“I'm your boy, right?” Tim whispers to Hawk as he kneels before him.
“And your boy wants to go to the party.”
“How far do you want to go?” Hawk asks as Tim descends his
partner
's torso .
Then Tim puts Hawk's toes in his mouth one by one and licks them while looking into his eyes.
“Now show me what my boy really wants,” Hawk orders.
The previous paragraph could be the transcription of the beginning of a contemporary gay porn film.
However, the scene is part of the first chapter of a commercial series released at the end of 2023.
Fellow Travelers
(or
Companeros de ruta,
Spanish title with which it can be seen on SkyShowtime) tells the story of love (and sex) between two American men between the 1950s and 1980s. Over eight episodes, the miniseries created by Ron Nyswaner (
Philadelphia
) shows how the lives of homosexuals changed since the “lilac terror,” as the persecution of gay men by part of the authorities during the Cold War, until the AIDS epidemic and the explosion of LGTBIQ+ activism.
Based on the novel by Thomas Mallon
The Lavenders: Fellow Travelers
(Silver), it received reviews as positive as that of the
New Yorker
, which considered it one of the best fictions of last year.
Perhaps its most striking ingredient was the large number of explicit sexual scenes, to the point that one viewer complained on Twitter of having seen them all without having tuned into the series at any time.
The team defended them, arguing that it was necessary to show the relationships between the two protagonists, played by Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey, in all their splendor to fully understand their love story.
“Gay sex has been depicted before on television and in film, and it is present in some of my favorite films,” executive producer Robbie Rogers (former football player and partner of television creator Greg Berlanti) told
Variety
.
“But I think it's something different here.
It is the power dynamic that varies throughout the episodes, and the characters change and adapt, and they do so throughout their sexual experience.”
Matt Bomer, all biceps, triceps, pecs, abs and lats in 'Fellow Travelers'.©Showtime Networks Inc./Courtesy Everett Collection / Cordon Press
But there is a detail that the series team did not usually talk about in their interviews that did creep into some of the criticism: the muscular bodies of Bomer and Bailey, with the shapes and dimensions of two men apparently addicted to CrossFit
,
so much so. so
Vanity Fair
claimed that they had “an anachronistic amount of pectorals and abs.”
You see those naked bodies and wonder what gym US government workers went to in the 1950s, and what nutritional supplements they took (the same goes for the journalist played by Jelani Alladin).
We have seen it before, to a greater or lesser extent, in many period audiovisual productions, regardless of the era to which they transported us: 18th century Scotland in the
Outlander
series , the 19th century British court in
The Bridgertons
, the period of Henry VIII in
The Tudors
or the ancient empire of
Rome
.
Both the slender bodies of women and the often muscular physiques of men raise the question: were our ancestors so attractive, or is this a matter of creative license that at best pleases the viewer and at worst the does it start from the space-time line?
Alberto Mira, writer and professor of film at Oxford Brookes University, also raised the question when watching
Fellow Travelers
, and came to the conclusion that “not everything in representation is about realism.”
“This is what the author of a book about
Gods and Monsters
[a 1998 film starring Ian McKellen about the last days of James Whale, the director of the 1931 film
Frankenstein
] complained about: he said that bodies weren't like that then.
And there may be some truth in that.
But the body of the actor is always a contemporary body, subject to contemporary logic.”
Mira defends the right of fiction to take license, but at the same time cites cases such as the model Joe Dallessandro, Warhol's muse in the sixties and seventies, known for his Herculean physique: “Yes, there were bodies like that.”
It also invites us to compare the bodies that Kirk Douglas and the rest of the cast of Stanley Kubrick's
Spartacus
, sculptural and tanned, with those that can be seen in the series
Spartacus
, broadcast in the early 2010s and very much indebted to the hypertrophied aesthetics of the movie
300
.
“The bodies in both are very different, but both models of representation lie.”
It is more than likely that Bomer and Bailey's bodies are not just the result of a casual contemporaneity: it may be that the producers of
Fellow Travelers
, as well as those of the other titles mentioned, were looking for attractive physiques according to the norm to increase viewership.
“These bodies are a plus of commerciality that has nothing to do with plausibility,” Mira adds.
Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey in 'Fellow Travelers'.©Showtime Networks Inc./Courtesy Everett Collection / Cordon Press
The idealization of the male body in pursuit of aesthetic pleasure is not exactly new.
Already in ancient Greece, man was represented with the attributes of a hero, often a demigod of enormous shapes, capable of accomplishing the greatest feats judging by his physical perfection.
“The classical world accustomed society to contemplating the physique of athletes and military heroes through full nudes that showed them in physical splendor in monumental statues in preeminent places in the Polis,” explains Carlos G. Navarro, conservator. of 19th century paintings from the Prado Museum.
“These were images of exacerbated male power and their mission was to propose them to citizen imitation.”
That tradition was lost and recovered over the centuries, but it is also found in Christianity.
“Especially after the Renaissance.
It is also common to find powerful men represented as heroes or gods, with naked, muscular physiques.
There is no shortage of examples without leaving the Prado, where you can see Charles V naked in the fabulous sculpture by Leoni that is in the upper rotunda of Goya.”
Nor has sex been invented in modern times.
Sometimes we face period fiction with a more puritanical outlook than those who lived them.
An example is the article that historian Amanda Foreman published in the
Daily Express
in 1998 after the premiere of
Vanity Fair
, a BBC miniseries based on the classic by William Makepeace Thackeray.
“It may look a little too sexy, but all those breasts and thighs hit the mark (…).
“Men and women of the Georgian era not only enjoyed a strong attitude towards sex, but they took great delight in breaking the rules imposed by their Puritan ancestors.”
Jonathan Bailey and Matt Bomer in 'Fellow Travelers'.©Showtime Networks Inc./Courtesy Everett Collection / Cordon Press
That same period, between the 18th and 19th centuries, is where the Netflix series
The Bridgertons
is set , and although it is a very free reimagination of the time (much was said about its
colorblind casting
, in which different ethnicities without paying attention to realism), his portrait of the effervescent sexuality that surrounds the characters is quite reliable.
“Although the legal system continued to be strict in its regulation and restriction of what were considered perverse sexual practices, and although the attitude of society remained largely conservative, there remained much evidence that there was increasingly sexual liberation and experimentation in the territory.” more urban,” explains historian Elaura Lacey, citing examples such as brothels or the so-called
Molly Houses
, where homosexuals met to have secret meetings.
They were the higher classes, precisely those who star in the Shonda Rhimes series, those who enjoyed a more unprejudiced sexual life.
“Those racy scenes are very believable, they could even be toned down for the viewer,” insists Lacey.
We could make the same mistake with
Fellow Travelers
, which shows somewhat surprising sexual dynamics for a couple of men raised in the 1930s: spitting, domination, fellatio, and role-playing that borders on sadomasochism.
Rogers explained in this regard that the producers' objective was never to shock for free: "When you are extremely careful with all the decisions you make in your life and you keep secrets and hide something out of everyone's reach, when you finally manage to have those intimate moments, that sex can be incredibly passionate or aggressive or tender or very emotional.”
Mira, for her part, does not find anything so strange or contemporary in these practices.
“The stories we are told about sex until the seventies give an orthodox vision,” she defends.
“Try looking at a collection of erotic drawings edited by Thomas Waugh: they are drawings made by normal, non-commercial people, from the beginning of the 20th century and you can see very extreme fantasies.”
In fact, the terms sadism and masochism were born with psychoanalysis at the end of the 19th century, but we have an even older reference in the Marquis de Sade a century earlier.
Anyway: accepting its licenses regarding the physique of its protagonists,
Fellow Travelers
is probably a more reliable portrait of the time than it seems.
As Paquita Salas said: “There have been queers throughout the history of humanity.”
And they lived, loved and fucked.
Even in Spain, as Mira recalls: “Yes, there were arrests and homophobia and thousands of people lost their jobs.
But there were meeting places, and certainly a subculture.
Accessing it was not always easy, but it existed.
The dynamic between repression and expression, between prohibiting or doing, is fluid.”
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