‘Fellow Travelers’ Sex Scenes: Matt Bomer Dominates Jonathan Bailey in a Steamy Display of Power

Matt Bomer‘s character in Showtime‘s new series Fellow Travelers, Hawkins “Hawk” Fuller, is a man who likes to take things. Specifically, lovers, and he likes to take them hard. In Fellow Travelers‘s premiere episode, “You’re Wonderful” — now streaming on Paramount+ — we watch in flashbacks to the 1950s as Hawk stalks potential hookups like a hunter would prey. Early on, he sets his sights on Jonathan Bailey‘s earnest young Catholic Conservative Tim Laughlin at an election party and approaches like a panther, closing in on the milk-drinking lad from multiple angles. First, Hawk’s a friendly face to Tim, then a professional fixer, and finally the older war hero is ordering his “boy” around the bedroom. Tim is happy to take orders from the handsome Hawk, but by the end of the first episode, the emotional bond the men are reluctantly forming threatens to upend the delicate balance of power between them.

Fellow Travelers is a show about the intersections of forbidden love and coveted power. It follows the decades-spanning love affair of Hawk and Tim, two Washington D.C. politicos forced to keep their romance behind closed doors. The first episode of Fellow Travelers introduces Hawk as the ultimate power player in and out of the bedroom, exploring his penchant for taking control in all areas of life. He knows how to maneuver in Washington as well as he can bring a lover — be it Tim or a random hookup picked up at the park restroom — to heel.

The sex scenes in Fellow Travelers are refreshingly steamy not just because they feature two openly gay actors exploring gay sex through a queer lens, but because they play out as expressions of power. Which is perfectly fitting for the show’s themes and its story.

Based on the book by Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers opens in the 1980s. An older Hawkins Fuller and his wife Lucy (Alison Williams) are holding a lavish party with friends, adult children, and grandkids to celebrate their upcoming diplomatic move to Milan. That’s when Hawk’s old friend Marcus (Jelani Alladin) shows up to share the news that Hawk’s real true love, Tim, is dying of A.I.D.S. in San Francisco. While Hawk deals with this news and decides to make an impromptu trip to his estranged lover’s deathbed, we cut to how the men first met during the rise of McCarthyism and fell in love despite Tim’s Catholicism and Hawk’s issues with emotional intimacy.

Part of how they fall in love? Sex.

After hooking Tim up with a gig in Senator McCarthy’s office, Hawk shows up at Tim’s lowly room in a boarding house. He pretends he was going to invite the younger man to dinner, but Tim has to decline because he’s already boiling a can of chicken soup on his hotplate and it’s a sin to waste food. Hawk hovers around Tim, quizzing him about sins. If it’s a venal sin to waste a can of soup, what kind of sin would it be if they were to kiss? After the two men share the soup, and a conversation about Tim’s past sexual experiences with a priest, Hawk goes in for the kill.

Hawk doesn’t use blindfolds or handcuffs to control Tim. Simply his confidence. Hawk starts to undress Tim before calmly ordering him to not only take Hawk’s trousers off for him, but to fold them. It’s a request that immediately makes it clear Tim is in a position of service. Hawk is in command.

And if the power dynamics weren’t clear to the audience yet, as Hawk takes Tim in the bed — thrusting his hand down the younger man’s pants to pleasure him — he asks Tim, “Are you my boy?” Tim is very much Hawk’s boy.

Of course, we didn’t even need this scene to know that Hawk likes to dominate in the bedroom. After meeting Tim, he goes to a park bathroom and picks up a trick named Eddie (David Tomlinson) for the night. When we see them in bed, Hawk is very forcefully pounding into the other man and slapping him hard. After both men finish, Hawk immediately shuts down any prolonged connection, giving Eddie a fake name and leaving.

But there’s something different about Tim. Hawk not only returns to Tim’s place — radio to muffle their moans in tow — but lets his “boy” convince him to tag along to influential gatherings, and later a gay club along with Marcus. Tim is able to do this by playing the coquettish submissive, begging Hawk for the invite while sitting in his lap…and then later sucking on Hawk’s whole foot.

It’s still early days in the series, but it’s clear by the end of the Fellow Travelers‘ premiere, that Hawk and Tim’s relationship might very well seesaw in power before the end of the series. Not only does the 1980s version of Tim ignore Hawk’s pleas to see him — leaving Hawk patiently waiting for a sign — but the final embrace we see in the episode is simply of the two lovers hugging each other.

Power plays might be what connects Hawk and Tim sexually, but their love threatens to put them on equal footing.

Fellow Travelers Episode 1 is now streaming on Paramount+ and will make its debut on Showtime on Sunday, October 29 at 9 PM ET.