formed between them. What was important for you to convey with the inclusion of these scenes?
RON NYSWANER: Sex, you know, for me is It’s a powerful force. Coming out in the 70s, it was a very liberating force. I could be in this room, and there are all these men, and I could go home with one of them, or more than one of them, perhaps, you know? And the freedom of finding that, and finding that physical connection, was really powerful to me.
The show is about the things that are in some ways sacred. You know, Tim is searching for a connection to God, but he’s also searching, we’re all searching for like ecstatic experiences, transcendent experiences. And I think there’s certain times that a sexual experience can be a transcendent experience, that it takes you outside of yourself and it connects you to somebody in a really profound way.
That was the first thing. The other thing is that I believe in this you know, it’s not politically correct, I guess, and it says who I am, but you know, I believe that all relationships have a power element to them. We all do. You know, and that sometimes one person loves more than the other, or wants more than the other.
And so we had a rule, we had several rules for making Fellow Travelers, but one of the rules was every scene. In our show, it’s about power, especially the sex scenes. And the actors grabbed onto that. They loved that because then they were given something to act. You know, they were in a scene. So who’s in charge now? Who wants me more or do I want more? And so that was very important to me to be able to show the truth of that.
And for years, I have said that, you know, I think we have to move past the LGBTQ characters who are noble victims. We need to move past that. And this is my response to people who complain about Hawk. I actually love Hawkins Fuller. I love him. And I feel under no obligation to present people who behave correctly. I love characters who behave inappropriately and who are provocative, you know, and that I think that we should as, as gay creators embrace the whole range of humanity with our gay characters.
GABE GONZÁLEZ:I think it’s a lovely thing to say, right? If we want equity in representation and substantive representation, having the range of humanity shown within LGBTQ characters is so important. I love somebody presented with difficult choices and making incorrect decisions. It’s where you get dramatic tension.
It’s, they’re human. I do it all the time and I’m gay. So, yeah.
RON NYSWANER: Yeah, exactly.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Absolutely. There’s also something so interesting, which is that whenever they meet in a room and the door closes, they’re on each other almost like, Like, teenagers pawing at each other after realizing they can make out behind the bleachers. There’s a sort of a need to, to let out this emotion immediately. And so, in addition to learning about them, I’m wondering if portraying a romance forced to play out in secret, influenced the kind of sex that they had, the sort of energy, the intensity, and the commitment to these sort of power dynamics throughout time.
RON NYSWANER: I mean, I think that certainly that must have been, that is a factor, it’s there. If I go back to high school, you know, and when I was so careful about every step that I took, you know, because I had been criticized at times in my life because I walked like a girl, or my voice, oh, you talk like a girl. You know, and I’d heard that a lot.
It screws us up for a long time. I have to say. You know, so there’s a lot of, there’s a whole editing thing that goes on. You’re constantly editing yourself. Watch how you’re walking, Ron. Watch how you’re talking. Oh my God, your voice went too high that moment. Cause at any moment, some bully was going to call you out or punch you, and you’d be punished for it.
So imagine that in all aspects of life that you are from the moment you step outside your door, you are, especially in the fifties in Washington, DC, you’re being watched. And any little sign could get you, not called a name, but fired and branded for the rest of your life a deviant. So I think, sure, what a relief.
Shut the door, take off the clothes. Ah, you know, so that absolutely, I think you found, no one’s ever commented on that before, but I think that’s actually very true. The relief of that.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: So, I mentioned earlier, I host a show called The Lavender Scare in New York, and I do always ask the audience at the beginning of the show if anyone knows what The Lavender Scare is. And for the first few years, almost nobody knew. You’d get a couple of hands in the audience. But I will never forget, we were about halfway through Fellow Travelers being on the air, and there was one show where I asked if anyone knew what The Lavender Scare was, and this whole section of hands went up, like nine or ten hands, of presumably queer people. And one of them shoots their hand up and screams, the foot licking show, the foot licking show! And I lost it because I was like, this is what it takes. I just had to put a little foot licking in my show. Y’all could have known, but it was a moment that made it so clear to me that Fellow Travelers had brought an era that young queer people might not know about back into the cultural consciousness by any means necessary, so to speak.
RON NYSWANER: Well, you know, I, I don’t start out to educate. I just want to tell stories. But I do think that it is easy for us to forget that many people before me and again, before them struggled and suffered and had courage. I mean, Fellow Travelers, yes, Hawk is never going to be a gay rights advocate, but you know, what was the courage that it took to go to the park restroom and have sex?
I mean, your life could be destroyed. That wasn’t, you know, a guaranteed safe act either. So things were. really different. I mean, when I grew up, two things were going to last forever. The Soviet Union, and that gay people could never, ever, ever, in a million years, ever get married. It was not even a thought.
I went to my first gay rights demonstration in 1977, and, you know, we, none of us, for years, ever even mentioned marriage as a goal, as something we were going to struggle for. As a matter of fact, in the 70s, we were against marriage for everybody because we were all going to just live in communes and, you know, have sex with everybody and raise everybody’s children. That was the seventies ideal of things.
But I love that they shouted out the foot looking scene because that in some ways it was because we were honest about sex. It makes a show that is period, contemporary. I mean, it’s some of the hottest sex you’ll see outside of a porn film. So we pushed the edge of contemporary television while telling a story that is historical. I think it’s very important.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Absolutely, it is. And we’ve talked a lot about showing characters that contain complexity and are imperfect. And especially about the limited options that queer people had during the 50s.
And I think Tim and Hawk sort of embody the ugly things people can do out of fear or the need to survive. Why were you drawn to depicting queer characters that feel this need to make those flawed or selfish decisions? What do you think we can learn about that as audiences and what makes it unique queer storytelling today?
RON NYSWANER: First of all, I write to entertain myself. That’s the first thing. And I have no interest in happy characters who always make correct decisions that are healthy and have been guided by their therapist. As a matter of fact, I don’t have interest in those kind of people as friends. I like neurotic, weird people who, somebody did say like, you know, why Ron, why couldn’t you write something happy between gay people?
I said, you mean like Hamlet? Like, let’s say Hamlet goes home for his father’s funeral, he forgives his mother for murdering his father and marrying his uncle, and they all lived happily ever after. Now, that’s great drama. Drama comes from struggle. Happiness, first of all, I’m not sure I believe in it. You know, I, you know, there’s always, you know, life is a struggle.
Now, I have a very happy life. I’m a guy who’s pretty optimistic, actually, and comfortable. It’s the human struggle that really interests me. You know, I had a lot of rules. Another rule in Fellow Travelers, in the writer’s room, this is probably going to get me in trouble too, you know, there were certain things that were not allowed to be said.
Like, there were certain words. I didn’t want to hear the word trauma, I didn’t want to hear the word trigger, and I didn’t want to hear the phrase “speak their truth” because no one in fellow travelers will ever Speak his or her truth. You know why? Because human beings don’t know their truth. The great thing about us human beings and the great thing to write about is that we go through life discovering, if we’re lucky, our truth, or being misguided about what is our truth, and often just living in the dark.
And then every now and then, the door opens, we learn something, and maybe we’re a slightly better person for that. Those are the stories that interest me. You know, that’s a general rule. It has nothing to do with queer characters. That has to do with all characters. Where human beings are most interesting to me is when they struggle within themselves as opposed to just good people struggling against the bad forces of society, which I have no interest in.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: That’s great advice for any writer, honestly, I think so. So we’ve talked a lot about Tim and Hawk, and I wanted to talk about two other characters I fell in love with throughout the series, Marcus and Frankie.
RON NYSWANER: Yeah.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: They are two black queer characters that to me offer such a different point of view as doubly marginalized people in the 50s, right? And they’re characters that are unique to the series, they don’t appear in the books. So when researching what life looked like for queer people of color in the 50s, did you feel that they were equitably included in the historical record?
RON NYSWANER: You know, there’s a lot about them in David K. Johnson’s wonderful book, The Lavender Scare. There are chapters about the black community in Washington in the fifties. And you know, they were really fascinating. There’s a whole season two of Fellow Travelers to be done there because in some ways he says that there was, black families sometimes were more accepting of their gay children than white families. There was sort of, there was almost more compassion or something.
It’s a very interesting thing, but he really covers the bars and the drag shows and the rent parties and the kind of joy that people managed to have, you know, in times of great oppression. So knowing how vibrant the black community was. And in Washington, D. C., you know, in the 50s, was as well.
I just knew I didn’t want to make a show with all white characters in 2023. I just, that felt not quite morally right to me. So I started thinking about, you know, who Marcus and Frankie would be. So interestingly enough, Marcus, there were black journalists that I modeled Marcus on who were not necessarily LGBTQ, but there’s a guy who was the first black reporter at the Washington Post. And I took his story and gave it to Marcus, you know, and it really started thinking about, you know, You know, it just seems so dramatic to me.
CLIP: Fellow Travelers
The words just, just kept coming.
Oh, I can tell. It’s good. Really good, but I don’t mean to sound like a prima Donna, but where am I?
I know.
The bouncer called us fags. You forget that?
Frankie, that’s not a fight I can win right now. No editor would run that story. I’ll always be a colored man first.
RON NYSWANER: If it was hard to be white and queer in the 50s, what the heck was it like to be black and queer, you know? So that, I thought that was a very important thing to explore.
And then Frankie is inspired by Stormé DeLarverie. You know, Stormé is in the show. And I don’t know if your audience knows, but Stormé is a true to life, historical, basically queer icon, played by Chelsea Russell. And at one point, I was thinking, oh, Marcus, maybe, because I wanted to go to Cozy Corner, and maybe he connects with Stormé.
And then I thought, no, I, Stormé‘s a historical figure, so I can’t bend and shape a historical figure the way I might need to for drama. I said, well, I’ll make a waiter who also sings. You know, we got the great Noah Ricketts to play Frankie, who is on Broadway right now in The Great Gatsby with a great voice.
And Jelani Aladdin plays Marcus. And it was really, I’ll tell you Gabe, you know, I was, I think I, you know, I had a certain amount of respect for what I don’t I have the ability to understand. But sometimes I took it a little too far. And I just want to say, you know, again, thank you to my dear friend, Jelani, who I adore, because at one point I would often approach, you know, I’d go to Matt and Johnny or Allison.
I’d say, you know, I have a thought about Lucy or Hawk or Tim, but with Jelani, I’d always say, now, the first thing I say is I just want to acknowledge that I don’t understand a black man’s experience. I’m not black, but I have this thought about Marcus. And finally, Jelani said, stop, stop apologizing. You wrote a great character. You know, what are you not? Can I help you? Great. Uh, you know, and let’s do this together. But he didn’t want to hear the apology anymore. And that was just really moving to me.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I love that. And I love hearing about the connection to Stormé as well. Did you read about the jewel box review in your research of Stormé?
RON NYSWANER: Of course. I love that character. And certainly there’s a great documentary about Stormé who identified as a woman, as a lesbian. And I don’t know if you, have you seen, there’s a great documentary about her and she actually became a bouncer for a lesbian bar. And she also carried a gun.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: She was known for carrying a gun around the West Village. Yeah.
RON NYSWANER: She was the sheriff of the West Village. There was gay bashing going on. She said, I’m going to get a gun.
GABE GONZÁLEZ:Yeah. She used to say, I’m carrying it to protect my girls. I love that one. Yeah.
RON NYSWANER: She’s, I know, that’s another, that’s another great, I mean, there’s so much, and, you know, Fellow Travelers, we move so fast in some ways through history, there’s a lot left to be explored.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Absolutely. Well, even going back to what you said, too, about Marcus and Frankie, you know, it feels inappropriate today to make a series that doesn’t include perspectives of color, but it also feels inappropriate to depict a history as if those perspectives didn’t exist. I mean, it might seem far fetched to think of a black drag queen, but in my own research, I found out about all these Halloween festivals that used to be organized by black drag queens.
One of them in Philadelphia was called Bitches Christmas, and every Halloween, they would use Halloween as an excuse to get into drag publicly and do a parade. So stuff like that is, you know, it takes academics, showrunners, show creators, dedicated writers to find these moments in history and bring them back to life or else they get buried. And we don’t see them.
RON NYSWANER: There were drag balls in the 50s. I think there may be just one or two a year. People from Washington went to, there was a famous one in Baltimore. You know, and actually the police didn’t stop it. They like controlled the traffic around it or something. It was just this weird, bizarre sort of cooperation. I don’t know why.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, it’s wild that we could have drag shows at Radio City Music Hall in the early 20th century, and suddenly we can’t even have them in public parks, like, what is going on, right?
RON NYSWANER: Exactly. Yeah.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Absolutely.
RON NYSWANER: Wow, that’s an interesting point.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yeah. It’s pretty wild stuff. Well, Ron, thank you again. I’m wondering before we wrap up, do you have any final thoughts or things you might want to share with listeners we didn’t get to touch on?
RON NYSWANER: There was the beauty in making fellow travelers that has affected my life profoundly. We did feel a responsibility to be as truthful as we could about our struggle, but also our humanity.
You know, which means that we are people who, as all human beings are, who often make mistakes, who miss the opportunity to love and be loved because we’re afraid. And I’m very proud that we were able and supported. I have to say, it’s really important. People love to tell stories about how bad the executives were and how they tried to repress everything.
I’ve spent three years being said yes to by the people at Fremantle and Showtime. I mean, they had notes and thoughts, but the sex was more. The note on the sex was, take it as far as the law will, and they let me know what the law was, as you can go, among other things. So that, I’m really grateful for that.
And I just would say to the younger LGBTQ people, don’t despair. Don’t despair, because when you sink into despair, they win. And you know, study ACT UP, and study the incredible things that they did. Wrapping Jesse Helms house in a condom. You know, there was always joy in stuff that ACT UP did. And so find joy in the struggle. It’s not a bad thing to struggle. It’s actually where you find yourself. So join the struggle and be joyful in it.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: What a wonderful sentiment to end with. Ron Nyswaner, screenwriter, director, and creator of Fellow Travelers. A show that’s left quite an impact on me, and hopefully a lot of folks. It seems like it. I gotta thank you again for creating this show, for bringing together the team that brought it to life. It really means a lot. So it’s been such a privilege to have you. Thank you.
RON NYSWANER: Oh, this means a lot to me, Gabe. Thank you. It’s really a pleasure.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Wow. Okay. What a joy and what a privilege to have Ron here with us to take a romp through queer history and remind us that queer characters not only don’t have to be perfect role models, but that they are more interesting and more human when they’re allowed to embrace their imperfections and grapple with what they don’t know about themselves.
So now that we’ve swept our gay way across four decades in a very honest way, we are going to talk about what Fellow Travelers means within the current landscape of queer representation on TV, and why shows that aren’t afraid to be honest about LGBTQ characters’ imperfections or their sex lives mark an important and valuable shift in TV norms.
After the break, we’ll unpack all of this with Katherine Sender, professor of feminist gender and sexuality studies at Cornell University.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome back. We are here with Katherine Sender. Katherine is the author of Business, Not Politics: The Making of the Gay Market released in 2004, as well as The Makeover: Reality Television and Reflexive Audiences released in 2012. She’s also a documentary director and producer whose credits include Off The Straight and Narrow: Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, and Transgender People on U. S. Television.
Her expertise in media, particularly LGBTQ media, makes her such an exciting person to talk to about how Fellow Travelers has impacted audiences and the TV landscape.
Katherine, thanks so much for being here.
KATHERINE SENDER: Thanks so much for having me.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I am so excited to talk to you about Fellow Travelers. So I was talking to Ron and he mentioned that in all of his projects he’s not interested in sanitized portrayals of queer people who only live morally upstanding lives. He’s interested in the messy humanity of his characters. Do you think this perspective is an outlier in the current media landscape?
KATHERINE SENDER: It’s very interesting looking historically because when gay and lesbian people, much less so bisexual, transgender, queer people, began to get any publicity on television at all, they had to be gay saints. So they had to be the valedictorian and the captain of the football team and, you know, the perfect son who loved his mother, you know, perfectly, and there wasn’t room for any real moral ambiguity there, or really any kind of sexual expression. I mean, you know, when Ellen had a kiss in, I don’t know, 1998, you know, all of the advertisers freaked out.
So I will say I am staggered by the level of sexual explicitness we’re seeing in television shows now. What is wonderful about Fellow Travelers is that it doesn’t, you know, the gay people are messy and complex and ambivalent and have internalized homophobia and, you know, that there’s this quite interesting, sometimes quite troubling, sort of dominance-submission relationship with the main characters that, you know, there’s definitely some times when some of the sex does not seem what we might consider in inverted commas to be healthy. And so I think that Ron did an amazing job of actually being very bold about saying, look, we’re not perfect people.
I mean, one of the precursors of this is that we began to see much more complicated characters on Showtime and HBO, people like, you know, Tony Soprano and, you know, Walter White on Breaking Bad, you know, on AMC. And the disconnect between, like, these really interesting, compelling characters on cable television became sort of more and more obvious when the gay characters were still incredibly squeaky clean. And so I think what we’ve seen is sort of a new iteration of that where, you know, very forward thinking, LGBTQ-identified showrunners, writers, you know, are able to put these much more complicated characters forward without people saying, Oh, that’s just a stereotype of the gay villain, because they’re much more three dimensional and complex.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Do you find that maybe statistically, or at least anecdotally in your research, TV has been capable of swaying folks regarding their opinions on LGBTQ people?
KATHERINE SENDER: Well, I think we’ve seen an incredible shift really since the early 90s. And I think The Real World is still going strong. And that really changed people’s awareness of openly gay people in public life.
I mean, before the seventies or eighties, it was possible to grow up thinking, you know, as a gay person thinking you were the only one and was, you know, there’s something horribly wrong with me and there’s nobody else in the world. And that’s just really not possible in this day and age. And of course, social media has also really reinforced that level of publicity and awareness. A Gallup poll in 2022 found that something around 20 percent of young people identify as something other than cisgendered and heterosexual, which is just unfathomable for me as somebody who came out in, you know, the early 80s.
So I think there is definitely a cyclical relationship, but we also have to bear in mind that part of that is seeing a great deal more homophobic and transphobic backlash where various people in elected and non elected roles take it upon themselves to try and quash that level of visibility and the much more positive sense we have of LGBTQ lives today.
There’s also a question about whether media distributors are going to sustain their investment in diverse LGBTQ representations, because one of the things that I’m arguing in a paper that I’m writing right now is that there’s this kind of idea of the queer vanguard, which is that you send all of these really interesting, complex representations out when you want to launch a new brand, and then when you’ve got the reputation and the awards and the and, you know, the reviews for Orange is the New Black or Transparent or, you know, Sense8. Then they’re like, great, thanks, gay people. You know, we’re going to go back and we’re going to make the Lord of the Rings prequel. You know, I don’t think we can rest on our laurels that this is the way that it’s going to be.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: That actually leads me to our very last question. I’m curious what your hope is for the future. What would you like to see queer representation look like or what changes would you like to see moving into the future?
KATHERINE SENDER: I mean, I’m much more interested in thinking about LGBTQ people behind the camera, or at least in the media industries themselves, because I think, you know, it’s great that we’ve had these amazing shows come out, but I think media companies need to invest in personnel to take those representations forward in ways that are really authentic and complex and can really delve into some of the sort of real complexities.
I mean, going back to Fellow Traveler and the relationship between Marcus and Frankie, apparently that wasn’t in the original book, but Ron brought that in, you know, to make the whole picture of this scene much more complex. And I just think that comes from, you know, a kind of deep commitment, a deep sort of personal commitment to rich and complex LGBTQ representations.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Absolutely. You felt like such a crucial perspective to include, and I’m really thankful that you managed to join us today.
KATHERINE SENDER: Thank you for including me in this conversation. It’s a real joy to talk to you, and yeah, thanks very much.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Thank you again to Ron Nyswaner and Katherine Sender for an incredible episode. They both articulated a feeling I have had for a long time a while as a queer television viewer, which is the need to move beyond sanitized portrayals of queer people. Right? Give us the range everyone else gets. Give us the option to be messy and deceptive and wrong the way people are every day. I don’t think a flawed character is always a bad one.
And while Ron and Catherine both touch on the media’s history of erasing LGBTQ people, or reducing them to harmful stereotypes when they are depicted, perhaps overcompensating for that history has pushed the pendulum too hard in the opposite direction, creating new, supposedly positive tropes that rob queer characters of their complexity.
Given the isolating and sometimes terrifying era for queer people explored by Fellow Travelers, there’s one observation Katherine made that really stuck with me: her point that before the 70s or even the 80s, it was possible to grow up as a young adult thinking you were the only gay person. Ron’s series and Katherine’s historical grounding are a reminder of how far LGBTQ rights have come in the U.S. even if it is imperfect or incomplete.
But the parallels we still see between the past and present are an urgent addendum to that reminder because we’ve still got a long way to go. Hopefully bringing queer history to younger generations, through Ron’s work on fellow travelers, and through other great queer media, can make sure we don’t lose sight of the connections between our past, present, and future.
The Peabody Awards are decided unanimously, so to close out our episode, I bring you We Disrupt This Broadcast‘s unanimous decision, where we unanimously pick the most disruptive line of the day.
RON NYSWANER: It’s some of the hottest sex you’ll see outside of a porn film.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Thank you again for tuning in, and join us next time for a very special episode where we talk to the one, the only, Judy Blume. That’s right, we’ll talk to her about the Peabody Award winning documentary on her life, Judy Blume Forever, as well as her thoughts on a hot topic she is very familiar with, book bans.
JUDY BLUME: If you come into my bookstore, we have a little area that’s taped off, you know, these are banned books. But really, we could put that tape anywhere in the store, on any shelf, in any department, because books are there to make you think.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: We Disrupt This Broadcast is a Peabody and Center for Media and Social Impact Production. Hosted by me, Gabe González, with on air contributions from Caty Borum, Jeffrey Jones, and Joyelle Nicole Johnson. This show is brought to you by executive producers, Caty Borum, Jeffrey Jones, and Bethany Hall.
Producer, Jordana Jason, writers, Sasha Stewart, Jordana Jason, Bethany Hall, Jennifer Keishin-Armstrong, and myself, Gabe González. Consulting producer, Jennifer Keishin-Armstrong. Associate producer, Bella Green. Research assistant, Blake Voyles. Graphic designer, Olivia Klaus. Operations producer, Varsha Ramani. The marketing and communications team, Christine Drayer and Tunishia Singleton.
From PRX, the team is Terrence Bernardo, Jennie Cataldo, Morgan Church, Edwin Ochoa, and Amber Walker. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzalez.