PinkPlayMags
Fellow Travelers – gay love within the White House during the volatile political 1950’s era
Fellow Travelers is a searing historical novel infused with political drama, unexpected humor, and genuine heartbreak.. It’s 1950s Washington, D.C.: a world of bare-knuckled ideology and secret dossiers, dominated by personalities like Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, and Joe McCarthy. Enter Timothy Laughlin, a recent college graduate and devout Catholic eager to join the crusade against Communism. An encounter with a handsome State Department official, Hawkins Fuller, leads to Tim’s first job and, after Fuller’s advances, his first love affair. The story moves between the diplomatic world of Foggy Bottom and NATO’s front line in Europe.
An epic love story and political thriller, chronicling the volatile romance of two very different men, who meet in the shadow of McCarthy-era Washington. Handsome and charismatic Hawkins Fuller avoids emotional entanglements, that is until he meets Tim Laughlin, a young man brimming with idealism and religious faith. They begin a romance just as Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn declare war on “subversives and sexual deviants,” initiating one of the darkest periods in 20th-century American history. As McCarthy mounts a desperate bid for power and internal investigations in the government, Tim and Fuller find it ever more dangerous to navigate their double lives. Over the course of four decades, Hawk and Tim cross paths through the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, the drug-fueled disco hedonism of the 1970s and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, while facing obstacles in the world and in themselves.
A Showtime television mini-series is now in production to bring this novel to the screen, and it’s being filmed right here in Toronto. It’s being created by Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia), with the two main leads being Matt Bomer (Guiding Light, All My Children) and Jonathan Bailey (Bridgerton). Toronto’s own David Tomlinson also appears in two episodes.
Read an excerpt.
Available from Penguin Random House
About the Author
Bryen Dunn is a freelance journalist based in Toronto with a focus on tourism, lifestyle, entertainment and community issues. He has written several travel articles and has an extensive portfolio of celebrity interviews with musicians, actors and other public personalities. He’s willing to take on any assignments of interest, attend parties with free booze, listen to rants, and travel the world in search of the great unknown. He’s eager to discover the new, remember the past, and look into the future.