The New Yorker Radio Hour - ”Fellow Travelers”: A Showtime Series Explores a Forgotten Witch Hunt

Episode Date: October 24, 2023

Much of the peril and persecution of the McCarthy era is well-trodden territory in historical dramas, but the burden that the Red Scare placed on the L.G.B.T. community is another story. The historian and writer Thomas Mallon published a novel called “Fellow Travelers,” drawing from real-life events, about a gay couple living under the shadow of the McCarthy witch hunts; it has now been adapted into a Showtime miniseries. “The government was really on a tear when it came to dismissing gays from the State Department—but really all over in the early fifties,” Mallon tells David Remnick. “So really any gay romance had to be tremendously clandestine.” Gay Americans targeted by McCarthy and his acolytes were forced to assert not only their patriotism but their humanity, too. “The book is full of people trying to reconcile things which society and the government are telling them are irreconcilable,” Mallon says. “But the people themselves don’t see any moral or logical reason why.” Mallon talks about the political climate in nineteen-fifties Washington and about the pioneering L.G.B.T. activist who picketed the White House years before Stonewall.Share your thoughts on The New Yorker Radio Hour  podcast. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Adam Howard, in today for David Remnick. Fellow Travelers is a mini-series premiering on Showtime, set during a period that's not widely remembered now. We know the story of Joseph McCarthy going after supposed communists and the government, but alongside the Red Scare was a witch hunt that cost thousands of gay people their jobs. The president is going to issue an EO. Whatever that is.

Executive order. Come here. And they're worried. Eisenhower is trying to undermine them with it. By taking the lead on the anti-communist crusade? I think so. Senator McCarthy wants to ignore it, but Roy thinks that they should...

Roy? On a first-time basis? Mr. Cohn thinks the smarter move is to make people think that they, McCarthy, and Cohn, are behind the order. That they forced Eisenhower to do the right thing? thing. It was a grim situation. An investigation at the time claimed that, quote, one homosexual can pollute an entire government office. Fellow Travelers is based on a novel by Thomas Mallon. It describes

real events through two fictional characters working in the government. They start a secret relationship while their lives in the Capitol brush up against the likes of McCarthy and the infamous Roy Cohn. Thomas Mallon spoke with David Remnick. Tom, the relationship at the center of the book is a romance between two men, and this is Washington, D.C. in the 50s, talk a little bit about what it meant to be gay back then, and maybe particularly in D.C. What it being an out gay man at that time really looked like? Well, it made life very claustrophobic and made life very dangerous. Washington, like a lot of big cities, was filled with people who had come from small towns so that they could live a bit more openly. But there were special strictures in Washington. The

government was really on a tear when it came to dismissing gays, especially from the State Department, but really all over in the early 50s. So any gay romance had to be tremendously clandestine. And when I started writing this book around 2004, I was so aware of how much easier my life was because of a number of people in the 1950s who pushed back. with a great deal more courage than I certainly would have had in that period, and made my life much, much more livable. Tell me about that. Who were they, and what did that mean?

Well, the grand old man of gay rights in Washington, D.C. was Frank Kameney, who was an Army astronomer who was fired for, you know, this sort of men's room incident that would get you fired in those days. I was called in by two civil service commission, investigators. They said, we have information that leads us to believe that you're homosexual. Do you have any comment? I said, what's the information? They said, we can't tell you. I said, well, then I can't comment. And in any case, it's none of your business. So the Civil Service Commission had a provision, among others, denying jobs to those involved in immoral conduct. I was

fired. I met Frank toward the end of his life a couple of times. Frank was a very tough son of a bitch, and he was exactly what was needed. He was irascible, difficult. He picketed the White House in 1965. That's amazing. Yeah. And I always try to imagine, you know, LBJ and Lady Bird sort of looking at the wind,

you know, Johnson saying, bird, you won't believe this. You know, look what's out there. And they were carrying these very. poignant picket signs saying that we were homosexual citizens. And he just chipped away and chipped away and had courtroom defeat after courtroom defeat. But he persisted. And what he was battling was both in real time and similar to McCarthyism, essentially. This is before Stonewall. Right. There was definitely an overlap in the 50s. And when McCarthyism receded the repressions of gay people who were government employees

continued with gusto. And the book is, it's full of people trying to reconcile things which society and the government are telling them are irreconcilable, but the people themselves don't see any logical or moral reason why. I mean, Timothy is a...

Explain who your characters are... Yes. Who is Timothy Loflin is a young man who comes to a... Washington straight out of Fordham. And Hawkins Fuller, the man he becomes involved with who's a little older, is somebody who's out of Harvard, was a hero at the end of the war, and has exactly the kind of pedigree that Timothy didn't have, nor did I have.

And Timothy was raised in this Irish Catholic milieu in New York. He's a fervent anti-communist, as I was certainly brought up to be. and he is very serious about his religion. But these things are supposedly so irreconcilable with his being gay that he is caught in this vice. And, you know, I stayed out of the television adaptation and let the screenwriter do his very good work. This is the showtime adaptation of your novel. Yes. And I sort of learned to do that.

There's also been an opera that's based on this book, which has had about a dozen different productions over the last half dozen. years. Who was there? Come on. Vice President Nixon. Penny Roosevelt's daughter, Mrs. Longworth. Senator John. That's efficiency.

Buried his office girl to crank out his baby. And I stayed out of the hair of the librettist and the composer. The one conversation I recall having with the librettist was, just don't make the kid, meaning Timothy, just don't make the kids' politics and religion into a joke. Don't make them something that, well, you know, once he gets rid of that baggage, he'll be free and so forth. Because I think those things remained a craving for people. Tom, tell me why you decided to write a novel about this rather than a history. I mean, you're capable of both and have written, thank God for us, nonfiction as well as fiction. Why? Why?

do it in the form of fiction and historical fiction. Yeah, like a lot of my novels, this one did begin with nonfiction or an attempt at nonfiction. We were coming up on the 50th anniversary of the Army McCarthy hearings, and I had an idea for a magazine piece. Maybe it was for you. I can't remember if I pitched it to anybody. But I wanted to find out what had happened to Fred Fisher, who was the young lawyer about whom the famous question was asked. of McCarthy, have you at long last, no decency, sir? Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. Look, you've done enough.

Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last, have you left no sense of decency? And I thought that maybe writing about Fisher, who was a very young man at the time, might be a way into this period. it didn't work out that way. And yet I was doing all this reading about the period and I began to imagine these characters. But I thought I could dramatize this story and dramatize a lot of concerns that were on my mind. My novels had hardly been replete with sex,

let alone gay sex. And the gay sex here is meant to be very characterizing and it's often quite explicit. And I think one of the things that actually helped me writing this book was, I was exhausted a lot of the time I was writing it. And I think it was good for my emotions because I was not used to bringing my emotions certainly into a gay love story. And, you know, I was a federal employee for a while. And I wrote this book, a lot of this book at night. I would go down after dinner, I'd force myself to go down to the GW library and I would write there.

I remember a couple of times when I literally pushed the pad away from me. I still write longhand. I pushed it away from me and it was too much to bear and it was on the verge of tears whatever I think it was good for the book you've talked at various times about how similar you are to Timothy Loughlin who's the younger character

in fellow travelers and given that you give him a pretty horrific ending he leaves politics he leaves the church he never has another relationship and he dies after a painful battle with cancer

yeah I was was determined to write a tragedy because there was no way to tell the story of these people who had been fired by the thousands. There was no way of telling that story without making my two fictional characters, tragic figures. I will say that the fate that meets Timothy Laughlin is quite different in the TV version, a much happier and fulfilled one. And if I can let the cat out of the bag, He's able to have a full life as an activist and be part of the gay community.

And were you disappointed or did you react well or poorly to the way TV treated your novel in that way? I've only seen the first two episodes so far. But I liked them. And when there were these scenes set in the 50s between Hawk and Tim, I very much had the feeling, oh my gosh, those are my characters up there. I really sort of see this. But I think if you write historical fiction, you should face the fact that you are yourself an adapter. You know, by inserting these fictional people into actual history, you are changing, adapting, modifying history to begin with.

So there's a certain inconsistency, I think, if you say, well, I want any filming of my book to, you know, produce a mirror image of the text. Right. And he had his own idea. about what to do with things. And I think it's very fruitful and kind of natural. It's a much bigger thing, much more expansive. Canvas, yeah. Covers much more time than my novel does.

David Remnick, talking to Thomas Malin, author of The Novel Fellow Travelers. More to come. Tom, you left the Republican Party, I think, a few years ago. How much did a lack of support for gay rights affect your decision in the Republican Party? It was actually Trump that drove me out of the party, but insofar as I had been a registered Republican,

I was never happy with the Republican Party's issue on social issues, especially gay rights, and I never hid that opposition. But I was bifurcated in some ways. My politics when it came to things like foreign policy were relatively conservative, and I had to make choices. I would have had to make the same choices in the Democratic Party. Politics has never been easy for me. It's always been a matter of tension between values that don't accommodate themselves to one party or another. Tom, your book begins and ends in 1991 during the AIDS crisis. I bring that up only because last year we published excerpts from your astonishing diaries during that time. And I'd ask that you read a section from that for us. Okay, yes.

This entry was made Saturday, February 13, 1988. Came home with The Times tonight, a front-page article on how the virus isn't spreading to many gay men anymore. So safe sex apparently is safe. but how a great harvest of souls is imminent. They actually say that a large portion of the gay male population in San Francisco and New York will be, quote, wiped out over the next several years. Everyone who got the virus in the early 80s.

Did I get it five years ago next week? We'll be dying. Or nearly everyone. And you know what this means. Since the virus has stopped spreading and heterosexuals are safe, the search for a cure will slow. The dying will be allowed to do. die, nature's adjustment of the surplus perverted population. Gays won't be extinct, they'll just

be reduced and contained. In their secret hearts, many people will think the shriving a good thing. And will I be gathered in with the quarter of a million still to die? I tell myself I want only to finish these two books. Let me see them done and out, and then I'll go quietly. That's what I tell myself anyway. God, what a horrifying thing. It's just so painful to read that. I can't imagine what it was like to write it and live it. What surprised you when you went back through those diaries? I don't, had you looked at them in a long time? I had never reread my diaries from the 80s. And I mean, my diaries are voluminous. I mean, Peeps was like a tweeter compared to me. They go on and on for 50 years. The collected tweets.

It's a new old peeps. And so, but my papers, sort of like Frank Kammany's, my papers have now gone to the Library of Congress, including all these diaries. But before they went, I always knew I wanted to make a book out of the diaries. And so my partner and I, Bill, and I've been lucky enough after an entry like that, I mean, Bill and I've been together for 35 years, we scanned them.

It was an enormous project so that I could work with them without having to go to Capitol Hill to read my, own diaries. But I hadn't, I don't think I had ever re-read that passage until I was trying to extract a piece for the New Yorker. It was a harrowing experience to publish that piece. It's just imbued with fear and anxiety and funeral after funeral after funeral. Yeah. And I was a worrier by nature. My disposition is sunny enough, but I'm constantly anxious. When could you stop worrying about a... needs for yourself?

Well, a lot of the drama in the excerpt that you published was about whether or not to take the test. And today, I think that sort of surprises people because if you are at all concerned with your own sexual health and others, you take that test. But at the time, you could get the news and there would be nothing they could do for you. You know, I mean, AZT was coming in, but the side effects of AZT sometimes. seemed worse than a disease. I mean, Larry Kramer, who was, of course, a fierce activist,

there was a period in the late days when he was saying, don't take the test. Why have this sort of Damocles hanging over your head when there's nothing they're going to do for you? So I didn't take the test until 1990 or 91. And by that time, and even before that, one knew how to behave to protect oneself. I don't mean behave in the sense of good behavior.

One knew how physically to protect oneself. But it was just constant, constant bad news. One of the things that I was struck by when I read the diaries, that whole stretch of them, out of which the excerpt came, I was struck by a manic quality to the diaries. And I don't think of myself as a manic person. But I was in New York in the 1980s, very happy about a lot of things. I was getting a little bit of traction as a writer. and I was sort of living my 20s in my 30s. And I was enjoying, getting published in certain places,

starting to write my books, whatever, and I would enthuse about all of that. And then the next entry, there'd be this crash landing because some horrible piece of news had come in. And the next day I'd pick myself up, and it would go like that. And the sign curve of it is much sort of more alpine than the other decades in my life have been.

Tom Mallon, it's a privilege to talk to you just as it is to publish you. Thank you so much. Thank you, David. That's the writer Thomas Mallon, talking to David Remnick. You can read Malin's piece called Finding My Way and Staying Alive during the AIDS Crisis at New Yorker.com. Malin is the author of more than a dozen books, and fellow travelers premieres on Showtime next week. I'm Adam Howard. David Remnick will be back next week. Thanks for being with us. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a good.

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