Fellow Travelers
2023 · Series · Ron Nyswaner
Forty years of one affair, from the Lavender Scare to the AIDS crisis.
Where to watch Fellow Travelers
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Streaming options last verified September 15, 2026
What is Fellow Travelers about?
In 1950s Washington, Hawkins Fuller is a State Department operator with a talent for survival and a habit of taking what he wants. Tim Laughlin is a young Catholic idealist who believes in the work and, quickly, in Hawk. Their affair begins during the Lavender Scare, when Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn were purging gay men from the federal government, and the series follows the two of them across four decades, through Vietnam, through the disco years, and into the AIDS crisis, always returning to the same question: what does Hawk's self-preservation actually cost the people who love him. Ron Nyswaner's adaptation of the Thomas Mallon novel is explicit and unsentimental, and Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey are both playing people who are much harder to like than a romance usually allows. It is the rare show that ties the closet directly to the politics that enforced it, then makes you watch two people live inside that for a lifetime.
It ties the closet directly to the politics that enforced it, and then makes you watch what that costs two people.