\n<\/p>\n
Ron Nyswaner, the Oscar- and Emmy-nominated screenwriter, can still recall a chance meeting on a beach more than 50 years ago. Then a teenager and a self-described \u201cJesus freak,\u201d he\u2019d come to Ocean City, N.J., to attend a Youth for Christ conference. Late one night, he said, while walking alone, he saw \u201ca gorgeous, muscular guy\u201d across the sand.<\/p>\n
That young man asked him to speak in tongues \u2014 it was an invitation to religious ecstasy and nothing more. Nyswaner complied. He told me this story over lunch in Manhattan\u2019s Soho neighborhood, on a stormy afternoon in September, as a way to explain that, for him, \u201csex and the sacred have always been united.\u201d<\/p>\n
He wanted that same union for \u201cFellow Travelers,\u201d<\/a> a new series that premieres Friday on Paramount+ and then on Showtime on Sunday.<\/p>\n Moving back and forth from the early 1950s to the late \u201980s, \u201cFellow Travelers,\u201d based on the 2007 novel<\/a> of the same name by Thomas Mallon, is a pr\u00e9cis of 20th-century queer history viewed through a turbulent relationship between two men. Matt Bomer<\/a> (\u201cWhite Collar,\u201d \u201cMagic Mike\u201d) stars as Hawkins Fuller, Hawk to his intimates, a State Department employee. Jonathan Bailey<\/a> (\u201cBridgerton\u201d) plays Tim Laughlin, a milk-drinking, God-loving na\u00eff who dreams of working for Senator Joseph McCarthy<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n As they tumble through the decades \u2014 in and out of bed, in and out of love \u2014 the lavender scare<\/a>, the gay liberation movement and the AIDS crisis happen around and through them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Nyswaner, who was dressed in all black save for a tan raincoat, claims to dislike love stories. \u201cYuck!\u201d he said. (The two chunky rings he wore, mementos of former relationships, may have belied this.) But his genius resides in making the political feel shockingly intimate. Despite its many congressional hearings, \u201cFellow Travelers\u201d is<\/em> a love story, one illustrated with some of television\u2019s most screen-fogging queer sex scenes. The first time Nyswaner read the novel, he fell in love with Tim and Hawk. It was that love \u2014 sexual, sacred \u2014 that inspired him to make the series, the first he has created for television.<\/p>\n Nyswaner, 67, grew up in small-town Pennsylvania. Gay and closeted, he was an outsider as a child, an observer. That, he believes, is what made him a writer. After graduating from the University of Pittsburgh, he enrolled in Columbia\u2019s film school. While still a student there, he slipped a script to the director Jonathan Demme. Demme optioned it, and Nyswaner has supported himself as a writer ever since.<\/p>\n His first major success came in 1993 with \u201cPhiladelphia,\u201d<\/a> directed by Demme, the story of Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks), a lawyer who believes he has been wrongfully terminated by his firm because of his AIDS diagnosis. (Nyswaner, whose script earned him an Oscar nomination, makes a cameo in a party scene dressed as a priest.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n By that time, Nyswaner was in the throes of drug and alcohol addiction. In the five years after the film\u2019s release, newly flush with fame and cash, his addiction worsened.<\/p>\n \u201cI dedicated myself to cocaine and alcohol and sex, with tragic results,\u201d he said. (He details this tragedy, which involves the suicide of a sex worker, in his 2004 memoir<\/a>, \u201cBlue Days, Black Nights.\u201d)<\/p>\n There was heat on him in Hollywood then. But he showed up to more than one meeting high on methamphetamines, and the heat dissipated. Which didn\u2019t especially bother him. Having found success early, he has rarely been swayed by the demands of the market.<\/p>\n \u201cI always just wanted to write what I wanted,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Newly sober, he proved this. He scripted the 2003 true-crime Showtime film \u201cSoldier\u2019s Girl,\u201d<\/a> about an Army private\u2019s relationship with a transgender cabaret performer, and followed that with the 2006 adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham\u2019s doomed romance, \u201cThe Painted Veil.\u201d<\/a> Neither was intended for mainstream success, but these works had the heartbreak he loved, the passionate intensity.<\/p>\n In 2012, his management team asked him what he wanted to do next. \u201cGet me out of my house,\u201d he told them. He had spent two decades living in upstate New York. Now, he found himself craving the crush of a big city and the camaraderie of a writers\u2019 room. Though he had already optioned \u201cFellow Travelers,\u201d he back-burnered it in favor of moving to Los Angeles and joining two Showtime series: first the punchy noir \u201cRay Donovan,\u201d<\/a> and then \u201cHomeland,\u201d<\/a> the fervid espionage thriller. In 2018, when his time on \u201cHomeland\u201d ended, he felt ready to turn to \u201cFellow Travelers.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In \u201cFellow Travelers,\u201d Nyswaner expands on the themes that define much of his film work \u2014 the ways in which longing, sex and secrets intersect with the law. In the series, the historical characters and events are meticulously researched. (There are perhaps a few aesthetic lapses \u2014 did men really work out this much in the 1950s?) But Nyswaner wanted to offer something more than a history lesson. Hawk and Tim and the show\u2019s other queer characters are intimately involved in this history, and they are not mere bystanders and victims. Occasionally, they are aggressors.<\/p>\n \u201cThe best thing you can do with any marginalized character is to make them as fully human and complicated as every other straight character that\u2019s out there in the world,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n