TV’s ‘Fellow Travelers’ Mirrors the Good and the Bad of Catholic LGBTQ+ Experience

Fellow Travelers, a Showtime television mini-series created by Ron Nyswaner and based on the novel by Thomas Mallon, traces the love story of Tim and Hawk through the mid-20th century challenges faced by gay and lesbian men  community then.from the Lavender Scare of the 1950s in the U.S. through the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.

For many queer people of faith who have seen the show, what resonates most deeply is the journey of the character Tim and how his Catholic background intertwines – sometimes painfully, sometimes creatively – with his sexual orientation and his relationships. Fellow Travelers thus offers a powerful lens to reflect on faith, conscience, desire, and survival.

The story of Tim and Hawk

The television series follows the U.S. government bureaucrat Hawkins “Hawk” Fuller (Matt Bomer), and Timothy “Tim” Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey), an employee in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s office, as their lives unfold across several decades: from the Lavender Scare of the 1950s (fanned into full-scale terror by McCarthy), through the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s and the early gay rights movement of the 1970s, to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.

Both men are gay, but are forced to remain closeted in order to keep their jobs and to keep safe, just as many queer people have to do, especially in the past and for those who live in religious  environments.

Hawk is polished, confident, and well-connected, raised in a wealthy family and already seasoned in the careful strategies required to survive as a gay man in the 1950s. Tim is younger and more naive. He is idealistic, eager to change the world, to defend the United States from Communism, and to make a difference. They meet by chance in 1952 in Washington, D.C., on the night of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidential election victory.

Faith shapes relationships

From the very beginning of their relationship, Tim’s faith plays a big role in their story. Even the pet name Hawk gives him is rooted in religion: “Skippy,” after an angel character from Bishop Fulton Sheen’s radio show, which Hawk used to listen to with his mother as a child.

Often Catholics learn to read our bodies and desires only through the language of sin, guilt, and prohibition. Fellow Travelers shows how religious vocabulary can also become a space of reinterpretation and even liberation. Catholic symbolism, devotion, and ritual become places where queer people of faith can experience their desires and bodies as holy.

We can also see this dimension in the novel. During one of their earliest private meetings, Hawk asks Tim: “Who owns you?” and Tim thinks: “It sounded like some early piece of the catechism, a cosmically important question-and-answer he has somehow missed, on the order of Who made us? God made us”. By instinctively framing Hawk’s question in the language of the catechism, Tim places his desire within a sacred horizon. For queer Catholics, it can reflect the experience of discovering that love for another person and love for God are not necessarily in competition, but can illuminate each other. In these moments, their hidden relationship is felt not as something dirty or wrong, but as something meaningful and even touched by grace.

Some pages later, Mallon writes: “Tim did not plan to worship Hawkins Fuller, but why couldn’t his love for him be attached to the love he already felt for the actual Trinity? Had he not, in fact, always been in love, physically and particularly, with Christ, whose dark, haloed image on every calendar and classroom wall glowed more handsomely than any man walking His Earth?”

Similarly, queer Catholics can recognize this feeling because they know that their attraction to God sometimes sublimates desire and sometimes intensifies it. For some, devotion becomes a way to redirect forbidden longings. For others, it heightens these longings, allowing attraction, tenderness, and embodiment to be imagined within a sacred horizon. The result is not a simple confusion between God and a lover, but a porous boundary where faith and desire speak to each other.

Guilt over sexuality

Tim and Hawk’s emotional and sexual lives also bear the weight of religious moral teaching which caused internalized homophobia. Tim gradually realizes that Church taught him to despise his sexual orientation, yet he feels like a good person when he is with Hawk. Even though the couple needs to hide, Tim feels whole, even pure. He tells a priest in confession: “When I committed this sin I felt pure, more pure than I felt in my entire life. So how can I be sorry for it?”

Matt Bomer as Hawkins “Hawk” Fuller and Jonathan Bailey as Tim in ‘Fellow Travelers’

For many queer Catholics, this contradiction is painfully familiar: growing up within a religious framework that names their desire as sin, while their lived experience of love and intimacy feels truthful. Tim’s words give voice to that inner fracture so many people carry, the tension between what they have been taught to feel about their bodies and relationships, and what they actually experience in them.

When the two characters see each other after almost a decade of separation, Tim still struggles with guilt over sexuality. He tries to refrain from intimacy with Hawk because, as he tells him, “In the past I held two truths, my love for you and my love for God. One was real and one was a fantasy.” He sees his sexuality and his love for Hawk in opposition to Catholic teaching and his faith—a common experience for those who struggle with their own sexual orientation even today.

Tim tries, but he can’t really resist the man he loves. He becomes consumed by shame and self-loathing. Even if Hawk reassures him that “there is no sin in what you and I just did. It’s natural”, Tim can’t forgive himself. He can’t accept being incapable of putting his body into silence.

Impact of politics

Tim and Hawk live in a specific historical context, which today does not sound so distant considering the increase in violence and restrictions towards LGBTQ+ community, especially trans people. In 1953, President Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, a directive that included “sexual perversion,” an expression explicitly used at the time to mean queerness, as a national security threat. With this order, all federal employees – like Hawk and Tim – became subject to thorough and intrusive background investigations.

Those dismissed on grounds of “perversion” were blacklisted from any other federal employment, ending their careers, damaging their relationships with loved ones. There was constant fear of being outed by undercover investigators or betrayed by people coerced into naming suspected homosexuals. Public humiliation took a heavy toll on mental health. Among the 7,000-10,000 people fired or forced to resign because of their sexuality, some died by suicide.

To put some distance from Hawk and to escape the suffocating climate of fear, Tim enlists in the army and later enters the seminary. He recognizes in himself an intensity that shapes everything he does. “I seem to be always searching for something to lose myself in completely,” he explains. Tim loves, believes, and commits “beyond measure,” echoing a common experience among queer Catholics: the impulse to throw oneself entirely into causes that feel larger than themselves. Social and political commitment, faith communities, or activism become places where desire for meaning and belonging can finally converge.

So, during the 1960s Tim becomes involved in anti war protests, including being part of the Catonsville Nine, a group of Catholic activists who break into the Selective Service office near Baltimore to take and burn draft cards in protest against the Vietnam War. He turns himself in to be loyal to the cause and goes to prison.

When he is released, it’s the 1970s and he moves to San Francisco where he works as a clinical social worker in the Castro neighborhood, the LGBTQ+ enclave.  He finally embraces his sexuality, channeling his spirituality into resistance, care, and survival.

Reconciling faith and sexuality

In the 1980s, Tim meets Hawk again and realizes: “I spent most of my life waiting for God to love me, and then I realized the only thing that matters is I love God. It’s the same with you.” Tim continues to love beyond measure for the rest of his life, discovering the abundance and inexhaustible depth of the love he carries for both God and Hawk, for faith and for his own queerness. After everything he endures, he finally becomes free to feel everything, to be himself, beyond the expectations imposed by society and by religion.

This final arc of Tim’s life also resonates deeply with many queer people of faith. It mirrors a journey of reconciliation: with themselves, with God, with their own body, and, for some, even with the Church. Tim’s story shows the moment when survival slowly opens into acceptance, when the struggle to fix or silence desire gives way to the recognition that your own sexuality, too, can be a place of grace.

For many LGBTQ+ Catholics, this is the point at which faith is no longer experienced as an enemy, but as a language to inhabit their lives more fully, without hiding. Living honestly, loving openly, and refusing shame becomes a way of encountering God more deeply: a God who does not tolerate queer people despite who they are, but who loves them because they are queer, whole, and capable of loving others.

–Elisa Belotti, New Ways Ministry, January 23. 2026