Fellow Travelers.

So back to Fellow Travelers, now that it’s done — I thought it was kind of amazing.

At first I was really struck by the idea, and successful execution, of a suspenseful and sexy melodrama set in that repressive and often terrifying time and milieu, to use the repression itself to drive the plot and make it sexy. I didn’t expect it to become such a history lesson, which seemed to start around the third episode. I resisted it at first — the exposition of the politics and homophobia of the era felt clumsy and dry at times — but I got used to it, and soon it didn’t bother me at all. I think that to tell a story so dependent on the culture and politics of a specific moment in history, you either have to not explain it and accept a very small audience of those who have that knowledge, or, if you want a mass audience, you need to catch them up quickly.

People barely remember McCarthy and the HUAAC hearings now (shameful, for such a broadly consequential moment in recent history) let alone the “lavender scare,” and I realize more and more that even the most liberal accepting straight people I know usually have little knowledge of gay history and how very recently attitudes, and more importantly laws, persecuting queer people have relaxed, to the extent that they (and not just straight people but often younger queer people) will look at and judge gay life and same-sex relationships from 20, 30, 70 years ago through a lens of how things are now. True also, and maybe even more so, of the early 1980s AIDS years. Even a lot of gay men who were around then don’t remember the timeline very well. So, I was on board for the Wikipedia-ish nature of some of the dialogue.

What I think was new, at least in a TV series made for a general audience, is how this series set out to and mostly succeeded in dramatizing what “the closet” means, how holding such a deep secret, with the stakes of disclosure so severe, the terror of that, how the necessity of that secrecy corrodes everything around it, over generations, relationships, careers, families, including the integrity of our own souls. And how holding that secret together shaped our communities, shaped how we interacted, not only, but crucially, sexually.

Overall, I thought the series was ambitious (and unique in what it set out to do) and mostly lived up to its ambition, beautifully made, and very compelling start to finish. And, I don’t even know, there’s something about Matt Bomer, I’ve always found him almost uncomfortably sexy, like I feel like even if I just look at him too long I’ll do something wrong.

I asked for the book for Christmas. I wonder how it will compare.