Editor’s Weekly Column: ‘Fellow Travelers’: Roy Cohn & Perils of the Closet

“Listen, kids who die — Maybe, now, there will be no monument for you, Except in our hearts, Maybe your bodies’ll be lost in a swamp, Or a prison grave, or the potter’s field, Or the rivers where you’re drowned like Liebknecht. But the day will come — You are sure yourselves that it is coming — When the marching feet of the masses Will raise for you a living monument of love, And joy, and laughter, And black hands and white hands clasped as one, And a song that reaches the sky — The song of the life triumphant Through the kids who die.” –Langston Hughes.

This excerpt from the powerful poem, “Kids Who Die” by mid-20th century poet, scholar and civil rights icon Langston Hughes is the segment recited in the current Showtime mini-series, Fellow Travelers, currently being aired. Through five of eight episodes to date, the remaining three upcoming chapters are aired on Fridays.

If the remaining three episodes match what’s been shown so far, I declare this series to be one of the very best ever done about gay people, right up there with the adaptation of Randy Shilts’ And The Band Played On, Tony Kuschner’s Angels in America and the late Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart. This one is based on the novel by Thomas Mallon by the same name.

The series is gritty and, in this case, the sex scenes, which stop short of being pornographic, are integral to an understanding of the characters, the times and the realities of the gay closets of the 1950s.

What the series most emphatically depicts with excruciating effectiveness is the seamless post-World War II world of repression and hate that defined the McCarthy Era and what flowed from it. The link that connects that era to the present day is provided by the singular figure of Roy Cohn, the closeted gay who was the counsel to Sen. McCarthy during his gay witch hunt hearings from 1952 into 1954, a key figure in that era who subsequently took on the career building of one Donald Trump;

One can surmise that Cohn’s obsession with securing all manner of special dispensations for a military consultant to the hearings, David Shine, was very much like what he later on did with Trump. Though Cohn died of AIDS in 1986, Trump has continued into the present time to fondly recall his association with Cohn (“Where’s Roy Cohn when I need him,” he’s been overheard quipping in public situations).

Still, the best treatment of Cohn belongs to Kurchner in Angels in America, which came out in the early 1990s in the midst of the still ravaging AIDS epidemic. But his role in Fellow Travellers is more thorough and damning.

So, the overriding theme of Fellow Travelers is the terrible reality of the closet, especially the particularly damaging effect of the fear-laden struggles of millions to live deceitful double lives.

As a boy in the 1950s, I was deeply impacted by all this. I grew into adulthood in the late 1960s and wrestled with the implications of confronting my own closet. How well, indeed, has the Fellow Travelers series resonated with my painful memories of those days.

It was only as I finished graduate school in Berkeley, Calif., that I screwed up the courage to break free of all that, but once I’d decided to, I barged out like a howling beast to become an activist.

Still, many remain in their closets today, so sadly true. Fellow Travelers helps viewers see how damaging the closet is to so many people on so many levels.

One chilly day in early 1969 I remember that I sat in a straight bar looking out the window at a gay bar in San Francisco and thinking to myself all the ways my life could be ruined just by walking across that street and into that bar.

Everything from being seen by someone where I worked walking in, to having a snitch inside who would expose me, to having the bar raided by the cops, to being beaten up by thugs, pickpocketed and/or blackmailed, to being subjected to unwanted coercion and numerous more.

I didn’t cross the street that day. That day.