Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey in Travel companions (Photo: Ben Mark Holzberg/Showtime)
“Did you know that Roy Cohn had a collection of frogs in his apartment?
The simplicity with which this random fact about one of the perpetrators of the 1950s Red Scare comes out of Robbie Rogers’ mouth surprises even him. Seconds later, he switches to an obscure note about the noisy rise of Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator who led the relentless anticommunist expulsion of government employees during the Cold War.
“It’s all the little details that obsess over you when you read about these men,” Rogers says.
Rogers isn’t just revising his Cold War American history. He spent more than two years writing books and biographies about the major players in McCarthy-era America to serve as an executive producer on Showtime. Travel companions, a love story between two men at one of the most perilous times in history to be any shade of queer. The series is based on the book by Thomas Mallon, which screenwriter Ron Nyswaner handed to Rogers in 2021 during production of their latest project, the Harry Styles-led film. My policeman.
While McCarthy and Cohn were the faces of the anticommunist push in the halls of government, Rogers said the book was most compelling in its depiction of the human cost of the Lavender Scare, the movement led by McCarthy and company to denounce the homosexuals working in the country. the government due to prejudices that they were amoral and more vulnerable to communist extortion in order to conceal their sexuality. The story follows Hawkins (Matt Bomer), a Democratic staffer who long ago decided to satisfy his needs with a secret desire rather than a compromising love. That is until he meets Tim (Jonathan Bailey), a religious political climber who finds an idol in McCarthy’s anti-communist rhetoric despite being gay himself. As the two fall into a global love, their values and limits are tested by the expectations and dangers of the society around them.
“It’s always been a love story for me,” Rogers says. “It’s a love story set at a time when the stakes were so high. There is such an important story there.
The series marks a major breakthrough for Rogers, who is himself a historical figure having become the first openly gay man to play in a major North American professional sports league when he joined the LA Galaxy soccer team in 2013 .Since then, he has pivoted to producing with some crucial credits under his belt, including the All American franchise on The CW, one of the few things to survive the sale of the network to Nexstar.
He also produced the My policeman, another historical title that explores a gay affair in 1950s Britain, when homosexuality was a crime. Rogers says the experience was a compelling history lesson. But upon his return to American soil, he found a subject of study even closer to home.
“Obviously gay history isn’t taught much in schools, but even some of the Red Scare history isn’t something I remember hearing about,” he says. “Maybe I was so focused on football and didn’t pay attention to it. But I don’t think I really understood the Red Scare and certainly not the Lavender Scare. So really, I just went back to school.
This new training helped him work with the show’s creative team to strike a delicate balance while building on the foundation laid by Mallon’s book. While Rogers found McCarthy and secretly gay Cohn fascinating as reviled political figures, the representation of their atrocities was never meant to overshadow the struggle of Hawk, Tim, and everyone they left to live in fear of persecution or worse.
“When you really dive into McCarthy and Cohn, you don’t want to stray too far from the love story,” he says. “Really, when you’re in the room or in the restaurant with Hawk and Tim, that’s where you want to stay. This is the story we wanted to tell.
As Travel companions Since its launch on Paramount+ and Showtime, the series has received acclaim on many fronts, including its frank and unflinching depiction of gay sex. Rogers says he was surprised by the fixation on the show’s sex scenes because they weren’t the main topic of conversation in the writers’ room and never, he says, was the issue raised. asked how far they could push the limits.
“It was all about character and story and power,” he says. “It was about the power Hawk has over people, the way he uses sex, the dynamic between him and Tim and how that can change between them. What we talked about was how gender is an extension of the power dynamics at play in Washington, DC.
As Hawk and Tim succumb to their feelings for each other, the wall they have erected for the world begins to fall and their desires, compulsions, and even flaws are laid bare. Rogers says he thinks that’s what people respond to: the unfettered passion that erupts when you allow someone to be who they are.
“I think – or really, I know – that when you are a gay man or woman and you hide from your family, from your colleagues, from your friends; When you have these intimate moments with someone you fall in love with or are intimately attracted to, you don’t know what emotions are going to come out of it,” he says. “It can be aggressive, it can be passionate, it can be kinky, it can be so many different things. And it’s very heavy because you’re so reserved and guarded the rest of the time. Hiding, hiding, hiding and then there’s this explosion, which can be very transcendent for someone like Tim.
Depicting this freedom in the bedroom and in the quieter moments after the explosion of passion — which Rogers says are his favorites in the series — helps frame the stakes of how dangerous queer people can be outside of these safe spaces. Even beyond Hawk and Tim, the series follows the budding and even more perilous romance between Marcus (Jelani Alladin), a black journalist, and Frankie (Noah Ricketts), a drag performer at a local gay-friendly club. In the face of even greater prejudice, their story serves as a reminder that the threat of the Lavender Scare was not limited to a single label.
Dressing up this tragically still-relevant story into something digestible and engaging for audiences is how a moment like Lavender Scare gets its due. Travel companions. As Rogers finally puts away the McCarthy and Cohn books, that will be the challenge that awaits him in whatever historical moment commands his attention next.
“When you sell something, you have to hide it under other things,” he says. “Everyone loves a love story, and that’s perfect because it has to be something else before it can become a history lesson.”
New episodes of Travel companions stream Fridays on Paramount+ and stream Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on Showtime. Join the discussion about the show in our forums.
Hunter Ingram is a television writer living in North Carolina who watches way too much television. Her byline has appeared in Variety, Emmy Magazine, USA Today and Gannett’s USA Today Network newspapers.
