During her 1987 party conference speech in Blackpool, Margaret Thatcher launched her famously bold thoughts on sexuality and education. “Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values,” she said, “are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.” Her words came back to me while watching the forthcoming glossy, epic gay drama, Fellow Travelers on Paramount+, an episodic parable of gay life on either side of the American legalisation of homosexuality. What strange times they were, marked by the hunt for an invisible enemy.
Fellow Travelers begins with the purge, when McCarthyism gave rise to the Lavender Panic, deeming gay men a threat not just to US state and society but to decency itself. We are in Washington DC. The spine of the drama is a clandestine, often uncomfortable love story crossing decades. Hawkins Fuller (Matt Bomer), a suave, slippery employee of the US State Department, meets Tim Laughlin (Bridgerton’s breakout star, Jonathan Bailey), at a social function in Capitol Hill, then runs into him again outside a Dupont Circle public convenience that doubles as a hotbed of gay dalliances for closeted DC.
