Fellow Travelers: From oral to foot fetishes, creator wanted to ‘embrace gay sex’
Showrunner and executive producer Ron Nyswaner speaks with GAY TIMES about the saucy sequences in Fellow Travelers and his plans to continue to the series.
WORDS BY SAM DAMSHENAS HEADER BY YOSEF PHELAN Within the first twenty minutes of Fellow Travelers, Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey’s sub-dom dynamic is on full display as the former feasts on his on-screen lover’s foot. (That isn’t a sentence I ever thought I’d write, but hey-ho.) “One of our executives said a long time ago, ‘Let’s make the sex so hot that straight men will want to have gay sex,’” says executive producer and showrunner Ron Nyswaner, who is embracing the influx of articles and horny headlines (including ours) that have focused on the saucy sequences between the two leads. “If people are talking about Fellow Travelers, that’s all I care about.” The Showtime series, airing on Paramount Plus in the UK, is based on the acclaimed Thomas Mallon novel of the same name, which follows a “volatile” gay romance in the shadow of McCarthy-era Washington.
Bomer and Bailey respectively lead the series as Hawkins Fuller and Tim Laughlin, with their affair coinciding with Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn’s declaration of war on “subversives and sexual deviants”.
Fellow Travelers chronicles their (at times) toxic relationship over the course of four decades whilst exploring the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, the “drug-fueled disco hedonism” of the 1970s and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.
