Thomas Mallon's 'Fellow Travelers' is a must for readers and Seattle Opera fans alike

Reading Thomas Mallon's 2007 novel, "Fellow Travelers," I couldn't help but think it was always destined to become an opera.

Maybe that's the hindsight talking, or maybe it's just that the Lavender Scare was always bound to be the perfect setting for a devastating love story. In any case, Mallon's novel was perfect for the stage — and the screen, as it was later adapted into a Showtime miniseries.

The story of two men, Timothy "Tim" Laughlin and Hawkins "Hawk" Fuller, who fall in love during the McCarthy Era has all the hallmarks of classic opera, from the passionate romance to the bittersweet conclusion (spoiler alert). The novel is simultaneously a history lesson, delving into the very real way the U.S. government hunted and expelled gay people in the 1950s, and a painfully beautiful tragedy.

Mallon's work was adapted into an opera by the same name and premiered at the Cincinnati Opera in 2016. Now, the Seattle Opera is bringing "Fellow Travelers" back to the stage. The show opened on Saturday, and performances are scheduled through March 1, including Wednesday, Feb. 25, when "Pay What You Wish" tickets will be available.

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I was invited to the opening performance after interviewing Mallon at a talk hosted by Town Hall Seattle. We talked about "Fellow Travelers" as well as his new book, "The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983-1994," a powerful accounting of Mallon's early career, loves, and life through the AIDS epidemic; Mallon lost friends to AIDS, including a young love, Thomas Curley. The diaries are hefty, with 592 pages, but Mallon said they had to be that way to tell the whole story, one that makes for a perfect accompaniment to "Fellow Travelers" on the page and on the stage.

"My editor, unsurprisingly, wanted a shorter book," Mallon said. "I understand this, but I said unless the book contains literary life, unless it contains my hapless romantic life, unless it contains a lot of politics, unless it contains some of the ludicrous comedy of life at Condé Nast when I worked there as an editor, it's reductive. We were terrified [during the AIDS epidemic] every day, but we couldn't be terrified 24 hours of every day. You simply wouldn't endure, you wouldn't survive that way."

Taken together — reading the books, seeing the opera, meeting Mallon and being allowed to pick his brain — the entire experience was emotional. I loved the opera and cried, just as I did when I read what I thought was the most powerful line from the book:

The grand message — that love is love or, as the character Mary Johnson puts it on page 65, "love must trump politics" — came through clearly in both the novel and opera.

"The most endangered kind of love right now may be love between family and friends," Mallon said. "If you're like me, most of your friends are not happy with the incumbency, and you have plenty of friends to feel allied with, but... there are a couple of people in my life that I've just had to kind of withdraw from."

And that's not out of a disregard for conservative views.

"I've always been politically torn," he said. "In many respects, my political instincts were conservative ones. I grew up as a little cold warrior in a very pro-Nixon household."

(That didn't extend to the Ronald Reagan era for obvious reasons, he added, including Reagan's "complete indifference to AIDS.")

That "cold warrior" in Mallon came through in his character Tim, whose commitment to rooting out communism seems to blind him to the way his own government is also targeting gay men, men like himself. Mallon captures the absurdity of those efforts perfectly.

Readers and opera-goers may find themselves laughing nervously, for example, when Hawk is called in for an interview to determine whether he is gay — and, therefore, allegedly vulnerable to blackmail by the nation's enemies, as the bigoted logic went at the time. He's made to walk across the interview room, then told to read a newspaper article and a passage from "Of Human Bondage."

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Much like Mallon's diaries, though, "Fellow Travelers" not only describes the terrors of the time and its characters but also the joys. The most intimate moments between Hawk and Tim are hot enough to satisfy any contemporary romance reader.

"These were two characters trapped in a very claustrophobic situation. They could not socialize together without danger. They could not do all of the things that people today can do as couples," Mallon said, explaining that sex became like a form of dialog in the book. "The sex between the two of them is a form of expression. They are themselves during those scenes."

In that way, "Fellow Travelers" in all its memorable forms is also a reminder to not let paranoia and bigotry win — and to stand for something in dark times.

"What the hell else are you supposed to do?" Mallon said. "To live the way you want to live, to live as honorably as you can, and to fight against people whose idea of governing the country is pushing people around. That's the only word of semi-wisdom that I've got."