half-an-hour-hence - Tumblr blog

[half-an-hour-hence]

Matt Bomer in a Fedora hat save me…. Save me Matt Bomer in a Fedora hat….

[half-an-hour-hence]

Tim and Hawk in modern times would SO be those married gay guys who give out dad hugs at pride events 😭

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Listen, I love all of Tim’s eras, but if you don’t think that the 70’s was his best look you’re lying to yourself

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A lot of people (me included) talk a lot about how Hawk lives his life in secrecy, and how because he is so fearful of his sexuality being revealed he denies himself his desires. And of course that’s tragic. But not many people seem to be talking about how it’s the other way around with Tim.

Like he came out of the closet to everyone, including his family. If he was devoutly catholic, I can’t imagine how religious his family must’ve been. And we have little to no idea about the extent of their reactions - we don’t know if when he said his mother was praying for his soul was an understatement so Hawk wouldn’t worry so much. But Tim did that so that he could feel liberated and live as his true, authentic self.

Not only that, but he was an activist for gay rights. He stood up in front of complete strangers and fought for more to be done so that other people affected by AIDS might have a chance to survive. He forced people to listen when they thought that they could just stay ignorant and get away with having blood on their hands. And Tim did that until he was too weak to do it anymore. Until he physically couldn’t.

[half-an-hour-hence]

I’m trying to imagine what Hawk would do after the finale, after we see him for the last time with his daughter at the AIDS memorial. Because he’s so alone after Tim’s death; he doesn’t have a lover, his wife’s left him, he has two friends who live in San Francisco and a daughter who’s busy raising a family of her own.

The only thing I can imagine him doing is moving in with Marcus and Frankie in San Fran so he’s around people who understand not only him but also his grief. But I can’t see him moving on from his Skippy. Not after all the decades of loving him and yearning to express that freely.

I genuinely think all he does is try to cope. He sees his family occasionally, he hangs around with Marcus and Frankie and their friend group, and he tries to keep it together.

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If I see one more person in the comment section of a Fellow Travelers TikTok calling Hawk a villain I might actually end it all

[half-an-hour-hence]

Hawk seeing those gay couples outside the cafe and how loud and open gay people were in the 80’s physically pains me. Because this man was so scared of what society thought of him and his identity that he forced himself to conform to heterosexuality, to commit to a wife that he could never truly love and a family he could only lie to. Hawk did so many things he didn’t want to do to protect himself, and hurt a lot of people - including the man he cared for the most. And yet here he is, 30 years later, and two men are allowed to be together. There’s no investigation as a consequence of their relations, no reason to deny themselves something they need out of fear.

I just know he was thinking about what could’ve happened if society had realised that people like him weren’t ‘dangerous’ or ‘wrong’ earlier. It could’ve been him and Skippy walking down that street holding hands.

[half-an-hour-hence]

The Fellow Travellers hyperfixation is taking over my life. I’ve got to start revising for my exams soon and yet all I can think about is: ‘you were my great, consuming love’ ‘I’m looking at you’ ‘When I committed this sin I felt pure. More pure than I felt in my entire life. So how can I be sorry for it?’ ‘Promise you won’t write?’ ‘I won’t’ ‘They said they were going to tell my mother what I was. I begged them not to. She was sick. They told her anyway. She never looked at me again’ ‘But I don’t know how love can be a sin’ ‘I wonder sometimes, when it all happened, if I had offered to leave D.C with her and find some cottage somewhere’ ‘you’re innocent’ ‘My boy is dead, Skippy. My boy is dead’ ‘I think there’s something wrong with me’ ‘Sweetheart? He wasn’t my friend. He was the man I loved’

[half-an-hour-hence]

I need more people to talk about Mary and Caroline. GOD they were so tragic. We were introduced to Caroline for all of two seconds and you could already see how much they loved each other, how happy they were to have one another in their lives. And it all died in an instant.

The investigation made me feel sick to my stomach. And the letter. Oh my god. But I can’t find it in me to hate Mary for the same reasons as to why I can’t hate Hawk: she had to protect herself. Her selfishness was necessary and you could see how deeply it pained her to do that.

But the true gut punch was the photograph of Caroline’s child and the fact that she had to marry a man. Not only did she have to marry someone she wasn’t attracted to, but she had to then go through CHILDBIRTH (probably multiple times, too) and raise that child while also maintaining a functional household. Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away, the woman she loves is regretting not running away with her.

[half-an-hour-hence]

You know what I think about a lot? The conversation Tim has with the other gay man from Mary and Caroline’s party, where the man says that in order to maintain a relationship with God he had to go celibate.

Can you imagine what was going through Tim’s head during that moment? He feels as though his sexuality being widely considered to be a sin is wounding his connection to his religion and his god. And the only solution anyone has offered him to repair that connection is to refrain from sexual relationships, to limit the expression of his desires to glances from far away and the odd impure thought that would be so much easier to forgive than acting on them.

It’s especially hard because physical touch was one of the only ways Tim could be with Hawk - so the ultimatum he’s being offered here is to choose between God and Hawk. Two things he wants and two things he needs.

[half-an-hour-hence]

I wish we saw more of Mary and Tim’s friendship. She was like Tim’s lifeline - the only person he could properly confide in during the 50’s because she knew exactly how he was feeling.

I wonder what happened to her.

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Kinda have mixed feelings about how it turned out, but I tried to draw Hawk to accompany the drawing of 70’s Skippy that I did the other day

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Something else that was completely ruined by restrictive societal conventions in Fellow Travelers is Hawk and Lucy’s potential for a healthy platonic relationship. I mean it was stated several times that they were exceptionally close in childhood, and it was pretty obvious that Hawk had no romantic interest in her whatsoever, even after Skippy left in the 70’s. If Hawk’s sexuality wasn’t seen as being wrong and if Lucy wasn’t under constant pressure to get a husband and start a family, I think they would’ve stayed really close friends. But being forced together by social pressure like that just made them miserable and unable to bare the sight of one another.

[half-an-hour-hence]

To be honest, the writers of Fellow Travelers were FOUL for putting so many gut wrenching moments into the final episode. As if they hadn’t caused me enough emotional damage already with the other seven episodes. Like…what do you mean Jerome has AIDS?? What do you mean Hawk reported Skippy?? You’re expecting me to function properly after ‘you were my great, consuming love’?! And then recover in 0.1 seconds only to see Tim for the last time fighting for something he knows will save lives - not his, but other people’s?!

And what about the AIDS memorial? Roy Cohn’s quilt? ‘HE WAS THE MAN I LOVED?!’ How the memorial kept growing and growing and having to deal with the fact that every single quilt represents a real person with their own story?! FOUL. I was sobbing uncontrollably for at least the last half an hour of this episode and then for another half an hour after it finished. I demand compensation for the irreparable damage to my mental health.

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I tried to draw 70’s Tim because that was a LOOK

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GOD I cannot stop thinking about how beautiful Marcus and Frankie’s relationship is.

I just loved the acknowledgment of Marcus’s gravitation towards more masculine men and how that then shifted to the exploration of his confusion and struggle with adapting to the more androgynous nature of Frankie once he realised he was attracted to him.

Also how it was so important for the audience to understand black, queer experiences as well. I personally feel like I learned a lot from their stories - both individually and collectively - that I wouldn’t have with Hawk and Tim.

And the care and concern for Jerome was nothing short of beautiful. They took him under their wing, allowed him to experiment with his identity because they knew how badly a restrictive environment hurt. They knew he was innocent, and they lost him. But they showed another young, queer black man what it was like to be surrounded by people who loved him and were the same as him, conveying to him that it was possible to be happy in a world dominated by hatred.

I loved every aspect of their story. There are little things - like the poetry scene, the second park scene, how Frankie continues to take no shit on a regular basis and when Marcus confessed he loved Frankie to his dad - that made my heart soar for them. And then there are bigger things - like their conversations, arguments and how deeply their love for each other is etched onto their faces - that make me love them even more.

I could talk about them forever.

[half-an-hour-hence]

When people say they dislike Hawk I lose my mind. Is he selfish as fuck? Yes of course. Did he do questionable things that hurt other people? Yes he did.

But can we talk about how he loved someone before, how that someone literally DIED trying to stay close to him, and how incredibly guilty he would’ve felt about that? Can we entertain the possibility of Hawk being reluctant to love someone again in case the same thing happened?

Can we simultaneously talk about how his father found out about his relationship with this other man, disowned him, cut him out of the will, and ridiculed him until the day he died? Can we THEN talk about how his mother told Hawk he could apologise to his father for being who he was in order to be put back in the will, only for his father to talk to him like he was worth less than the shit on the bottom of his shoe and being forced to apologise for causing such an ‘inconvenience’?

And if that’s not enough, he’s got people he knows being fired from their jobs, ostracised from their family and friends, admitted to hospitals to have electroconvulsive therapy to be ‘cured’, and even going as far as to commit suicide because their sexualities have been discovered by people who think it’s disgusting and wrong. Hawk’s surrounded by this group of powerful people who wish to see people like him dead. There’s absolutely no way he’s going to raise his hand and admit that he is gay when he’s witnessed how people are punished for it. Nobody would - not when society was this oppressive and full of hatred towards queer people.

I cannot fathom the amount of fear that must’ve been controlling him, and the constant battle he must’ve been having within himself over what he wanted and what he could realistically have. He is not the villain here. The true evil is the views of society at the time. Hawk is a victim of his circumstances, and I will die on this hill.