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.
Nyswaner, the Academy Award-nominated director behind Philadelphia (1993), tells GAY TIMES that it was crucial for him to embrace gay sex in the show as a result of his own personal experiences. “For me, when I came out in the 70s, those were the celebratory days of the gay experience. It was pre-AIDS and we were released. Sex is the way that we expressed our community,” he explains. “We wanted the sex to be powerful in Fellow Travelers, because I believe it is a really powerful part of the gay experience.”
CLICK HERE for GayTimes full interview with Ron Nyswaner, where he discusses the chemistry between Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey, whether Fellow Travelers will become an anthology series and, as mentioned above: gay sex/feet/oral – all of it.
Via GayTimes
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