Fellow Travelers Finale: A Real Tragedy in Fictional Moments

By Michael Savio  |  December 18, 2023 | 11:15am
Photo Courtesy of Showtime
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Fellow Travelers Finale: A Real Tragedy in Fictional Moments

Tim Laughlin’s (Jonathan Bailey) name is spelled out in red, woven into an ichthys symbol on his section of the AIDS Quilt laid out on Washington, DC’s National Mall in the closing scene of Showtime’s Fellow Travelers. It’s 1987. Tim Laughlin (not a real person) is presented as one of thousands of very real gay men who died of the virus in its earliest days. His eventual death was no secret: from Hawk’s (Matt Bomer) first reunion with him after nearly a decade in the season’s premiere, it was clear Tim’s condition had advanced to the point of no return. This reality afforded his and Hawk’s few remaining days together an urgency that propelled the entire time-jumping series forward. And yet, seeing Tim’s panel spread out amongst the others on the mall brings every preceding moment of the show into stark focus. 

Fellow Travelers is a show of moments. Based on Thomas Mallon’s novel of the same name, which itself was based on real letters and correspondences between government officials in the 1950s, Fellow Travelers shined brightest when attending to how an accumulation of moments—of stolen glances, late nights coming home, words spoken but promises broken—can rot a person from the inside out. As we hop around between timelines with only a slightly different color filter or haircut to indicate which year it is, the show becomes a type of collage, a lyrical patchwork of memories. Snapshots of a handful of characters to represent the thousands whose stories were never told.

In its eight episodes, which could feel thin in spots and leaden in others, Fellow Travelers covered the thirty-something-year volatile romance between State Department official Hawkins Fuller and congressional staffer-turned-priest-turned-activist Tim Laughlin. They drink in underground gay bars and have rough sex during the Lavender Scare, start families and find chosen ones throughout the turbulent ‘60 and ‘70s, and face their mortality during the ‘80s’ AIDS crisis. There is a staid, doleful quality to much of it all, and that’s okay. For a story dabbling in such territory, where suicides and overdoses are common and shame spreads as violently as an immunocompromising virus, this need not be a happy-go-lucky affair. The “bury your gays” trope is bad; but then again, in America’s history, far too many gays have been buried.

Historical fiction rests on this delicate balancing act between conjuring verisimilitude and respectfully doing away with it altogether. At times, Fellow Travelers did a bit too much of the latter. Our lead characters seem to pop up Forrest Gump-style in major historical events of the last century, and the sheer volume of queer characters, both major and minor, would have you believe that approximately 90% of adults working in Washington in the ‘50s were closeted homosexuals. Certain characters and plot lines would vanish overnight, and when the show doesn’t know how to let its portrayal of injustice speak for itself, it tends to hand characters clunky, didactic lines of dialogue to spell out how what we know to be bad about society is actually really bad.

But when the show focuses on the intimate moments of a queer relationship flourishing despite the odds stacked against it, like a flower growing through a crack in the pavement, no romance on TV this year could compete. I’m thinking about Hawk and Tim slow dancing naked on the dusty hardwood of a shuttered apartment, a sublime flash of time stopped, life put on hold, only to be punctuated the next morning when Hawk’s wife Lucy (Allison Williams) spots a hickey on his neck. The reality of Hawk’s infidelity and hidden desires sneak back in, and we’re reminded that no moment of bliss can occur for these characters without repercussions. It’s bleak, it’s bittersweet, it’s on-theme. It’s real. 

And it’s those very moments that create the patchwork of this series, highlighting snippets of lives so deeply and brutally affected by circumstance, society, or their own choices. The moments define the series, so let’s define this episode’s moments: 

I.

In the hospital waiting room in 1987, Hawk lights up a cigarette. He’s immediately told by a nurse he can’t smoke in there. “Christ,” he says, and puts it out. Hawk has always had a tenuous relationship with rules, using them to get others in trouble and keep himself clean, only to break them when his impulses require that he do so. This moment, where he subscribes to the hospital rules with hardly a fuss, is unimportant, until a moment later when he tells Marcus (Jelani Alladin) that his HIV test came back negative.

“Son of a bitch,” Marcus says, leaning back in his chair, his face hardening. “Still bulletproof.” This is something Hawk knows as well: there is a cruel, maddening injustice to the randomness of fate. Why Hawk should be spared from the virus, after all his years of self-serving acts that have tarnished the lives of those around him, while other good souls like Tim and Jerome (Jude Wilson) are afflicted is unanswerable.

Hawk’s chilly demeanor rarely if ever lets up. He chooses his words carefully, he controls every flicker of his eyebrow and inflection in his voice with professional precision. The political realm of DC, a machine whose gears are oiled with expertly worded lies and buried secrets, has molded him this way. But being gay—or, as he prefers to call himself, “homosexual” (“homo from the Latin for man, which I am, and sexual, which I am as well”)—has made it second nature.

Until Bomer, in one of his finest, most understated moments of the show, allows Hawk’s mask to crack. He scoffs at Marcus’ claim, both agreeing and disagreeing, and then slips into a vacuum of sober introspection. Fellow Travelers excels when it allows its characters’ pitiless realities space to breathe and settle like ash falling to the ground. It reminds us that sometimes there are rules you can’t break, plights you can’t lie your way out of. You can either sit with them or take action.

II.

There is too much trivial discourse around film and TV’s depictions of sex to keep up with. Should we be forced to watch sex scenes on TV? Should actors have to perform them? If so, how is one to portray sex realistically? What the hell is “realistic sex”?

In the show’s final sex scene, the tables have turned. Hawk studies Tim’s face after years apart, marveling at his newfound wisdom relative to his physical boyishness (regarding her and Hawk’s unborn child, the words from a very pregnant Lucy earlier in the episode about how “every man wants a boy” take on steamy implications here). “The Army made a man out of my Skippy,” Hawk says. “He’s all grown up now.” Then he tells Tim he wants him to top him, and the ensuing sex is as hard and carnal as always. 

Throughout its run, Fellow Travelers portrayed sweaty, grunty sex frequently, and it did so with gumption and in a way that felt appropriate for its characters. And it managed to make each sex scene both vital and surprising. Between Fire Island fellatio and bathroom-stall bottoming, the show used sex to heighten Tim and Hawk’s love for one another—the more forceful the pounding, the more tender the relationship. It was real to them, and that makes it real to us. It was truly the only real relationship Hawk ever had. 

III.

Poor Lucy. Throughout the show’s run, Hawk’s wife suffered the suicide of her father and the death of her only son, both indirectly caused (whether she knows it or not) by the difficult choices men make whilst circumscribed in a world that expects them to be one type of way and punishes them if they fall out of line. As she ages, each of Hawk’s quiet betrayals and open secrets etches another wrinkle onto her face. By the finale, she’s finished.

Lucy’s decision to visit Tim in San Francisco sort of comes out of leftfield, but it’s what she needs to do to jump-start the rest of her life. Seeing Tim in person, with his withered limbs and bulbous lesions, allows something to click. This specter in her life, who’s been behind the deterioration of her and Hawk’s marriage from the beginning, is himself deteriorating. As she tells Hawk later, “I thought, God forgive me, when he dies it will be over, the two of you. And you and I can have our life together in a way we never had it, free of him. But now I know it will never be over.”

She leaves Hawk, a move as devastating as it is overdue, taking all her belongings out of the home and bequeathing Hawk just the paperweight Tim had gifted him decades ago. “I’ve lived my whole life not knowing what it’s like to be desired,” she says, more exhausted than incredulous, in their final interaction. “Do you have any idea how lonely that’s been?” No, he doesn’t. By abandoning him, she releases and liberates him (and herself), and she becomes a walking reminder that the casualties of a homophobic world order never remain relegated to just those who love differently.

IV.

While Hawk’s life falls apart, others are granted a reprieve by this finale, like Marcus and Frankie (Noah J. Ricketts), who (despite being frustratingly sidelined), act as an important contrast for Hawk’s journey toward openness. Marcus has climbed toward accepting himself as both a political body and a member of something larger—a movement. As a gay Black man, he was always under heavy scrutiny, which forced him to keep his head down lest he face even worse social consequences and police-sanctioned violence than his white peers. However, his arc is completed when he crashes the California governor’s gala alongside Tim, Frankie, Jerome, and other ACT UP organizers to protest the state’s lack of response to the AIDS crisis. Hand-in-hand with Frankie, he’s finally taking a step out of the shadows and standing for others.

V.

Early in the finale, Tim attends the funeral of former boss and fearmonger Senator Joseph McCarthy (Chris Bauer) in 1957. Afterward, he tells Hawk, “At the end, I saw McCarthy for what he was. A rabble-rouser, demagogue. So why do I feel like I lost someone?” Hawk responds without flinching, “Because you knew him, and you’re a decent person.”

The characters in Fellow Travelers are riddled with death, the great unifying facet of all human life. On the AIDS Quilt thirty years later, Hawk finds a familiar name: Roy Cohn. “Bully. Coward. Victim,” his panel reads. There is perhaps no better way to summarize the multifacetedness of a figure so vile: Bully. Coward. Victim. There were never any real villains in Fellow Travelers, just as there were rarely, if ever, any heroes. But the show makes clear that there are those who cause pain to themselves and others, and while they may not deserve our sympathy, they belong on the patchwork.

And we’re back to the Quilt. Is it devastatingly beautiful or simply cloying to attach a fictional character to the names of others in a real-life political demonstration that isn’t even that old? I don’t honestly know. I suppose my reaction might have more to do with my attitude toward the genre of historical fiction itself, though at the same time I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t utterly moved by seeing Tim’s name inscribed next to the thousands of others.

Hawk seems to feel similarly, as he crouches down to get as close as possible to his former lover. Bomer wears every moment the two had together as well as every ounce of regret he’s always had for his actions on his face, each tear dripping from the tip of his nose onto the quilt seemingly representing one year, another year, another year, wasted by him trying to contain his secrets and protect himself and only himself. His daughter, Kimberly (Brittany Raymond), enters the frame. “It’s beautiful,” she says. “From what you’ve told me, it really suits your friend.” 

“Sweetheart, he wasn’t my friend,” Hawk responds. “He was the man I loved.” After eight hours of television and thirty years of reluctance, Hawk is open with the one person in his life that his compulsion for secrecy hasn’t pushed away.

Fellow Travelers was always a tragedy, one whose twists and turns accumulated toward an unfair and inevitable ending for its characters. At its worst, the show could veer into the heavy-handed melodrama of a soap opera; at its best, it stands as a companion piece to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, another ode to the ways in which America’s predilection for tamping down the queer community brings the worst—and best—out of its members. 

It’s up to interpretation whether Hawk deserves any sense of redemption, whether he too deserves a spot in Kushner’s “Gay Fantasia” among the individuals in an idealized society of rebels, vagrants, and beautiful souls. The only thing that’s incontestable, that the show makes clear (sometimes too painfully clear) time and again, is that he and the thousands of other real people like him, like Tim, like Marcus, did not deserve to live in hiding. They all deserve more than just fleeting moments of liberation. Yet in bringing those few times to light, Fellow Travelers captures both the joy and devastation of the fleeting seconds, defining a life through moments sewn together like a patchwork quilt. 

Michael Savio is a freelance writer and former editorial intern at Paste based in New York. He is currently pursuing a master’s degree in cultural reporting and criticism at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

For all the latest TV news, reviews, lists and features, follow @Paste_TV.

 
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