'A man in a coffee shop said he'd shoot me for being gay'

Actor Jonathan Bailey has triumphed this year with the acclaimed drama Fellow Travelers, but he tells Nancy Durrant LGBTQ+ people still have a lot to fight for

- Nancy Durrant

QUEER as Folk, Will & Grace, It's a Sin: it's not as if TV hasn't tackled the gay male experience and well-before. But I can't think of a gay, straight (as it were) drama that matches the sweep and sheer mainstream gloss of Ron Nyswaner's new Paramount+ series Fellow Travelers. It's certainly the first I've seen that explores gay relationships in such an unapologetic yet nuanced and, well, expensive way, I tell Jonathan Bailey, when I meet him at the Corinthia hotel.

"Totally," he says. "And you can see it on the screen: the respect. In the early Nineties, you needed a straight superstar like Tom Hanks [in Philadephia] to bring a queer story and commission it. Cut to 30 years later, and it's the story itself that is the commissionable thing." I think the heartthrob star of Bridgerton is underselling his own clout a bit.

The series follows the love affair between Tim Laughlin, an idealistic young congressional staffer (Bailey), and the more experienced, cynical, handsome State Department official Hawkins "Hawk" Fuller (Matt Bomer, whose all-American jawline could open a can of spinach) that begins at the height of McCarthyism.

What stands out about the series, which opens in 1953 at the start of the Lavender Scare - the government crackdown on homosexual federal employees that resulted in upwards of 5,000 losing their jobs, and an alarming number taking their own lives - is that the gay leads are played by out gay actors.

Bailey has said before that the important thing is gay stories being told, rather than "appropriate" casting, and "I still 100 per cent stand by the fact that I think all actors should be able to do everything," he says. "But to have gay actors chronicling the oppression and the trauma of it, I think it only adds to the experience.