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What’s it like to be 30 and queer and an artist? To try to put something meaningful into the world while simultaneously figuring out who you are? For many, it’s a pivotal year — a time when you start to know yourself with greater clarity and to understand what you want and how you want […] More
Now on Netflix, the movie tracks the life of the American conductor and composer and his wife, the actress Felicia Montealegre, played by Carey Mulligan.Pop quiz: Who wrote the score for Bradley Cooper’s new Leonard Bernstein biopic, “Maestro”?Trick question: Bernstein. But you might not realize it, or learn of some of his more lasting accomplishments (“West Side Story” erasure!), even after watching the entire film, which focuses on the personal life of the prodigiously talented musician.Which is to say, the film — which Cooper directed and starred in, and which is now streaming on Netflix — does not hand-hold. It assumes some basic familiarity with one of America’s most storied conductors and composers. Here’s a guide to help you get up to speed.His careerWhat is Bernstein best known for?One of the rare virtuosos to compose for musical theater, write classical music and conduct august bodies like the New York Philharmonic, Bernstein is probably best remembered as the composer of the 1957 musical “West Side Story.”The Manhattan-set tale of urban gang warfare in New York City, based on “Romeo & Juliet,” includes standards like “Tonight,” “I Feel Pretty” and the aching, wistful “Maria.” The classic show, a collaboration with Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book, and Stephen Sondheim, who penned the lyrics, won two Tony Awards in its original incarnation.In his day, Bernstein was known first and foremost as an animated, passionate conductor. After his spectacular fill-in debut at the Philharmonic at age 25 in 1943 — on just a few hours’ notice, because the scheduled guest conductor fell ill — Bernstein would be affiliated with the orchestra for four decades and conduct symphonies around the world.He also wrote classical music, including three symphonies, “Jeremiah,” “The Age of Anxiety” and “Kaddish,” and made the classical realm accessible to ordinary Americans through his Young People’s Concerts. Those televised lectures, which ran on CBS for 14 years, covered a broad range of subjects including humor in music, and the composers Gustav Mahler and Igor Stravinsky.What is Tanglewood?Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its training academy in the Berkshire Hills in Massachusetts, is where Bernstein studied with Serge Koussevitzky, then the director of the ensemble. The two met in 1940, when Koussevitzky selected a 22-year-old Bernstein as one of three inaugural conducting fellows for the Berkshire Music Center, now known as the Tanglewood Music Center.Bernstein went on to teach and perform there nearly every summer for 50 years, becoming the head of orchestral conducting at Tanglewood after Koussevitzky died in 1951. In 1990, Bernstein led the final performance of his life there — a gripping account of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.How much of the film’s score is Bernstein’s music?That cue you hear when Bernstein finds out he’ll be making his conducting debut at the New York Philharmonic? That’s from “On the Waterfront,” the 1954 Marlon Brando drama for which Bernstein wrote the music. That spiky, horn-filled composition that signals tension when Bernstein and a male lover arrive at the family’s Connecticut home? That’s the prologue from “West Side Story.”In fact, most of the music you hear was written by Bernstein. (Also see if you can spot classical excerpts from his ballets “Facsimile” and “Fancy Free,” his opera “A Quiet Place,” and parts of his second and third symphonies.)His personal lifeWas Bernstein gay or bisexual?Though he was married to his wife, the actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), for 26 years, he had numerous relationships — with both men and women — before and during their marriage, and after her death in 1978.The film focuses on two of them — his dalliance with the clarinetist David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer), whose bottom Bernstein slaps at the beginning of the film, and the musician Tom Cothran (Gideon Glick), whom he steals kisses with at a party and brings to his Connecticut home.What was society’s attitude toward gay people at the time?Anti-gay prejudice was rampant in America in the 1940s and 1950s, and the Lavender Scare — a fear that homosexual people had infiltrated the federal government and were a threat to national security — led to the dismissal of gay and lesbian employees, and those assumed to be, en masse. Gay, lesbian and transgender people — particularly public figures — faced intense pressure to conceal their identities, and Bernstein worried that the public revelation of his sexual orientation would hurt his conducting prospects.Did Montealegre know Bernstein was gay or bisexual when she married him?Yes, according to a letter she wrote to him the year after they were married, which the couple’s children discovered after her death. “You are a homosexual and may never change,” she wrote, adding later, “I am willing to accept you as you are, without being a martyr.” She went on to tell him, “Let’s try and see what happens if you are free to do as you like, but without guilt and confession.”Was Bernstein open about his affairs with men?At first, he was discreet, heeding Montealegre’s request to not embarrass her publicly. But, as “Maestro” shows, he became “sloppy” later or, rather, decided that he no longer wanted to hide what he viewed as a fundamental part of himself amid society’s changing attitudes.In 1976, he briefly left Montealegre to live openly with his boyfriend, Cothran, though he returned to her a year later when she learned she had lung cancer and cared for her until she died at age 56.What did Bernstein say about his sexuality?Nothing, at least, publicly. But privately, he suffered through years of therapy, apparently in the hope that he could be “cured” of his attraction to men. That desire lasted a lifetime: “I have been engaged in an imaginary life with Felicia,” he wrote in a letter to his sister, Shirley, from Israel in 1950, “having her by my side on the beach as a shockingly beautiful Yemenite boy passes.”Did Bernstein love his wife?Bernstein was “a gay man who got married,” his “West Side Story” collaborator Arthur Laurents once said in response to the assumption that Bernstein, who had three children with Montealegre, was bisexual. “He wasn’t conflicted about his sexual orientation at all. He was just gay.”But what is clear, from their children’s memories and from Bernstein’s own letters, is that he and Montealegre had an abiding affection for one another, and that their relationship was built on tenderness and mutual respect.“Bernstein absolutely loved her — there was no question about that,” Paul R. Laird, the author of “Leonard Bernstein,” a 2018 biography, recently told Time magazine. “It was as sincere a marriage as you’re going to get between a male homosexual and a woman at a time when a lot of male homosexuals married women.”Bernstein’s oldest daughter, Jamie, has spoken about her parents’ friendship. “They were really great friends, and probably that counts for the most in the long run, that they could still make each other laugh,” she said in a 1997 PBS interview.How did Bernstein die?He had received an emphysema diagnosis in his mid-20s — he would struggle with addiction to cigarettes and alcohol for most of his life — and died on Oct. 14, 1990, at 72, of a heart attack caused by lung failure.He was often depressed in his later years, intimidated that he would be best remembered as a conductor, resigned to the fact that he could never live up to the success of “West Side Story,” and guilty about his wife’s death from cancer, which he held himself responsible for. More
Once told he would never be a leading man if he came out, Bomer defied such predictions and, in projects like “Fellow Travelers” and “Maestro,” is getting some of the richest roles of his career.In 2001, the actor Matt Bomer took a role in “Guiding Light.” He had resisted it at first. A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University’s vaunted musical theater program, he felt that a soap opera was beneath him. But a few theater jobs hadn’t gone anywhere, and he had recently lost a bellman gig at a midtown hotel, so when the chance came up to play Ben Reade, a trust fund baby turned sex worker, he signed on.Bomer had been afraid of being on camera. “I was terrified of anybody seeing that close to my soul,” he said. On the soap, he learned to say his lines, hit his marks, make a choice and stick to it. The camera left his soul alone.In 2002, he asked the producers to write him off. He had been told that he was the director’s choice for a major new superhero movie. Then, he believes, the movie’s producers discovered that he was gay. That movie was never made.Bomer has never been sure if that’s why the project fell apart. Like marriages and dishwashers, movies in preproduction have many ways to fail. Still, he took from the experience a painful lesson. He couldn’t be himself and have the career he wanted. Around the same time, a producer (Bomer didn’t name him) told him that if he came out publicly, he would never play leads.In the Showtime series “Fellow Travelers,” Bomer, left, and Jonathan Bailey play lovers during the Lavender Scare of the 1950s.ShowtimeIt took 20 years, but Bomer, 46, has proved that producer wrong. He can currently be seen in two major projects: the Netflix film “Maestro,” which came to Netflix on Wednesday, and the Showtime romantic drama “Fellow Travelers,” set during and after the Lavender Scare of the 1950s, in which gay men and women were denied and purged from government jobs.In the series, which concluded last week, Bomer plays Hawkins Fuller, a state department operative with a promising career, a loving wife and a passionate entanglement with a man, played by Jonathan Bailey (“Bridgerton”). Driven, magnetic, emotionally opaque, Fuller — Hawk to his intimates — has all the signifiers of a prestige drama antihero. His is a leading role. Bomer, playing him, is a leading man.“Before this I was like, why can’t we have our Don Draper? Why can’t we have our Walter White?” Bomer said. “I don’t think I could have done it if I hadn’t worked on all the projects leading up to it.”Bomer grew up in Spring, Tex., a suburb of Houston. His family went to church several times a week, and that church considered homosexuality an abomination, so Bomer spent much of his childhood and adolescence running from himself. In high school, he participated in forensics, football, student council, Latin Club. “Anything that kept me busy,” he said. He also acted, landing his first professional job at 18. In theater, inside the skin of a character, he felt free.He began to date men in college, during a year abroad in Ireland. A decade into his career, once he had recurred on several series, co-starred in a Jodie Foster movie (“Flightplan”) and was firmly ensconced as the breezy lead of the USA cop-and-con-man procedural “White Collar,” he came out while receiving a humanitarian award, in 2012. He was already married then, to the publicist Simon Halls, and the father of three young boys.Bomer came out while he was still playing the breezy (and straight) lead of the USA cop-and-con-man procedural “White Collar.”David Giesbrecht/USA NetworkBomer isn’t sure that it was an ideal time to come out. “White Collar” was still airing, and the first “Magic Mike” film, in which he plays one of the exotic dancers, would soon premiere. But he was tired of running. And he was happy.“I just thought, I don’t want to hide this,” he recalled on a recent morning. “Love is more important to me than anything that being my true self cost me.”We had met an hour earlier in the middle of a West Village street. The plan had been to walk around the neighborhood, Bomer’s favorite in the city. (Although he is based in Los Angeles, he and Halls have an apartment nearby.) But it was near freezing, so after a few moments we ducked into the glassed-in back room of a pastry shop on Bleecker Street.I can confirm that if you are a person who enjoys the company of handsome men, it is very nice to sip herbal tea across the table from Bomer. He has dark hair, light eyes, a jaw so square it could be used for geometry tutorials. Wrap that up in an off-white turtleneck sweater, and it’s heartthrob city. I had mentioned to a few friends that I would be meeting him, and they all wanted me to ask the same question: How does it feel to be that handsome?Bomer doesn’t discount his looks, but he has the decency to be mildly embarrassed by them. “We were raised in my home to always be very humble and to not be worldly in that regard,” he said. “Having said that, I make sure to moisturize.” He favors writers and directors who see him as more than a pretty face and sculpted abs. And there is more: impishness, candor, a sense of wounds long healed.“There’s a real sort of confident vulnerability about Matt,” said Bailey, his “Fellow Travelers” co-star.Coming out altered Bomer’s professional trajectory, though it didn’t necessarily diminish it. “I mean, there are certain rooms that I haven’t been in since,” he said. “But I think my career became so much richer.”As “White Collar” wound down, he took on several gay roles. He appeared in Dustin Lance Black’s “8,” a play about the overturning of the amendment banning same-sex marriage in California. He followed that with turns in Ryan Murphy’s film adaptations of “The Normal Heart” and “The Boys in the Band,” both seminal works of gay theater.“I feel like I’ve been watching straight people express their sexuality in front of me my entire life,” Bomer said. “Now you can watch some of our experience onscreen.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesIn casting Bomer in “The Normal Heart,” Murphy recalled thinking: “Maybe this is the role that can show the world what Matt can do. I remember saying to him, ‘I can tell you can do this because you have a lot to prove.’” He also perceived that Bomer, an actor who had always relied on technique and charm, who had seen performance as one more way to hide, had a deep emotional well to draw from.“He knows what it’s like to struggle, and he knows what it’s like to be afraid, and he knows what it’s like to have people not believe in you,” Murphy said.Even as he played these gay roles, he continued on with straight ones, building a résumé that would not have been available to an out actor even a decade before. Murphy cast him opposite Lady Gaga in a season of “American Horror Story,” and he appeared as a Hollywood producer in a miniseries version of “The Last Tycoon.” He also filmed a second “Magic Mike” movie.Three and a half years ago, he read “Fellow Travelers,” the Thomas Mallon novel on which the series is based, with an eye toward starring in the adaptation. He was interested, but he didn’t really expect it to go forward. “There was a central part of me that has been in the business since I was 18, thinking, ‘Are the gatekeepers really going to give this the budget that it needs?’” he recalled.But the gatekeepers did. Ron Nyswaner, the showrunner of the series, wanted Bomer for the lead, intuiting that he could play both what Hawk shows to the world (charisma, ambition) and what he conceals (heart, desire, anguish).“Matt, for all his physical attractiveness and charm, he understands emotional pain,” Nyswaner said.When I asked Bomer what of himself he had given to Hawk, in terms of both effort and personal experience, his answer was simple: “Everything.” Finally, he is letting the camera see into his soul. In most scenes, Bomer plays two or three emotions simultaneously, some across the surface of his face and others roiling underneath. The show includes several unusually intimate sex scenes, and Bomer gave himself to these, too. With the consent of his co-star and an intimacy coordinator, he even improvised a few unscripted moments, as when Hawk licks a lover’s armpit.“I feel like I’ve been watching straight people express their sexuality in front of me my entire life,” Bomer said. “Now you can watch some of our experience onscreen.”In “Maestro,” Bomer plays a colleague and lover of Leonard Bernstein’s. (With Bradley Cooper.)NetflixIf Bomer has his way, there will be more to watch. He appears in Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro,” as the clarinetist and producer David Oppenheim, a colleague and lover of Leonard Bernstein’s. And there are plans for other series: a queer espionage drama, an adaptation of another novel. (His dream project is a “Murder She Wrote” reboot.) Then of course there are his other roles: husband, father, son, brother, advocate and activist for human rights.Bailey, who is a decade younger, described him as “a blinding light — a good blinding light! — of energy and commitment.” Bomer was someone he had looked to as he navigated his own career, a man who had nudged open a door and kept it open for others who came after. “He’s a beacon,” Bailey said.Predictably, Bomer takes a humbler approach. His concern is for what he has received, not what he might provide. His life has taken him, he said, from an industry suspicious of queer storytelling to one more receptive. From running from himself to settling down with a family and faith rooted in love and acceptance. Another man might discount the earlier years — the division, the prejudice, the pain — but Bomer doesn’t. It has made him who he is: a leading man and a man now able to take the lead in his own life.“I’m grateful, ultimately, that I got to see both sides,” he said. More
As director and star, Bradley Cooper delivers an intimate portrait of the composer and his many private and public selves.“Maestro,” Bradley Cooper’s intimate portrait of Leonard Bernstein, takes flight with a terrific whoosh of exuberance. The young Bernstein (played by Cooper) has just gotten the phone call that will change his life. He’s been asked to step in for an ailing guest conductor and lead the New York Philharmonic; it will be his conducting debut. Overjoyed, Lenny, as he’s often called, jumps up, throws open a curtain and then sprints out of his apartment to race, bathrobe flapping, into his dazzling, very public future as an American genius.The real Bernstein was 25 and an assistant conductor with the Philharmonic when he took the Carnegie Hall stage on Nov. 14, 1943, to polite applause. The program opened with Schumann, ended with Wagner, and by the time it was over, the house, as Bernstein’s brother, Burton, put it, “roared like one giant animal in a zoo.” The next day, The New York Times ran a story about the concert on the front page. A few days later, The Times followed up on the concert with a small item that likened Bernstein’s debut to a young corporal taking charge of a platoon when the officers are down: “It’s a good American success story.”In “Maestro,” Cooper explores the definition — and brutal toll — of that kind of success with deep sympathy, lushly beautiful wall-to-wall music and great narrative velocity. In outline, it’s a familiar story of a classic American striver. Bernstein was the son of Jewish-Russian immigrants who escaped a dire fate in the family business (the Samuel J. Bernstein Hair Company) to become a 20th-century cultural force. He conducted and composed, wrote for the ballet, the opera and Broadway, and was a fixture on TV. He had gold and platinum albums, was on the cover of Time and Newsweek, and won slews of Grammys and Emmys.It was a big juicy life, one that Cooper — who wrote the script with Josh Singer — has condensed into two eventful, visually expressive hours. “Maestro” is as ambitious as Cooper’s fine directorial debut, “A Star Is Born,” but the new movie is more self-consciously cinematic. Some of the choices — different aspect ratios as well as the use of both black-and-white and color film — nod at the look of movies from earlier eras. The visuals also convey interiority, swells of mood and feeling, as does Lenny’s explosive, at times ecstatic physicality, the full-bodied intensity of his conducting style and the orgasmic rivers of sweat that pour off him.“Maestro” is a fast-paced chronicle of towering highs, crushing lows and artistic milestones, most delivered in a personal key. Cooper packs a lot in without overexplaining the era or its titans (Brian Klugman plays the composer Aaron Copland, one of Bernstein’s closest friends); years pass in an eyeblink, events slip by obliquely or go unmentioned. Cooper is more interested in feelings than happenings, though part of what makes the movie pop and gives it currency is how he complicates the familiar Great Man of History template. Bernstein is rightly the main event in “Maestro,” but crucial to the film’s meaning is his relationship with his family, especially his wife, Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein (a brittle Carey Mulligan).Theirs was a fraught, decades-long relationship that begins in the 1940s when they meet at one of those fabulously glamorous New York parties that mostly exist in old Hollywood films or in biographies of very important dead people. There, amid a boisterous crowd of revelers wreathed in cigarette smoke and bobbing together on an ocean of booze, Lenny and his pals Betty Comden and Adolph Green (Mallory Portnoy and Nick Blaemire) are lighting up the room. Lenny and Felicia make their introductions, tuck into a quiet corner to flirt and laugh, their heads and bodies soon listing toward each other. By the time the night is over, they’re walking side by side, seemingly destined for a happily ever after.Cooper, who stars and directs, used different aspect ratios as well as both black-and-white and color film.Jason McDonald/NetflixIt didn’t turn out exactly that way for assorted reasons, including Bernstein’s overshadowing brilliance. He was also gay, though maybe bisexual; the movie nimbly avoids labeling him. (In her memoir “Famous Father Girl,” his daughter Jamie refers to him as both.) Instead, with roundelays of teasing and desiring looks as well as in asides and conversations (including a faithful restaging of an Edward R. Murrow interview), “Maestro” expresses the complexities of Lenny’s private and public selves. After Lenny receives that call to conduct the Philharmonic, for one, he playfully taps drumlike on the discreetly covered rear of his lover, David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer). And then Lenny rushes out the door alone.The opener introduces the idea of Lenny’s life as a performance, which becomes the film’s controlling metaphor. Cooper underscores this idea repeatedly, including when Felicia takes Lenny to the empty theater where she’s an understudy and where they playfully act out a love scene they seal with a Hollywood kiss. Sometime later, in an energetic swerve into surrealism, Felicia grabs his hand, and they sprint from an outdoor meal with friends and into another theater where three dancers in white sailor uniforms are waiting onstage. As with Lenny’s dash out of his bedroom and into Carnegie Hall, Cooper stages this sprint with the camera pointing down at the characters, as if it were running on an overhead catwalk.As Felicia and Lenny race into the theater, they look like performers hitting their marks and a bit like dollhouse runaways. The dancers start performing “Fancy Free” — Bernstein and Jerome Robbins’s ballet about sailors on shore leave in New York — then move into its musical adaptation, “On the Town.” With Felicia and Lenny watching, the sailors begin moving to the infectiously alive, jazzy music, their snaky hips and tight uniforms emphasizing the choreography’s muscular eroticism; and then a sailor beckons Lenny to join in the fun.Here and elsewhere, Cooper makes a point of showing Felicia watching Lenny first with what seems to be admiration, then love and later something darker, sadder and despairing. He’s already a name when they meet and already taking up a lot of room; soon, he is the star around which everything and everyone orbits, including Felicia and the three children they have together. He’s a bigger-than-big personality (flamboyance is a favorite adjective of Bernstein biographers), with a buzzing, heady vitality that feels like a life force or a painfully addictive high. It’s easy to see why she’s pulled in, but the exhilaration that initially lifts the film is a harder sell once Felicia and Lenny begin to fall in love.The movie makes the case that their love was genuine, even if Cooper and Mulligan never convincingly sync up. This disconnect doesn’t seem intentional, but it also serves the story and characters, including early on when Lenny’s and Felicia’s heightened emotions and smiles can feel forced, like an act of mutual will. Even so, you believe they love each other, however differently; and because Cooper spends a lot of time on Felicia, you grow to understand that she knows she’ll never be enough for Lenny. Yet in focusing so much on Felicia, whose light dims the brighter his blazes, stressing what it costs her to play a role in this performance of happy heterosexuality, Cooper also inadvertently shortchanges Lenny.Although Cooper makes Felicia the linchpin of his Great Man revisionism, the film’s most deeply felt scenes involve Lenny with his children and his close male friends. One centers on an anguished encounter he has with David. The other unfolds at Lenny and Felicia’s country home after the birth of one of their children and finds him walking across the lawn, the newborn in his arms. Lenny drifts over to Aaron Copland, who’s sitting under a tree on a swing with a smile. Lenny joins him and gently holds the baby so that Aaron can see the baby’s face. Lenny nuzzles the infant, and the two men just sit quietly as the tenderness of the moment — and the overwhelming cruelty of this world and all its terrible lies — knocks you flat.MaestroRated R for some discreet nudity and a whole lot of cigarettes and booze. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes. In theaters. More
The new drama, which follows a gay romance over several decades, is the first TV series created by the Oscar-winning writer of “Philadelphia.”Ron Nyswaner, the Oscar- and Emmy-nominated screenwriter, can still recall a chance meeting on a beach more than 50 years ago. Then a teenager and a self-described “Jesus freak,” he’d come to Ocean City, N.J., to attend a Youth for Christ conference. Late one night, he said, while walking alone, he saw “a gorgeous, muscular guy” across the sand.That young man asked him to speak in tongues — it was an invitation to religious ecstasy and nothing more. Nyswaner complied. He told me this story over lunch in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood, on a stormy afternoon in September, as a way to explain that, for him, “sex and the sacred have always been united.”He wanted that same union for “Fellow Travelers,” a new series that premieres Friday on Paramount+ and then on Showtime on Sunday.Moving back and forth from the early 1950s to the late ’80s, “Fellow Travelers,” based on the 2007 novel of the same name by Thomas Mallon, is a précis of 20th-century queer history viewed through a turbulent relationship between two men. Matt Bomer (“White Collar,” “Magic Mike”) stars as Hawkins Fuller, Hawk to his intimates, a State Department employee. Jonathan Bailey (“Bridgerton”) plays Tim Laughlin, a milk-drinking, God-loving naïf who dreams of working for Senator Joseph McCarthy.As they tumble through the decades — in and out of bed, in and out of love — the lavender scare, the gay liberation movement and the AIDS crisis happen around and through them.In “Fellow Travelers,” Jonathan Bailey, left, and Matt Bomer play men who move in and out of one another’s lives as history unfolds around them.Ben Mark Holzberg/ShowtimeNyswaner, who was dressed in all black save for a tan raincoat, claims to dislike love stories. “Yuck!” he said. (The two chunky rings he wore, mementos of former relationships, may have belied this.) But his genius resides in making the political feel shockingly intimate. Despite its many congressional hearings, “Fellow Travelers” is a love story, one illustrated with some of television’s most screen-fogging queer sex scenes. The first time Nyswaner read the novel, he fell in love with Tim and Hawk. It was that love — sexual, sacred — that inspired him to make the series, the first he has created for television.Nyswaner, 67, grew up in small-town Pennsylvania. Gay and closeted, he was an outsider as a child, an observer. That, he believes, is what made him a writer. After graduating from the University of Pittsburgh, he enrolled in Columbia’s film school. While still a student there, he slipped a script to the director Jonathan Demme. Demme optioned it, and Nyswaner has supported himself as a writer ever since.His first major success came in 1993 with “Philadelphia,” directed by Demme, the story of Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks), a lawyer who believes he has been wrongfully terminated by his firm because of his AIDS diagnosis. (Nyswaner, whose script earned him an Oscar nomination, makes a cameo in a party scene dressed as a priest.)By that time, Nyswaner was in the throes of drug and alcohol addiction. In the five years after the film’s release, newly flush with fame and cash, his addiction worsened.“I dedicated myself to cocaine and alcohol and sex, with tragic results,” he said. (He details this tragedy, which involves the suicide of a sex worker, in his 2004 memoir, “Blue Days, Black Nights.”)There was heat on him in Hollywood then. But he showed up to more than one meeting high on methamphetamines, and the heat dissipated. Which didn’t especially bother him. Having found success early, he has rarely been swayed by the demands of the market.“I always just wanted to write what I wanted,” he said.“The best thing you can do with any marginalized character is to make them as fully human and complicated as every other straight character that’s out there in the world,” Nyswaner said.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesNewly sober, he proved this. He scripted the 2003 true-crime Showtime film “Soldier’s Girl,” about an Army private’s relationship with a transgender cabaret performer, and followed that with the 2006 adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s doomed romance, “The Painted Veil.” Neither was intended for mainstream success, but these works had the heartbreak he loved, the passionate intensity.In 2012, his management team asked him what he wanted to do next. “Get me out of my house,” he told them. He had spent two decades living in upstate New York. Now, he found himself craving the crush of a big city and the camaraderie of a writers’ room. Though he had already optioned “Fellow Travelers,” he back-burnered it in favor of moving to Los Angeles and joining two Showtime series: first the punchy noir “Ray Donovan,” and then “Homeland,” the fervid espionage thriller. In 2018, when his time on “Homeland” ended, he felt ready to turn to “Fellow Travelers.”In “Fellow Travelers,” Nyswaner expands on the themes that define much of his film work — the ways in which longing, sex and secrets intersect with the law. In the series, the historical characters and events are meticulously researched. (There are perhaps a few aesthetic lapses — did men really work out this much in the 1950s?) But Nyswaner wanted to offer something more than a history lesson. Hawk and Tim and the show’s other queer characters are intimately involved in this history, and they are not mere bystanders and victims. Occasionally, they are aggressors.“The best thing you can do with any marginalized character is to make them as fully human and complicated as every other straight character that’s out there in the world,” he said.Many of those complications are revealed in the sex scenes. Thirty years ago, “Philadelphia” received criticism for shying away from gay sexuality. “Fellow Travelers” is not so shy. “Perhaps I overcompensated,” he said, laughing.Nyswaner said each sex scene was intended to move the story forward and dramatize a power exchange.ShowtimeNyswaner, who has something of the provocateur in him, described a scene late in the series, a threesome that leads to a nervous breakdown, as “very much me” and “one of my proudest achievements.” (For that scene he educated the director on the uses of amyl nitrate.)If these scenes are not especially graphic, they are unusually specific in their mapping of power and desire. Nyswaner had rules for these scenes, which were carefully choreographed and scripted. Each had to move the story forward. Each had to dramatize a power exchange. And no act could be repeated, which invited creativity in the later episodes.The queer characters are all played by actors who openly identify as queer. “It wasn’t a requirement, but it was certainly a strong motivator for us,” Nyswaner said. He believes the casting may have contributed to the veracity and intensity of these scenes.“I do think it might have really made a difference and made everybody more comfortable,” he said.Nyswaner isn’t sure if writing about gay characters is a path that he chose for himself or one that the success of “Philadelphia” forged for him. Either way he is glad to walk it.“I so love, love, love being a gay man,” he told me over lunch. “I enjoy being slightly to the side of everything.” He worries, of course, for the state of L.G.B.T.Q. rights, but he has always enjoyed this feeling of being an outsider. “Outlaw” was another term he used.He isn’t dating anyone just now. His preference, he said, is for “unsuitable men, some of them are quite delicious.” Colleagues keep encouraging him to download a dating app, but so far he has resisted. These past few years, his primary relationship has been with Tim and Hawk, the characters he fell for a decade ago.“I wanted to live within that relationship,” he said. “And I have.” More
The catalog was more than a place to peruse the latest fashions. It reshaped society’s definitions of masculinity.One of the most famous “Seinfeld” episodes involves Jerry wearing a flamboyant “puffy shirt” — which was pretty much a copy of the “ultimate poet’s shirt” sold by International Male. The piece of apparel might be a pop culture footnote now, but for a while the mail-order catalog that inspired it meant quite a lot, as evidenced by Bryan Darling and Jesse Finley Reed’s documentary.In the early 1970s, Gene Burkard, a gay former airman turned entrepreneur, slightly retooled a medical garment called a suspensory into a “jock sock.” Its mail-order success eventually led to Burkard’s launching International Male, whose catalog peddled unabashedly outlandish men’s clothing modeled by unabashedly sexy hunks.Narrated by Matt Bomer, the doc breezily chronicles International Male’s rise and fall from the 1970s to the mid-00s. As the fashion commentator Simon Doonan argues in the film, International Male documented — and reinvented — gay and straight men’s shared fetishization of masculinity. Casting aside the cloaking devices known as dark suits and white shirts, the catalog displayed butch specimens lounging in hot pants, crop tops and thongs, with color schemes running a retina-searing gamut from coral and lime to prints like purple zebra stripes. Anticipating Instagram, the company turned clothing into lifestyle, while also providing a coded fantasy outlet for gay men around the country.Admittedly, the film is more dutiful than artful, ticking one box after another, a tendency that is especially obvious when it ventures to the dark side of paradise (the ravages of AIDS on employees and customers, the lack of diversity among the catalog models). Then it’s right back to knights in white satin and the realization that men’s gauze harem pants were once an instrument of liberation.All Man: The International Male StoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More
