MR. HARRIS: Hello, everybody, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Shane Harris. I’m a national security reporter here at The Post. And I’m very happy today to welcome Ron Nyswaner for a conversation about his new Showtime series “Fellow Travelers.” Ron, thank you so much for joining us. It’s great to talk to you.

MR. NYSWANER: Hey, Shane, I'm really happy to be here.

MR. HARRIS: So, Ron, this is a sprawling and tumultuous love story, to put it mildly, and folks got an idea there in the intro of the time that this is spanning. We start in the McCarthy era amid the Lavender Scare. It travels forward into the '80s amid the AIDS crisis.

The story follows these two characters, Hawkins Fuller, played by Matt Bomer, who is a war hero, now mid-level Foreign Service officer with aspirations of a great career ahead of him; and Tim Laughlin, played by Jonathan Bailey, who is a young idealistic Senate aide to one Joe McCarthy, who figures pretty prominently as well.

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Tell us a little bit about who these characters are and where we meet them when the show begins.

MR. NYSWANER: You know, I love love stories that--about people who basically are not meant to be together, you know, and that the--it's an attraction of opposites. And you know, Hawkins Fuller is a survivor, and actually, he enjoys life. And that was very important. He finds ways to enjoy his life, which for him means often having sexual pleasure with anonymous strangers. And he sort of seems fearless. And I think the only thing that he actually fears is love, because then he’d have to show us a bit of weakness.

And Tim Laughlin has the opposite worldview, that we’re put on earth to make the world a better place. And he has a mission, and he's a fervent anti-communist, mostly because he's a devout Catholic. And in the '50s, Catholicism and anti-communism were very tightly connected.

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MR. HARRIS: Yeah, it’s interesting. You mention--you talk of this as a love story. I read somewhere that you actually don't like love stories, but I love that this has these one, you know, where these people, they truly seem like they are not meant to be together at all.

Talk a little bit about the inspiration for this. It's based on the Thomas Mallon novel "Fellow Travelers" of the same name. What drew you to a story about, you know, two men who are coming together at a time when being openly gay was not just dangerous to their career, it was arguably dangerous to their life, and certainly could have ruined both of them. What was attractive about that part of the story to you?

MR. NYSWANER: That relationship is at the center of the novel. I mean, we expanded--we went beyond the '50s to other decades, and we expanded with other characters. But that love story actually is the thing that drew me to it.

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And when I said I don’t like love stories, I don't really like soap operas. I certainly don't like scenes where people sit and express their emotions to each other. That probably tells you something about who I am personally. And I really--I love and was schooled in emotional drama as high stakes. So, you know, spending three years on "Homeland," for example, spending a lot of time in Washington researching for that show, meeting a lot of interesting people. And you know, to me, high stakes--love to me is always high stakes, in a way, because there's always a danger to being in love. And our tagline "Love is Dangerous," I think I suggested.

But to raise the stakes by putting it at a time--that relationship at a time when your life and your career could be ruined simply if someone saw you coming out of a particular apartment at a particular time.

And you know, it's not that foreign to me. I'm not that old. I wasn't around during the Lavender Scare. But I grew up in the--I came of age in the '60s and '70s. And I--you know, I never heard the word "homosexual" spoken aloud till I went to college. And even then, it wasn't often spoken aloud. So, I grew up thinking that what I was, was the unspeakable thing. And that--so I really understood what it was like to live in a time when homosexuality and homosexuals were invisible in all culture, certainly the culture that was available to a young man in coal mining Pennsylvania, in the '60s and '70s.

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MR. HARRIS: You know, it's kind of--it's interesting. You worked on "Homeland." So much of this feels like, in some ways, an espionage thriller, because Hawk and Tim are going to great lengths to cover their tracks and to hide from everyone around them. Talk a little bit about that a bit. It's--the ways in which they--you show them having to really hide who they are at the same time that they're trying to explore a relationship, which of course, I think was not unique. I think anybody who was in a closeted relationship like that then probably experienced.

MR. NYSWANER: Sure. You know, Mr. Mallon’s novel sent me into a lot of research, particularly about the Lavender Scare. And you know, one of the things that I read and learned about was that Washington in the '50s was basically the center of the world. You know, the United States was tasked with its allies with rebuilding Europe and that--and you went, if you were young and you wanted to make a difference, you went to Washington, D.C. And you know, people were coming off the farm and other small towns, and they were being liberated in Washington, D.C., straight or gay. They were having relationships that they wouldn’t have had back home.

And one of the things that happened if you were gay was that it would be suggested that you immediately pair up with a gay person of the opposite sex. So a gay man arrives, someone would say, I'm going to introduce to my friend Mary. You know, she's a lesbian, the two of you should be out on the town, you should go dating, you should always be together, you should never ever be out with just you and a guy having dinner in a restaurant. That should never happen. So, you're paired off.

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And there's a funny story about actually a dinner party where this woman was having--where the same sex couples were like in the privacy of her home around the dinner table, and her mother came to the door. And by the time she walked her mother from the front door to the dining room, they'd all switched. So, they were sitting next to their opposite gender partner. And you know that--and we're laughing about that because it sounds comical now. But you know, living--you know, it created a kind of an adventure to have. But once the investigations began--and what people will see in the series is this show is meticulously researched. So, when you see the FBI raiding someone's apartment and questioning two women who lived together, going through their underwear drawers, that everything in that scene is from a transcript. There's a polygraph scene. Everything from that is from the record. Everything that--everything that McCarthy and Cohn say in public in our show, they actually said in public. What--you know, obviously, we imagined what might have gone on behind the scenes.

So that we--I wanted the show to be this meticulously researched part of LGBTQ history at a time of incredible persecution. I mean, it's wasn't a subtle--there was nothing subtle about it. President Eisenhower signed an executive order saying sexual deviants cannot work in the federal government. And people whose--came to Washington with the hope of building these careers and changing the world, their lives were destroyed.

At one point, somebody from the M Unit said, we're experiencing--the M Unit was the State Department's investigative tool, investigating alleged homosexuals--we're seeing one suicide a week.

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MR. HARRIS: It's an extraordinary period of history. And I think, you know, it's not necessarily one that is known to subsequent generations of gay people, right, who didn't live through it. I mean, you know, it was--it was unknown to me as I was coming out in my 20s, until I really got to Washington.

MR. NYSWANER: Yeah.

MR. HARRIS: Yeah, and didn't appreciate it at all. You know, one of the things that struck me that’s so interesting about this pairing of these characters, Tim and Hawk, is they both know they have to stay in the shadows. But from the beginning, you kind of feel like Tim is the one who is trying to push things forward, and is always wanting to be with him. And at the same time that Hawk is drawn to him, he's also a tremendous threat to him as well. And that dynamic was so fascinating that they were--you know, there's a power play that goes on between them throughout the series that way.

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MR. NYSWANER: You know, my great director, Executive Producer, Dan Minahan, who directed the first two hours, said, you know, of Tim, is that Tim is looking for a sacred ecstatic experience.

MR. HARRIS: Yeah.

MR. NYSWANER: So he wants to be--he wants to have transformative experiences. So, whether it's in church with God, or it's falling deeply in love with this unknowable and elusive person, that's what is--Tim looking for. And he's kind of, he's just--he can't help but be an open person. You know, he--you know, and that actually caused--that is danger to Hawk. You know, Hawk knows how, you know, we can go to a restaurant, you'll be my cousin or my nephew, we’ll act a certain way, we’ll behave a certain way. And Tim agrees, but he can't stick to the rules. You know, he just is too open and vulnerable and emotional to do that. And that brings the tension into the relationship.

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MR. HARRIS: Now, I'd read that you--initially when you optioned the book some years ago, right, and imagined this "Fellow Travelers" as a film. So, what led you to decide to do it as an eight-part series instead of a feature?

MR. NYSWANER: You know, Shane, I think that's a mistake. I don't know who entered that into the record, that I thought of it first as a film. I think somebody said that at some Q&A and I just--

MR. HARRIS: I’m glad we're correcting it then because we like to check facts here.

MR. NYSWANER: I always thought [audio interference] multi part series of some sort. And you know, and I--because I had come to LA really to get further involved in television. I'd done some writing some pilots from my home in upstate New York, and writing features. But I--when I moved to LA, I said to my managers, get me out of my house. You know, I wanted the experience that writers have in television, which is to be at the center of the creation and the center of the production, you know, and not to be sidelined once you hand in your final draft.

MR. HARRIS: And you when you--because you've written features before, I mean, do you find that you get to immerse more in the process when you have all of that room of eight parts to tell the full story?

MR. NYSWANER: I mean, now, when if--the last time I worked on a feature script was quite a while ago, but you know as--you get to page 80 and you--which, you know, it’s 120-page limit, you go like, I just got started, you know? And it feels very [audio drop]. So this--the larger drama over several episodes is just so much fun, you know. And finding that right number, I think we found the right number. And so it does have an end in sight, although maybe there's an anthology version of a series that we follow. We have certain--we take certain themes and certain time periods and, you know, do love story thriller keep going with that. So that was a little pitch to my employers.

MR. HARRIS: I like it. No, I endorse this. So, we have a clip of the show to share with people. So, let's get that ready. This is a scene early on in the story that really gets at I think what we were talking about here of the--of the tension between what each of these men actually wants in the relationship and what they're afraid of. And this is--we'll see Tim here played by Jonathan Bailey and Hawk by Matt Bomer. So, let's have a look at the clip.

[Video plays]

MR. HARRIS: I’ve got to confess, Ron, I found myself yelling to Tim, don’t do it, you know? Because you can just see--like you imagining the--what he's about to embark on by actually letting this man into his life. It's gonna be transformative, and of course the show, but there's just so much pain in the hiding that's going to go with it. But talk about that scene because it just sets up so much of the relationship between these two guys.

MR. NYSWANER: Well, I love that scene, and I'm very proud of it. And I--it is actually interesting to show to people who may not have seen any of the show yet. This--you're seeing Hawkins Fuller at a vulnerable moment. Don't expect many of those, you know? And he, what--so he's at the--you know, they have gone through the pilot episode. And President Eisenhower's executive orders has landed. And they've also experienced somebody that Hawk who was once involved with in attempted suicide, you know, under investigation. So, the screws are being tightened on everybody in Washington at this particular time.

And Hawk has revealed himself in an early scene to Tim as someone who is not going to fall in love, basically. He says it more eloquently than that. And he--but in a moment of vulnerability, he comes to Tim and asks simply to be--to be able to go up to his room and hold him. And you know, I just know--it's so funny. A DP said to me on the set, I think you are half Hawk and half Tim, which is probably true, you know? And I just--I think Hawk is giving Tim a warning. He says lock the door. You know, it's not going to be--it may not be good for you. I'm not good for people. You know, that is that self kind of that--I think Hawk is totally pragmatic. And--but he's taking a risk. And of course, Tim is taking a risk, too.

And you know, love is dangerous. But if it wasn't dangerous, it wouldn't be--I mean, when I say this--oh boy, but the danger of emotional love, the emotional danger, is this great adventure. It's the great adventure to allow yourself to love somebody. I'm not--certainly not saying, you know, it's a great adventure to live in a time of oppression if you’d been gay, but I'm saying is the great dangerous adventure is to allow yourself to love someone, because we're all going to--you know, we all--and I kept saying this on the set. You know, we're not--there no noble victims in "Fellow Travelers." There are no victims at all actually in "Fellow Travelers." And this isn't just an LGBTQ story. All human beings experience grief, loss, heartbreak, love, joy, you know? And so we are connected to, I hope, a bigger human experience.

MR. HARRIS: Yeah, and in the show, we should tell people, too, it does explore, you know, other LGBTQ characters. It explores, you know, relationships between women as well. I mean, so there--it's more than just these two men that are the primary focus of the show.

I want to ask you about the decision of casting Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey--I mean, two very talented actors, gay actors who have largely played straight roles before. Was it important for you to cast gay actors to play gay characters, or was that incidental for you?

MR. NYSWANER: You know, I'm just going to go back to one thing and just say, just for our audience today. Among the characters that we follow, it was very important to me we have the third lead is Jelani Alladin playing Marcus Gaines, who is a Black journalist who falls in love with a Black drag queen. And we do follow it. So, we follow--it’s a diverse set of characters, and we follow them. And Allison Williams playing Hawk’s wife, those are the five people we follow for 35 years.

We--it was important to us. It was a preference on our part to find LGBTQ actors for these roles. It was not a deal breaker. You know, I--you know, to say absolutely not, you know, if the absolute right person came, so we are very lucky in that there are brave people. and you know, Matt's been out for actually quite a while.

MR. HARRIS: Yeah.

MR. NYSWANER: He was on a Human Rights Campaign a couple of weeks ago for that life that he lives, that open, honest life. And you know, to have the people who are perfect for their roles, who--and all of our LGBTQ characters are--all of them, not just Matt and Johnny but Jelani Alladin, Noah Ricketts, Erin Neufer who plays Mary, they are LGBTQ people.

MR. HARRIS: How--in your time in Hollywood, how have you seen that idea of representation change? I mean, there was a time--we could go back. I mean, "Philadelphia," the--you know, the groundbreaking film for which you were the screenwriter and were nominated for the Academy Award, I mean, that really introduced people in a way to not just the AIDS crisis, you know, but to gay identity, gay life, you know, notably played by Tom Hanks, a straight actor.

But things have changed so much in the way that we think about representation and straight men playing gay men and gay men playing gay characters. How--just reflect on that a little bit. In your career, how have you seen that evolve and change?

MR. NYSWANER: You know, obviously, there are more gay characters, you know, available for us to watch. And you know, I think it is easier to go in and you don't get sort of--you know, gets cold stares by saying, you know, oh, and I have this LGBTQ show, this LGBTQ character. For me, what--where we are now and I tried to do with "Fellow Travelers" is that we allow gay characters to be as complicated and flawed as their heterosexual counterparts. You know, because I was experiencing that for a while that if I was trying to pitch or write LGBTQ characters, people wanted them to be noble. They wanted them to be the righteous ones, you know, who were victims of society. And you know, that is--I think when I said "Yuck!" about--in The New York Times about love stories, I was saying that about the victim as--that's melodrama, you know, when good people are the victims of bad--the bad society, and that bores me completely. So that's where I think we can be now.

You know, I kept saying about Hawkins Fuller, when it--when there was any pushback, I'd say like, but would you be saying this about Don Draper? Like, you know, or Tony Soprano, or Walter White? I mean, why can't Hawkins Fuller, because he's gay man, be complicated like those guys? What are you--what are you trying to protect? You're just making him boring? You know, and I usually--and as you can see, I won the argument.

MR. HARRIS: Well, you know, it's an interesting comparison of Hawk to those other characters, because as I'm watching the series, it's hard to like him, you know, because I think you take sides maybe as a viewer early on, and I felt myself like very much on Tim's side in the equation.

But you mentioned that there are these very few moments of vulnerability that he has, and he is so closed off and he is so, you know, manipulative in his relationship with Tim and other people around him, too. But that's a lot of fun to write as a writer, isn't it? It gives you a lot to work with.

MR. NYSWANER: Well, I'd also say it's fun for an audience. You know, I think that sometimes if--when there's pressure from people in charge of things, you know, to make characters likable, that word, I literally just stop listening. That's--I'm like, in a meeting, I might have a smile on my face and thinking about well I'm not going to be working on this project. Because that--a likeable character is--what does that mean? You know, how about a compelling and fascinating character? You know, Hawkins Fuller--by the way, one of my directors Destiny Ekaragha, directed episodes three and seven, when I asked her why she wanted to be part of the show, she said, I love Hawkins Fuller. You know, she's a 40-year-old Black woman from London. And she said, "I love Hawkins Fuller. I want to be Hawkins Fuller. I want to be beautiful. I want to have sex all the time, and not care about anything." I said "You're hired," you know? So, there is pleasure in watching Hawk. and I've seen this--the pilot with audiences. They really enjoy how he's in control of everything. He always has the right thing to say. You know, anything that rattles him--and you know that he's going to get out of that situation somehow, you know? And I hope what you're waiting for is to see when he puts himself in situations. So that's why the timeframe, the [unclear] timeframes are really important. You know, I think that we go into the '80s right away, and we go into the '60s later and the '70s. And they don't happen quite in chronological order. It's an adventurous time, use of time.

But we also see Hawk in 1986 in a different place than he is in the '50s. And I think it's really important to see that he can be startled by something. He can be moved by something. He's not open and emotional yet, but he is--his soul is yearning for something in the '80s that seems to be blocked off in the '50s. And I think I'm really glad that we were able to come up with those alternating timeframes, to do that for all the characters.

MR. HARRIS: Yeah. And that works really well because you see as the audience that he's going to grow somehow. You know, he is not just this smooth as silk kind of user of people.

One thing I want to talk to you about too--and this has gotten a lot of attention from critics, and I think it's something you all did very well--are the sex scenes in the show. I mean, they're incredibly intimate. They are quite steamy, many of them. But you know, the thing that really came across to me as I was watching them is they are so much about power. And it is power, it is sex scene setting the power between these two men. You know, there's very much Hawk as the dominating force in the relationship and Tim is somebody's who’s kind of giving himself over. And talk about that, because these aren't just, you know, sex scenes for the sake of being provocative. They really are setting up a power balance between these two characters.

MR. NYSWANER: That was the rule, actually, on the set that we had, that all the scenes actually are about power, but especially the sex scenes. You know, Oscar Wilde said, you know, everything in life is about sex, except for sex. Sex is about power. And that was when we really--you know, we--my directors and I went to that over and over again, and the actors loved it, because then that gave them something to play as opposed to like, oh, I'm interested having sex with you. You know and the dynamic keeps shifting.

We had a couple of rules, actually, about the sex scenes, which--one of which is that we would never repeat the same act. And I have to say, when my writers and I--we got to episode eight, we were really kind of flummoxed. Like, wait, no, we did that already. No, we did that.

MR. HARRIS: What have we not tried, yeah.

MR. NYSWANER: And then we actually--there is--we did try something actually, which we won't spoil. There is--there is a change in their sexual behavior in episode eight.

MR. HARRIS: But it really does, I mean--is that I haven't seen many shows do it so well where it kind of--it almost removes the sex out of the realm of the erotic entirely. It's just--I mean, it is very much about who these two people are at their most vulnerable. And it's some of the few times you actually see Hawk actually being tender and loving and open, and then just kind of shuts himself down immediately when he's when he's through.

MR. NYSWANER: Well, you know, the very first scene between Hawk and Tim when Hawk--I mean, the very first intimate scene when Hawk comes to Tim’s apartment, you know, that actually--that’s a scene--Mr. Mallon wrote that in his book, and that actually helped inspire the Hawk-Tim dynamic, that Hawk just is totally bold, comes in the door, and within seconds is saying, do you want me to kiss you, and throwing Tim off--make unbalanced and then going boom right to it and being very sort of just straightforward about it. So that actually, Mr. Mallon’s style of writing, actually really inspired a lot of what we did with sex.

MR. HARRIS: Yeah. Talk a little bit about, you know, as the show moves forward through the decades--and obviously it culminates in the AIDS crisis in the '80s--you know, how did you draw on your own experience from that time and in your memories to inform the writing of the show?

MR. NYSWANER: Well, you know, the AIDS crisis, you know, is one of the big formative experiences of my life. I came out of the closet between '77 and '78, you know, and experienced that brief time of--and the late '70s was fantastic, which we have an episode set in 1979. And you know, the dancing to Donna Summer and taking drugs, staying up all night, and all that stuff, really, really fun. And the pleasure of sex being a liberating lifeforce to the gay community, the pleasure of just being naked with a bunch of guys. Actually, I don't know if I ever did that. But I've certainly thought about it, obviously.

But then, you know, the cold shower, the plunge into darkness of the AIDS crisis, and then being blamed, saying, you know, the sex that you--that gives you so much joy in life is the thing that is killing you and you deserve to die because of it, then having that huge reversal.

So I just felt like if I was going to go forward--and I wanted to see Hawk and Tim over time--I was going to expand it, it just seemed very natural to go right to the AIDS crisis to address that again.

And you know, just as people, most--many gay people, young people, I know--many, many people I know, do not--have never heard of the Lavender Scare. But you know, people are starting to forget about the AIDS crisis. And that is not--is something that we cannot forget, you know, that in the Lavender Scare our government actively persecuted us. In the AIDS crisis, our government persecuted us through neglect and indifference, you know, and thousands of people died because the government was not willing to recognize that this serious thing was happening. And the AIDS community saw it, addressed it, you know, very powerfully and created a--created a movement. So that, I just thought, you know, those are great bookends to the story.

MR. HARRIS: Yeah. And they do seem like eras that younger people tend to forget. I mean, I grew up in the '80s and '90s. So, it was always in the specter of the AIDS crisis. And what do you think about--you know, reflect a little bit on the moment in the time we have left where we find ourselves today. You know, obviously, people's visions of equality have changed dramatically. Inclusivity has changed dramatically. It's not the same kind of crisis that we were living through in the '50s, or the '80s, or even the '90s. But what are your thoughts on so many of the political movements that we're seeing that seem to be trying to roll back, you know, civil rights and the advancement for the LGBTQ community?

MR. NYSWANER: Well, you know, I think that, you know, the answer, you know, is always--is self-evident. It’s obvious. You know, that--you know, we--I didn't plan it, but it's--I'm actually very happy that we have a show about a demagogue, Joe McCarthy, who was--when we're being--seeing the rise of demagogues in our own country and in our allies, other Western democracies. And what do demagogues do? They accumulate power by creating fear, and fear and division. And Joseph McCarthy was brilliant at that, actually. And Joseph McCarthy, I have to say, was, in some ways, smarter and more educated than the current crop of demagogues. But that doesn't make him--that doesn't make them less dangerous. Actually, their--the lack of education and intelligence, in some ways, makes them more dangerous than Joe McCarthy. But so that--those parallels are really there.

And in terms of the LGBTQ community, you know, I’ve just been doing this for a long time. I went to my first demonstration in 1977. And you know--and when I was there and I was able to come out of the closet because I stood on the shoulders of people who 10 years earlier had been at Stonewall and had taken, you know--and they stood on the shoulders of people in the '50s who reacted to the Lavender Scare like Frank Kameny and created the very, very first homosexual rights events.

So, I think it's important for us to remember that we have been in tough times before, that we have survived. We've not only survived. We've grown as human beings, and we've grown as a community because of those tough times, and to find the joy in the struggle.

You know, when I was an activist in the '70s and in the '80s, I wasn't an activist because I was trying to get people to love me. I don't really care. I actually don't care. I'm a real old-fashioned liberal. I'm a total First Amendment believer. If you don't believe in homosexuality, that's fine. Your religion tells you it's wrong, great, God bless you. Just don't interfere with my life, you know? And I don't want to be liked, you know, by people who don't like me. Who cares? I probably wouldn't like you either. Let's just live in peace. But--and the way we’ll live in peace is that I have all my full civil rights just as you do.

So, I think it's--but artistically, I do think that identity has been at the core of my life and my work for my whole life. However, we are all human beings. And I--as we did on the show, let's not get trapped in our identity, like, you can only understand me if you are the same group of letters after your name as mine. Are you an L, are you a G, are you a T, or you--you know, I don't believe that. You know, we have common universal human experiences, and we should celebrate our common humanity, you know, while advocating for our rights.

MR. HARRIS: Well, that's a great place to end. And the show, I should say, really does--it does span the gamut of that humanity. So, if that was your intention, I think you pulled it off of.

Ron Nyswaner, thank you so much for coming on to talk about the show. It’s "Fellow Travelers." People can watch it on Showtime. I hope you do. Thanks, Ron, for coming on to talk to us. I really appreciate it.

MR. NYSWANER: Thank you. It's been a real pleasure. Really a pleasure. Thank you. Thanks, everybody.

MR. HARRIS: Thank you.

And thank you everyone out there for joining us. If you want to see what else we have in store, you can go over to WashingtonPostLive.com and see our full schedule of events coming up. I’m Shane Harris. Thanks a lot for joining us.

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