In the first episode of the Paramount+/Showtime series Fellow Travelers, a visitor arrives at the home of government diplomat Hawkins “Hawk” Fuller (Matt Bomer). The visitor is Marcus Gaines (Jelani Alladin), a journalist, teacher, and Hawk’s long-time acquaintance from Washington in the 1950s. They were friends as Senator Joe McCarthy upended the city and American society with his investigations into Communist ties within the government. Thirty years later, Marcus is there to tell Hawk that his long-time lover, Tim Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey), has been diagnosed with AIDS, the mysterious illness ravaging the gay community and viciously ignored by the political establishment to which Hawk belongs.
One might expect to see Marcus once or twice as the series hops between the past and present to recount Hawk and Tim’s romance. Perhaps he offers a pithy remark about Hawk’s aversion to emotional intimacy, or, if we’re lucky, we get brief glimpses of his journalism career as a Black and closeted gay man. Fellow Travelers exceeds those expectations by granting Marcus a complex narrative and his own decades-long love story. His partner is Frankie Hines (Noah J. Ricketts), a drag performer at the Cozy Corner, a haven for D.C.’s queer community that is a crucial backdrop for the series’ central relationships. Hawk and Tim’s romance is defined by clandestine, passionate clinches challenged by cynicism and yearning for purpose. Meanwhile, Marcus and Frankie are a steadying force, grappling with their own issues but unwavering in their devotion to each other.
For Alladin and Ricketts, Fellow Travelers was an opportunity to tell a love story unlike either had seen before, as they explained in a joint interview with Geek Vibes Nation.
“When I first got the audition sides, I thought it was so rare that they actually took the time to honor a drag perspective and give a drag queen a storyline, a romantic one at that,” Ricketts said. “Seeing that on the page, I was inspired to do the work, bringing all the emotion and the journey of a drag queen to the part, and uplifting voices that I feel are underrepresented on TV.”
Alladin shared a similar experience when reading about Marcus, who he sees as a revolutionary character. “I’ve been searching for a character like Marcus for years,” he explained. “One of the unique things about the breakdown was that, in the first four sentences, it didn’t say the word ‘gay’ at all. They didn’t use gay as an adjective or a character trait. It was simply whom the person loved. They talked about Marcus’ ambition to be a journalist, his confronting racism, and his sense of humor, these playable things. I thought it was so brilliant.”
Fellow Travelers initially suggests Marcus and Hawk are complements: two men who prefer sexual encounters without emotional attachments. As the series continues, Marcus sheds their shared romantic cynicism and embraces his love with Frankie, while Hawk continues to cling to it. Alladin believes that Marcus’s path diverges from Hawk’s because of his desire to find joy amidst a world battling his sexuality and skin color.
“Hawk and Tim are fortunate in the sense that they are white men who can rely on that privilege,” Alladin explained. “Marcus has none of that. When you’re getting beat down because of your race and who you love, you are desperate to find happiness and joy. Creating a home for himself was a top priority. He finds that in Frankie, and he latches on to it. He fights himself because it’s not what he’s used to, but he eventually gives in. Frankie is a rock for Marcus and teaches him how to love.”
Ricketts believes Frankie is attracted to Marcus because of his similarities to his father. “You know they say we always date our parents, right?” he quipped. “In a way, Marcus resembles what Frankie described his dad to be, this macho man, and I think this ‘opposites attract’ thing initially draws them together. But little by little, Frankie unravels this masculine exterior to reveal the incredible heart behind it. I think that’s why he stays in the relationship decade after decade, breakup after breakup, moment after moment. He sees his heart and, in a world so destined to hate, you have to find those bits of love to latch onto.”
Fellow Travelers conveys much about its romantic relationships and the characters within them through physical intimacy. Released amidst a particularly active discussion around sex scenes in entertainment, the series depicts a broad array, exploring the acts and the tastes and kinks informing them. When exploring Marcus and Frankie’s sex lives, Alladin and Ricketts worked closely with the show’s intimacy coordinator to establish a visual language that differed from preconceived notions of how they might interact and the harder-edged dynamic between Hawk and Tim.
“I didn’t want it to be this masculine-feminine rough engagement,” Ricketts said about the love scenes. “I wanted [them] to have play, this power play between two people.”
One such scene appears in the fourth episode when Marcus and Frankie sleep together while Frankie is still in drag after a performance of “Santa Baby.” “I think it’s a sexual power play,” Ricketts said of the scene. “It’s where I say, ‘I’m gonna make you a pumpkin pie’–”
“On a hot plate.” Alladin playfully interjected.
“– in this sexy lingerie,” Ricketts continued. “I think it’s an invitation. I also have that line where I say, ‘It’s hot to imagine you with a woman,’ and I love that they go there and play this kind of edgy, kinky thing with the masculine and feminine. I think it’s a beautiful depiction, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen that in a Black queer space before.”
Alladin added, “Noah and I wanted to make sure we crafted this intimacy that felt tender, inviting, and full of respect. We wanted it to feel like eating a chocolate rather than this aggressive, rough kind of sex. It was also a testament to how Black people love each other. We tried to make sure that we took care of each other’s hearts and minds. The fact that Marcus and Frankie fall in love over a poem is already a form of sex, the beginning of their sexual language. It’s not, ‘Let me grab you and push you up against the bed.’ It’s ‘Let me correct your heart. Let me find my way in through that and then let the body do what it does.’”
Marcus and Frankie’s relationship isn’t without its trials, sometimes seemingly impossible to overcome. One of the most challenging is whether both Black and queer liberation can be achieved at the same time. In the third episode, Marcus is denied access to a white club where Frankie is performing. The situation escalates, spurring Marcus to write a fiery essay about his experience that criticizes the city for their mealy-mouthed support of racial integration. Marcus, who abandoned Frankie after the altercation with the club bouncer, finds him later and shares his piece. Frankie praises Marcus’ writing but asks a gutting question: where is he in this story?
“It’s always a tricky situation to know which sword to pick up and wield,” Aladdin said about that moment and the choice between Black and queer identities. “That constant internal conflict was rich to play because it gave me a deeper understanding of how difficult it is to manage both, and how difficult it is to leave somebody out.”
“As Black queer men, we are constantly holding these two things,” Ricketts added. “Frankie doesn’t have the privilege of dropping his femininity to move throughout the world in a socially acceptable way. That’s why he presses Marcus and says, ‘Where am I?’ Because they were both attacked in that moment for being who they are.”
“I think it shows toxic masculinity in a way I didn’t want to shy away from with Marcus,” Alladin explained about the third episode. “I wanted people to see how harmful we can be to each other. When we try to say that ‘your gay is better than my gay,’ that is harmful behavior. It was important for me to show that Marcus wants to be able to talk about [being Black and being gay] but simply cannot bring himself to. That heavily influenced the approach, never backing down from showing that.”
As difficult as Black and queer intersectionality is for them to reconcile, especially in a ‘50s context, Alladin and Ricketts found space for resolution and healing. After Frankie explains how performing in drag allowed him to be seen for the first time, Marcus kneels in front of him, wraps his boa around his neck, and says, staring straight into his eyes, he’s looking at him. That moment of tender intimacy and fierce, intentional acknowledgment sets the course for the rest of their relationship. It was also improvised.
“I remember you were trying to find the scene that day,” Alladin recounted to Ricketts. “And it was important to me that there was a moment that we see Marcus have the recognition of, ‘Oh, I’m part of the problem,” and I can be part of Frankie’s healing. And it just came out of me in rehearsal. And we were like, ‘Let’s keep that.’ because I thought I’d never seen that on screen before.”
Another central touchstone of Frankie’s arc besides healing is the freedom of choice. With gender identity and expression, Frankie finds and harnesses the power that drag gives him, which Ricketts experiences for himself the first time he steps into Frankie’s heels. Ricketts also found power in Frankie’s fluid approach to life outside those heels. “Throughout the script, there are moments where [Frankie] acts on impulse and feeling and less on the binary of this or that or black and white. I tried to lean into that with the character. I love that he’s a bit androgynous, that some days he paints his nails and has his hair blown out, and other days he doesn’t.”
That boundless approach allowed Frankie to transition into more civic-minded work in the series’ second half, working in San Francisco to advance gay rights in the ‘70s. “He has this call to action of, ‘[drag] is an important part of my life, but there’s so much more I need to accomplish,’ to fight the good fight for gay liberation. Whether it’s a choice to give up the heels because they hurt or to put them down to get into battle, I think it’s because he felt a strong will and urge to fight the good fight.”
Alladin and Ricketts understand the urgency of Noah and Frankie’s story at this particular moment. “I think when you’re making a television show, there is a responsibility to speak to the audience and to use whatever circumstances you’re creating to reveal to them just how complex something is or challenge their beliefs,” Alladin said. “It was our responsibility to go back in time and show this is how people had to survive and operate every day so that we could be here and even have gay marriage be legal. We sometimes take for granted how much work had to be done and how much progress has been made.”
Some parts of Fellow Travelers’ audience are seeing the lives they lived reflected for the first time on television. Ricketts shared, “I was just at Thanksgiving with a pair of my elder gays, as I call them, and one of them started crying, saying to me, ‘I feel like I’m watching my life,’ and he was talking about Fellow Travelers. And that alone was the greatest compliment to me, that we went there and got this historic piece correct.”
Getting the history correct is crucial for Alladin, Ricketts, and Fellow Travelers as a whole. The “Lavender Scare” of the ‘50s and ‘60s occupies limited space in the American zeitgeist, and gay history is often lost due to active erasure and passive indifference from those tasked with preserving the collective past. The availability of history becomes even more dire when seeking a Black queer perspective. Ricketts shared that, of the documentaries and books he found to help him prepare for the role, his greatest takeaway was that “Black and brown trans folks and drag queens were why” they could tell this story. With the arrival of Fellow Travelers, that legacy continues. When asked about the response to the series from his elders, Ricketts shared that they are looking for what’s next to follow this landmark series.
“I have no idea,” Ricketts offered as an answer. “But I hope that [Fellow Travelers] puts the wheels into motion for projects like this moving forward, I really do.”
Alladin added, “People are starved for the truth.”
Fellow Travelers is now available to stream on Pararmount+ with Showtime.
A late-stage millennial lover of most things related to pop culture. Becomes irrationally irritated by Oscar predictions that don’t come true.
