An ad for a new TV mini-series put me on the scent of a story I had not heard before. Paramount’s ‘Fellow Travelers’ began at the end of October based on the 2007 novel of the same name by Thomas Mallon. It tells the story of two US government employees caught up in the McCarthyite paranoia of the 1950s. Working alongside those leading the campaign to smoke out from under the bed the supposed ‘reds’ in positions of governmental and military power and authority, Tim Laughlin and Hawkins Fuller are simultaneously trying to stay one step ahead of discovery and dismissal on the grounds of homosexuality while conducting a torrid love affair under the noses of those who would destroy them.

The story of the McCarthy witch-hunts for communist infiltrators and sympathisers in Cold War America is notorious. Less well known is the scandal of ‘The Lavender Scare’ as the historian David K. Johnson dubs it in his 2003 book, with its explanatory but less trippingly off the tongue subtitle, ‘The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government’. The book opens the lid on the almost forgotten and (certainly contemporaneously) unacknowledged ‘sexual orientation cleansing’ of thousands of gay and lesbian government employees out of their jobs because of paranoia that they were threats to national security. According to Johnson, up to a staggering 10,000 innocent people were interrogated about their sexual orientation, subject to dubious lie detectors, not allowed representation nor read their rights. They were then dismissed or ‘retired’ out of their positions without compensation or access to appeal or redress. The policy ruined lives not just careers and, in a number of cases, precipitated suicide.

The new TV adaptation of Mallon’s novel stars Matt Bomer as the unfeasibly insouciant Hawkins Fuller and British actor, Jonathan Bailey (W1A, Bridgerton), as his religiously and politically conflicted younger lover, Tim Laughlin. Before paying for a Paramount subscription to tune in, I am reading Mallon’s book first. I am a third of the way through so not ready to write my own review, though I already doubt I am going to add much to or disagree with the excellent 2007 New York Times review by Michael Gorra here. I have also downloaded the audiobook version of Johnson’s seminal work (free with Audible subscription) to learn even more about this important period of LGBTQ history.