Graphic and authentic, the sex scenes in 'Fellow Travelers' spotlight a dark chapter in LGBTQ+ history
Ron Nyswaner was a boy growing up in western Pennsylvania coal country when he saw a made-for-TV movie called "That Certain Summer." Broadcast in 1972, it starred Hal Holbrook as a gay father struggling to come out to his teenage son.
"There's a moment where Hal Holbrook says to his son, 'Do you know what the word "homosexual" means?'" Nyswaner recalled on a drizzly fall morning in Manhattan. "I remember breaking out in a sweat; I was just paralyzed."
"You have to imagine a world in which there are no gay characters on television, in films, in any book you'd read or any conversation you have. If you heard anything about being homosexual, it was derogatory. It was being called a (slur)," he added.
Over a four-decade career in film and TV, Nyswaner has told the kind of queer stories that were once vanishingly rare in pop culture. He was
