Giving books as gifts is a risk. Will they like it? Have they read it before? Do they hate this author? This genre? Is it too trope?
Boosted by the hit television series of the same name, Fellow Travelers found its way into wrapping paper and was gifted to me by my wonderful spouse a few years back. He’s long been a Matt Bomer fan (one of the stars in the television adaptation of the book), and thought I would enjoy it.
Small font size aside — yeah, my eyes challenge me sometimes but I refuse to get bifocals at this age — the book was the perfect gift.
Set in the 1950s as a historical fiction, weaving in McCarthy-era paranoia, the fear and tension bleeds through the pages as the potential and risk for the two male lovers getting discovered builds. But the worst-kept secret in the State Department office where one of the main characters works, is the private escapades and affair of their office mate.
“Is it really enough to only love and not be loved?”
The conflicts are many and as someone who grew up in the last decade of the 1900s, the tensions and fears felt all-too-real. The hiding. The secrecy. The shame of their hidden and colorful love range true then as it does now.
Did someone see me? Did they overhear something I said? Did I say something too friendly to that man? Did I really blush?
The questions then were questions I had as I came to my own sexual awakening in my late teens and early 20s.
And as a former politico, I felt myself at the fancy dinners eyeing the cute staffer from afar and dreaming of my next night with him.
But then, like now, love proved to be a challenge. In practice and in hopes.
Isn’t love the perfect gift? One you can give only when you want to but when you’re ready, give it unconditionally and with passion? It is a road we all travel.
Want to read it for yourself? Pick up your copy of Fellow Travelers by Thomas Mallon.
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