Adam Howard: This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm Adam Howard sitting in for David Remnick, who's away this week. 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 in the government, but alongside the Red Scare was a witch hunt that cost thousands of gay people their jobs.

[FILM- Fellow Travelers video plays]

Speaker 3: The President is going to issue an EO, whatever that is.

Speaker 4: Executive order. Come here.

Speaker 3: They're worried Eisenhower's trying to undermine them with it.

Speaker 4: By taking the lead on the anti-communist crusade?

Speaker 3: I think so. Senator McCarthy, he wants to ignore it, but Roy he thinks that they should--

Speaker 4: Roy? You're on a first-name basis.

Speaker 3: 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.

[end of video]

Adam Howard: It was a grim situation and investigation at the time claimed that, "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.

David Remnick: Tom, the relationship at the center of the book is a romance between two men. This is Washington DC in the '50s. Talk a little bit about what it meant to be gay back then, and maybe particularly in DC. What would being an out gay man at that time really look like?

Thomas Mallon: 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. 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.

Any gay romance had to be tremendously clandestine. 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.

David Remnick: Tell me about that. Who were they and what did that mean?

Thomas Mallon: Well, the grand old man of gay rights in Washington DC was Frank Kameny, who was an Army astronomer who was fired for the sort of men's room incident that would get you fired in those days.

[video plays]

Frank Kameny: I was called in by two Civil Service Commission investigators. They said, we have information that lead us to believe that you're a 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. The Civil Service Commission had a provision among others, denying jobs to those involved in immoral conduct. I was fired.

[vidoe ends]

Thomas Mallon: I met Frank toward the end of his life a couple of times and Frank was a very tough son of a bitch. He was exactly what was needed. He was irascible, difficult. He picketed the White House in 1965.

David Remnick: That's amazing.

Thomas Mallon: Yes. I always try to imagine LBJ and Lady Bird looking at the window, Johnson saying, Bird, you won't believe this, look what's out there. They were carrying these very poignant picket signs saying that we were homosexual citizens. He just chipped away and chipped away and had courtroom defeat after courtroom defeat but he persisted.

David Remnick: What he was battling was both in real-time, and similar to McCarthyism essentially, this is before Stonewall.

Thomas Mallon: There was definitely an overlap in the '50s. When McCarthyism receded, the repressions of gay people who were government employees continued with gusto. The book, 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. Timothy is a--

David Remnick: Explain to us your character. Who is Timothy?

Thomas Mallon: Timothy Loughlin is a young man who comes to Washington straight out of Fordham. Hawkins Fuller, the man who 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. Timothy was raised in this Irish Catholic area 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. These things are supposedly so irreconcilable with his being gay that he is caught in this vise. I stayed out of the television adaptation and let the screenwriter do his very good work.

David Remnick: This is the Showtime adaptation of your novel?

Thomas Mallon: Yes. 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.

[MUSIC - Fellow Travelers: Scene 1b, Park in Dupont Circle "Do You Mind?"]

Thomas Mallon: I stayed out of the hair of the librettist and the composer. The one conversation I recall having with the librettist was, meaning Timothy, just don't make the kid's politics and religion into a joke. Don't make them something that once he gets rid of that baggage, he'll be free and so forth. Because I think those things remained a craving for people.

David Remnick: Tom, tell me why you decided to write a novel about this rather than a history. You're capable of both, and have written, thank God for us, nonfiction as well as fiction. Why do it in the form of fiction and historical fiction?

Thomas Mallon: 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?"

[video plays]

Speaker 3: Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

[video ends]

Thomas Mallon: 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. Yet I was doing all this reading about the period and I began to imagine these characters. I thought I could dramatize this story and dramatize a lot of concerns that were on my mind. 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.

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. I think it was good for my emotions because I was not used to bringing my emotions, certainly into a gay love story.

I was a federal employee for a while. I wrote 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. It was too much to bear. It was on the verge of tears, whatever. I think it was good for the book.

David Remnick: You've talked at various times about how similar you are to Timothy Laughlin, who's the younger character in Fellow Travelers. 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.

Thomas Mallon: I 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.

David Remnick: I will say that the fate that meets Timothy Laughlin is quite different in the TV version, a much happier and fulfilled one. 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. Were you disappointed or did you react well or poorly to the way TV treated your novel in that way?

Thomas Mallon: I've only seen the first two episodes so far, but I liked them. 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 see this." I think if you write historical fiction, you should face the fact that you are yourself an adapter. By inserting these fictional people into actual history, you are changing, adapting, modifying history to begin with.

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

David Remnick: Tom, you left the Republican Party a few years ago. How much did a lack of support for gay rights affect your decision in the Republican Party?

Thomas Mallon: It was actually Trump that drove me out of the party. 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. I was bifurcated in some ways. My politics, when it came to things like foreign policy, were relatively conservative. 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.

David Remnick: 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 tim. I'd ask that you read a section from that for us.

Thomas Mallon: Okay, yes. This entry was made Saturday, February 13th, 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 '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, will 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 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."

David Remnick: 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? Had you looked at them in a long time?

Thomas Mallon: I had never reread my diaries from the '80s. My diaries are voluminous. Peeps was like a Twitter [unintelligible 00:38:14] They go on and on for 50 years.

David Remnick: Collected tweets [unintelligible 00:38:18]

Thomas Mallon: Oh, yes. Like Frank Kameny's, my papers have now gone to the Library of Congress, including all these diaries. Before they went, I always knew I wanted to make a book out of the diaries. My partner and I, Bill, and I've been lucky enough after an entry like that. Bill and I have 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. I don't think I had ever reread that passage until I was trying to extract a piece for The New Yorker. It was a harrowing experience to publish that piece.

David Remnick: It's just imbued with fear and anxiety and funeral after funeral after funeral.

Thomas Mallon: I was a worrier by nature. My disposition is sunny enough, but I'm constantly anxious.

Speaker 2: When could you stop worrying about AIDS for yourself?

Thomas Mallon: Well, a lot of the drama in the excerpt that you published was about whether or not to take the test. Today, I think that surprises people because if you are at all concerned with your own sexual health and others, you take that test. At the time, you could get the news and there would be nothing they could do for you. AZT was coming in, but the side effects of AZT sometimes seemed worse than the disease.

Even 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 Damocles hanging over your head when there's nothing they're going to do for you? I didn't take the test until 1990 or '91. By that time, and even before that one knew how to behave to protect oneself. I don't mean behave in the sense of to, good behavior. One knew how physically to protect oneself. 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. 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 living my 20s in my 30s.

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

[music]

David Remnick: Thom Mallon. It's a privilege to talk to you just as it is to publish you. Thank you so much.

Thomas Mallon: Thank you, David.

[music]

Adam Howard: That's the writer Thomas Mallon talking to David Remnick. You can read Mallon's piece called Finding My Way and Staying Alive during the AIDS crisis at the Newyorker.com. Mallon is the author of more than a dozen books and Fellow Travelers premieres on Showtime next week. This is a New Yorker Radio Hour, stick around.

[music]

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