I always follow Jelani Alladin’s eyeline as I watch his scenes in Ron Nyswaner’s Fellow Travelers. I want to know what he is looking at, who he is honing in on, and, sometimes, whose gaze he is avoiding. His Marcus Gaines can be a man of few words even if those words have the potential to be his strongest weapon. In a performance boiling with complexity and intelligence, Alladin gives Fellow Travelers one of its many bleeding hearts. He reminds us that it’s never too late to tap into your own powerful passions.
Not enough people are talking about the similarities between Marcus and Matt Bomer’s Hawkins Fuller. They both have palpable lone wolf energy, and neither man is shy to talk about their love of men when they feel they are in safe surroundings. Out in public, the main difference between them is how Hawk can float through the world as a white man while Marcus still enters white spaces entirely alone. Early in the series, we see how he has to endure his coworkers speaking inappropriately about women or listen to others talk disparagingly about Langston Hughes, a poet so prophetic that Marcus feels Hughes’ words in his bones.
How does that focus of singular queer survival affect Marcus and his relationships as time parades forward? When we see Marcus and Noah Ricketts’ Frankie in the ’80s, Marcus has become a teacher and mentor for one of his students, and I couldn’t help but think of how this man has absorbed from his surroundings as each decade passes. Back in the 1950s, he rejected anything that would associate him with any femininity, but that presence of femininity, observed from Frankie’s fearlessness, also seeps into Marcus’ being.
Fellow Travelers highlights the lives of those who were forced to live in the shadows, but people like Marcus are called to the light. He witnesses how others are more than eager to drag queer and trans people back into a permanent darkness, and he refuses to be a part of that. Alladin paints the portrait of a man who demands respect from those he shares his life with, but it’s thrilling to see him command that same respect for himself.
Fellow Travelers is streaming now on Paramount+.
