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American Toxic Yaoi
9 Plays1 day ago
Prestige TV is gay now! Historical bottom dementia is on the menu as we tackle two different era-spanning toxic romances. Ben, NiNi and friend of the pod Captain Hands talk Interview With the Vampire and Fellow Travelers.
Episode transcript available here.
00:00 Welcome
00:55 Introduction
02:25 Interview With The Vampire
12:27 IWTV: The Vampire Mythos
17:28 IWTV: The Best Bits
21:35 IWTV: Claudia
26:55 IWTV: Queerness in the Story
36:19 IWTV: Gay Paree
41:24 IWTV: Final Thoughts and Ratings
51:16 Fellow Travelers
01:04:44 Fellow Travelers: Hurt People Hurt People
01:13:22 Fellow Travelers: The Saga of Hawk and Tim
01:21:20 Fellow Travelers: Final Thoughts and Ratings
01:28:38 Outro: More Toxic Tales Please!
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:21
Speaker
Welcome to The Conversation, the queer media and brown liquor podcast. I'm Ben, the media critic. I'm Nini, the Vig's queen. And we're your drunk Caribbean uncle and auntie who are sitting on the porch in the rocking chairs.
00:00:33
Speaker
We're here to talk queer film and dramas with a special focus on Asian QL. So if you like deep dives into queer stories, if you like cracked out takes on art and commerce and queer media, if you just enjoy simping for attractive people, we believe in simping.
00:00:50
Speaker
Tune
00:00:56
Speaker
And we're back.
Western Content Discussion: 'Interview with the Vampire' & 'Fellow Travelers'
00:00:58
Speaker
Ooh, you came in hot there, Ben. Try it again. And we're back.
00:01:04
Speaker
Just like these couples. ah That's right. Let's try and save it. We return to the booth, finally, to discuss some Western content. Everybody who's here for BL, you can sign off now.
00:01:18
Speaker
We are here tonight with our good friend, Captain Hands. Say hi, Captain Hands. Hi, Captain Hands. Captain Hands, who graciously offered to complete the transcripts from the early days of the show.
00:01:35
Speaker
joined us at the end of that long project to not talk about BL and instead talk about people who would definitely post through their divorces if they had access to socials.
How Captain Hands Influenced Ben's Viewing Choices
00:01:47
Speaker
We're going to talking about the AMC interview with the vampire and Showtime's fellow travelers. These are the most divorced people that you will ever see on screen.
00:02:03
Speaker
I was unprepared, honestly, for both times that I sat down to watch these things. It's like, oh, people are talking about this. This should be fun. Only to be hit with some of the most toxic shit I've ever seen in my life. And I ate it the fuck up.
00:02:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:02:25
Speaker
Captain Hands is the reason I actually started watching Interview. You started posting aggressively about it. And I was like, what's going on? The show's fucking phenomenal. So I needed everybody to see it.
Vampire Tales: Louis and Lestat's Complex Relationship
00:02:39
Speaker
What's your familiarity with Anne Rice's work? And why did you pick up the show? I don't have... any familiarity with Anne Rice outside of like generally vague knowledge.
00:02:50
Speaker
Well, she's very Catholic. The scene in the church at the end of episode one was not at all ah hint towards that. Oh boy. So you hadn't watched the Brad Pitt show?
00:03:01
Speaker
Not really any familiarity with the source material at all, film or books. I think just everyone at some point around me was talking about Interview and I was like,
00:03:13
Speaker
but I love Jacob Anderson and I love gay people. so this should go well. And then it did go very, very well. When in combination. I, of course, was aware of the Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise version of Interview. i have never actually watched it all the way through. Like, I've seen bits and pieces of it over the years.
00:03:35
Speaker
I have never actually read any of the Anne Rice vampire books. So this, for me, is the definitive version of the story. so I've... Watched the Brad and Tom film.
00:03:48
Speaker
I guess I'll do the basic setup for what this is. So in the modern era, vampire Louis de Poindelac invites renowned journalist Daniel Malloy to sit down and have an interview with him where he's going to talk about his experience as a vampire and primarily his feelings about his ex.
00:04:11
Speaker
So many feelings. In the AMC show, we pass back and forth between the interview and the present and the events of the past. And we're meant to question constantly Louis' recollection of the past because it's framed around a lot of his big feelings about everything that happened.
00:04:33
Speaker
Louis was ah successful businessman the older era of New Orleans and He gets pursued by the vampire Lestat and eventually turned by him.
00:04:48
Speaker
and the two have a toxic relationship for decades that ends pretty badly for both of them, but especially Lestat.
00:05:00
Speaker
And then Louis goes on to try and live after him. It's a little difficult to talk about all this without like... Trying to give everything away. Yeah, you don't want to immediately give away where the story goes, but I feel like there's no way to talk around the events of the story.
00:05:19
Speaker
Let's just own some of the major events of the story. Massive spoilers to follow. Louis is pursued by Lestat. Their relationship is good at first, but it sours.
00:05:30
Speaker
Louis, being a man of his era, thinks a baby can fix their relationship. They eventually turn a young girl into a vampire as well. This is okay at first, but this also goes bad after a while because Claudia is an aging person trapped in a child's body.
00:05:51
Speaker
Eventually, as things sour with Lestat, Claudia convinces Louis that they have to kill him to get out of being under his thumb. They attempt
The Impact of Immortality on Toxic Relationships
00:06:01
Speaker
to kill Lestat, are mostly successful, and then in the second season, they go off to Europe to be depressed together.
00:06:10
Speaker
Louis ends up with the vampire Armand, who we eventually learn was also once with Lestat. Big problems unfold as the Paris Coven is not happy with the New Orleans vampires and their bullshit.
00:06:28
Speaker
Put them on a sham trial and then find out why Claudia isn't around anymore. In a truly horrific scene expertly performed by Delaney Hales.
00:06:39
Speaker
Listen, y'all, Ben's like underselling it here. This shit is wild. it is crazy. It is tragic. It is toxic. It is psychologically horrifying.
00:06:51
Speaker
i took psychic damage watching this show in the best way possible. Captain Hands, you said you were coming to this unfamiliar with any interview lore. What is your experience following Louis' recollections?
00:07:06
Speaker
What hooks you into this? What are you so compelled by? I just love a Good Mess and that whole relationship is so fucked in such a fun way Watching the way that Louis and Lestat navigate their relationship, both the points where it is good and the points especially where it's super, super bad.
00:07:29
Speaker
Casting Jacob Anderson and having Louis be black It's like a really interesting thing, I think, that you then get an extra level of complexity to the dynamic between Louis and the Stott.
00:07:39
Speaker
I love a good toxic relationship. I don't think there's enough super strong portrayals of that type of complexity. ah It's so clear that they love each other and they can't really get enough of each other and they are driving each other up the fucking wall.
00:07:55
Speaker
I think you get so much more juicy content there. out of that type of dynamic where like you can't actually get away from the problems because you don't fully want to get away from the person.
00:08:07
Speaker
Some of the problems and some of the toxicity comes from just sheer grinding day in day out longevity of the relationship. Maybe if they had taken a few years break away from each other at any point during this, maybe they would not have absolutely like created the messiest mess that you have ever seen in your life.
00:08:31
Speaker
But the fact that they're immortal and they're gay in a time when both of those things mean that they have to live a more or less secret life,
00:08:43
Speaker
which means that all they really have is each other be in, day out, every day for decades. Like, yeah, murder is bound to happen.
Anne Rice's Adaptation: Race, Class, and New Orleans
00:08:56
Speaker
Yeah. I think it's interesting too, especially in stories like this where you have that immortality aspect and the super strength and all this other stuff that you're going to get just inherently more violent outbursts to see the kind of fights that happened between louis and the star and how utterly they were beat to shit is something that you're not gonna see as often in like other content because like that would have killed anybody but they're just vibing looking at claudia and like her anger and the way that she just goes and fucking murders everybody because she's having a really hard time navigating being as young as she is and being a vampire and all of the stuff that has changed in her life and then seeing
00:09:42
Speaker
that type of anger exists in both Louis and Lestat as well. And the ways in which that ties them together is really interesting. Those explosions, I just feel are bound to happen when you get the type of emotional immaturity that you have in someone like Lestat, who should really know better by now with how old he is, but alas.
00:10:02
Speaker
There's a lot to say on that front. I'm so sorry for Nini in the editing room later. I just said it's in the Untamed. I am untouchable at this moment. Bring it on. Let's start with the adaptation component of this.
00:10:18
Speaker
So much about putting them in New Orleans was just so fucking fun for me because I'm from here. It was so cool to see the city in this particular time period and how much they gave a shit about it.
Queerness and Monstrosity in Vampire Narratives
00:10:31
Speaker
Making Louis black and Creel required them to move the story forward about 40 years. And this changes the dynamics significantly.
00:10:43
Speaker
In the source material, Louis' family is former plantation owners. So he's like declining old money-ish when Lestat finds him. In the 1910s version of Louis we get in the show, we have far more interesting dynamics with him having to navigate the triune racial structure that New Orleans lost after the Civil War.
00:11:10
Speaker
Making Louis French and black and urban has this really incredible layer. Louis' family is doing what they can to maintain the particular type of wealth they have here.
00:11:24
Speaker
Louis is essentially tasked with dealing with the ugly work of his family to maintain that. i find the fact that the closeted gay son is also doing ugly work on behalf of the family.
00:11:38
Speaker
really compelling aspect for when Lestat finds him. On top of the whole vampire transformation thing, one of the aspects of their toxicity that I think is so compelling and why the story works so much, we know they break up.
00:11:54
Speaker
Everything we're seeing is the past. There's no real rooting for anybody. In like a I hope they work it out way. Because we explicitly know that they don't.
00:12:06
Speaker
Shipping TM doesn't work in the traditional sense of you expect the story to resolve this. At least in the past. There's hope for the future. Vampire Lestat the Rockstars Season 3. I'm excited to see how they adapt that section.
00:12:27
Speaker
I always love monstrosity as a symbol for queerness. To have gay vampires is just right in my wheelhouse. One of the most compelling things about the vampirism of this is that it essentially traps the person in the moment of their death. An ugly place for most people to be, which is what's so inherently wrong with Louis.
00:12:49
Speaker
When Lestat finds Louis in the church, he is at the end of his rope. Louis, who is deeply unwell, is going to spend his internal afterlife trapped in the moments where he was facing doubt, facing extreme feelings of self-harm.
00:13:13
Speaker
And he is always going to be there because one of the biggest things we learned about vampires is that they don't gain new skills after they die. They have the skills that they had when they died.
00:13:26
Speaker
It's why Lestat is always mad about music because he can't create anything new. This is also its own kind of hell. All of these people are trapped in some of their worst moments.
00:13:39
Speaker
For the rest of their lives. And there really is no reasonable path for them to genuinely improve themselves. We know, having seen two seasons now, that Louis has many terrifyingly dark moments where he wanted to hurt himself or tried to hurt himself.
00:14:00
Speaker
Aside from that idea of them being stuck in the moment that they died with their mental and emotional state, they're also stuck in their grudges. When you think about all of the vampire characters, they are totally stuck in having the same grudges that they had when they died. And those grudges animating them.
00:14:20
Speaker
Lestat is never going to get over the primal wound of being abandoned. Louis is never going to get over the primal wound of being shunned.
00:14:31
Speaker
Claudia is never going to get over the primal wound of being left for dead. These are the things that they're essentially grappling with throughout the rest of their eternal lives. And the minute any of them comes even close to maybe healing that primal wound, it's basically the end for them.
00:14:52
Speaker
The whole thing is just a fucking mess. you even heal from something I you don't which is really interesting to me because we're looking back at this tale from a point in the future we're seeing a Louis who is seemingly calm and controlled and has ascended beyond all his petty trivial concerns have you looked at that man's eyes crazy as that's why I said seemingly it's always worse when they get calm
00:15:27
Speaker
I feel like it just is always more chilling once it's like, oh, you seem extremely put together. but he's not. He's a appearing that way. But the fact that he's even doing this fucking interview and spending hours and hours talking about his apparently dead ex.
00:15:44
Speaker
In front of his new boo. Yeah, like you've been with the new boo longer than you were with the old boo and you're still talking about the old bo You're still talking about your ex when we've been together for almost 100 goddamn years.
00:16:02
Speaker
What am I supposed to do with this if I am more fun? And then fast forwarding again to the future of the future, finding out later on that... maybe Louis wasn't being entirely truthful either with himself or with Malloy a about that relationship.
00:16:20
Speaker
He gave a version of it that put everything on Lestat. And then at the end, you start to see that version crumble a little bit. Listen, psychic damage watching this show.
00:16:35
Speaker
I feel like I can't even talk about it in a coherent way because all I want to do is like point at certain scenes and scream out loud. I have the same problem where if something's really good, I can't form coherent thoughts around it because my mind is just like blown I do think something that is really important to this story, especially because it is as toxic as it it is, is the fact that it is first-person telling.
00:17:01
Speaker
Nobody's a reliable narrator. Louis can put all of it on the start, but we know that that's not true by the end. It is an additional sign of toxicity to me. Louis is spending all of this time with Malloy, just trying to immortalize his particular version of events.
00:17:16
Speaker
Especially once we find out what happened to Malloy after the original interview. and
00:17:29
Speaker
I know for Nina, you watched it all as like basically one experience. For Captain Hands and me, we watched as two distinct seasons of television. And I haven't had such a positive experience with the second season of an American show since like Black Sails.
00:17:45
Speaker
We end the first season with them murdering Lestat, TM, and then fucking off to Europe in the middle of the Second World War. We know that Louis isn't capable of actually finishing off Lestat.
00:18:00
Speaker
We know that that's going to be a pain point in his relationship with Claudia. Because we had really only been given Louis' point of view and specific excerpts from Claudia, I was not too keen on reconciliation of some sort between Louis and Lestat.
00:18:19
Speaker
In the second season, being given greater insight into some of Lestat's motivations and realizing how much Louis was wrong about As is really compelling compelling transformation for me as a viewer, they finally reunite in the middle of our hurricane in New Orleans on subtle imagery.
00:18:44
Speaker
These two messy ass homos. The Mississippi River is one of the most dangerous rivers to jump into in the world. Louie swam across that river to go beat that man's ass because of a record he sent him.
00:19:02
Speaker
They're just so fun to watch. Like, this has to be a TV show, because if this were real, I would just be following these people around with popcorn as my daily entertainment. Lestat is such a mess.
00:19:14
Speaker
The fact that he's, like, got his side piece in front of Louis is absolutely insane. And then he got the nerve to be jealous if Louis tries it with some other dude.
00:19:26
Speaker
I have literally like seen this happen in real life and it was so entertaining. I keep thinking about the Claudia character. i think the most, I think one of the things that plays better for me this time around is how much more regard for Claudia I have.
00:19:44
Speaker
And I really think it comes down to the strength of both performances and also making her just a little bit older. To let an older actress play some of the horror of that whole scenario.
00:19:59
Speaker
I keep getting haunted by some of Claudia's final monologue. God damn it. wish I had the clip handy. Ben's definitely gonna find the clip and link to it.
00:20:10
Speaker
Don't you worry. I sure will. It's just so good. Like, her final fuck you to the whole crowd is so good.
00:20:23
Speaker
One of the things that's really compelling about this story is how fucking stupid Louis is. Like, lived together with Lestat for literal decades.
00:20:35
Speaker
Asked not a damn question about any vampire shit. And then they end up in Europe and start getting their asses handed to them. Louis was basically a trophy wife.
00:20:46
Speaker
He really was. Didn't even make sure to get a will or nothing, Jesus. No life insurance. They are in Europe looking for connection and a sense of purpose.
00:20:59
Speaker
Claudia is trying to find other vampires. And then she asked Louis legitimately, like, are you here with me? And he's looking at the fucking hallucination of Lestat and is talking to him instead.
00:21:11
Speaker
I'm never getting over that sequence in the back of that truck. He was really talking to Lestat when Claudia is asking him a question. And she really thinks that he's talking to her. And I want to scratch everybody's eyes out.
00:21:36
Speaker
chapter I want you to reflect on the Claudia narrative in particular. From being turned by these guys, reveling in the power, recognizing the box that she's kept in.
00:21:50
Speaker
Her first attempt to flee to Europe. The way that that ends on two different ugly fronts. And then their journey to Paris. That's a whole lot.
00:22:01
Speaker
I'm so happy to talk about her because she is undoubtedly my favorite character and so fundamentally the most tragic character, at least to me in all of this. I think it's really interesting to have this young Black girl on the verge of womanhood in a pretty poor area now suddenly gain a bunch of power and have the ability to enact that power against other people.
00:22:26
Speaker
And she's also trapped as this like 16, 17 year old girl forever. i think that they turned her at 14, which is even worse. Even worse, because then like she's looked at as a child her whole life.
00:22:39
Speaker
That has to be simply the most frustrating possible thing so like develop mentally and never be looked at as an adult.
00:22:53
Speaker
Never have complete autonomy She didn't ask to be turned. She was turned against her consent. She was used as like a toy, basically, for like Louis and the Stott to fawn over as a bandage for their super fucked up relationship.
00:23:10
Speaker
She does not have a lot of guidance and she has a lot of anger. And so... She goes on a killing spree that nobody really helps her through. That cuts to the river when all the bodies come floating up.
00:23:26
Speaker
Just like a really good visual metaphor for how much pain and like rage she's in and how much she is taking that out on people around her who can't fight back the way that Louis and the stock can fight back.
00:23:41
Speaker
Claudia and Louis end up having this type of special relationship because they can read each other's minds and Lestat is out of that. I think it's especially important in this version where Louis and Claudia are both black and Lestat is white and rich and powerful and French and not Creole and not from New Orleans and all of these other things that like really keeps Lestat outside of their little world in ways that I don't think Lestat likes because I think Lestat likes to get his little fingers and fucking everything and feel feels like he has a right to it as well she just wants to be loved and i do think she is but i think that love is hidden behind the love that louis stop have for each other and the toxicity that they have towards each other man i'd get tired too like i think claudia's just fucking over it by the end because who wouldn't be seeing what happens even when they go to europe after claudia does some truly genius fucking double crossing and manages to pull off this thing with
00:24:42
Speaker
drugging people to try to get Lestat killed. They're still not safe because not only are they in a fucking war, they're vampires in a place that's super against vampires and actually believes that they exist.
00:24:55
Speaker
How do you find safety in that? And then you get to Paris and she has an opportunity to to finally kind of be more independent and she finds Madeline and she joins the troop And she's still fucking stuck. Like 50 years she has to wait to play a role in this theater.
00:25:13
Speaker
and then she's stuck playing a fucking baby. So she never gets a chance to be seen as an adult except for by Madeline. And then they die. And that's just fucking awful.
00:25:26
Speaker
and the source material she is turned at the age of five. Oh no. Fuck. So, replay the whole show you've seen and make her a five-year-old. That is fucked That's fucked up. Anurice is from hell, you.
00:25:43
Speaker
The thing that's really interesting with Claudia as a character is she's dying when we meet her. And then she's turned immortal. But she's been dead this entire time. Like, the second we start this show, she's been dead this whole time.
00:25:54
Speaker
And there's literally nothing that saved her. Like, she's just been... on a delay. Very Eternal Yesterday style. but Eventually she's just going to haunt this narrative.
00:26:05
Speaker
It doesn't matter that she's upright and breathing right now. Her time is very limited and there's nothing that Louis can do to stop Claudia from dying. i think that's what brings Louis and the Stott back together at the end.
00:26:19
Speaker
Armand does not care for Claudia. I think my favorite scene in the entire show so far is when Claudia dies and the Stott's reaction. like watching his daughter turn to dust.
00:26:32
Speaker
Putting that in the context of Anne Rice losing a daughter at five of leukemia and then making a vampire book, which so heavily involves blood, and then having Claudia in the original like be five years old.
00:26:45
Speaker
I think a lot of it is just this exploration of grief on Anne Rice's part.
00:26:57
Speaker
I find the queerness of the show in particular so compelling for me. Like, Louis is closeted on so many fronts. Even despite ostensibly being out now, you can still feel the psychological walls that he's having to tread around whenever he does anything.
00:27:21
Speaker
Like, even when he stresses, this is the vampire Arman, the love of my life. You can feel the shaky uncertainty that comes with growing up queer and closeted.
00:27:32
Speaker
So painful. I don't know how Jacob found that. It's good. He's so fucking good. of the things that I do like about Louis and Armand is that they are presenting themselves as, you know, the proper gays, the proper vampires. They do things the proper way.
00:27:51
Speaker
They're not threatening. They're not scary. They're very civilized. Sure, they'll make eye contact while they drink the blood of a rat in front of you, but otherwise... There's a certain type of queer person who is very much about not scaring the normies.
00:28:07
Speaker
And I feel like a lot of what Armand and Louis are trying to present to Malloy is that idea of not scaring the normies. Even the fact that Louis is sharing this story with Malloy and he wants the story to be out there, he really wants to be seen as...
00:28:24
Speaker
quote unquote, as normal as everybody else, which is a queer metaphor. The whole, I am not a scary monster. i am a man of taste and refinement kind of thing.
00:28:35
Speaker
it hit me so hard. Even when you look at their surroundings, I'm like, what is the set design telling me about these people right now? It's very...
00:28:46
Speaker
High art, very austere, very severe, very refined, but so cold. It's like a mausoleum. Truly. and you contrast that with the house that you shared with Lestat.
00:28:58
Speaker
Night and day, chalk and cheese. It's like you met the new boo. And you're just trying to cast away all the things about yourself that were part of the old relationship. You're trying to make yourself into a new human being through your relationship with this new person.
00:29:14
Speaker
But it's not working because wherever you go there, you fucking are. yeah But what's so interesting about this is Armand's ability to say no to Louis. Because for all of the rule following that they do, making this interview...
00:29:29
Speaker
outing their entire existence is the biggest no-no. Why is Louis doing this? It's because he wants to die. And he is creating conflict with other vampires because he wants to die.
00:29:43
Speaker
Also, he wants to see Lestat again. This is how he accomplishes that. The line that Louis has about being thankful that the last sunrise he saw was marred by his brother jumping off a roof. So he's never felt the pain of missing ah sunrise in like the hundred plus years that he's lived is just so heartbreaking.
00:30:04
Speaker
We didn't talk about your brother. Oh my God. Listen, people, psychic damage. We lose his family so quickly. He ends up distanced from them within like 10 or 20 years becoming a vampire because it's obvious that there's something wrong with him.
00:30:17
Speaker
He also almost ate his nephew or his niece. He did try to hold on to his family for actually so long. But as you mentioned, Ben, he was already sort of half in half out of them.
00:30:28
Speaker
His family is very religious. They know he's queer, but they turn the blind eye to it until they can't turn the blind eye to it anymore. Not only is he showing up with this man, it's this white man, it's this French white man, you know what I mean?
00:30:40
Speaker
There's so much that in the end they can't turn a blind eye to, but he keeps trying to stay connected to them to hold on to his humanity. And little by little, it all slips away until he, like you said, tries to eat his niece. And then he realizes that he can't hold on to it anymore.
00:30:57
Speaker
He has to let it go. He has to let those relationships go. I'm also super invested in what's happening immediately in the present with Daniel. The fact that this is their second interview, that the first interview was broken up, that there questions about what happened during the first interview, that Daniel is sick and they know it, but now they want to finish the interview, that he's having to navigate this incredibly dangerous scenario.
00:31:28
Speaker
With two incredibly powerful, deeply unstable beings. Like, I'm never mad when we skip out of the past and Louis' ongoing self-righteous monologuing to focus on the present and Daniel.
00:31:43
Speaker
Sidebar. louis whole shtick is so insufferable just makes you want to stab him through the eye dude get over your fucking self oh my god okay i had to get that out of my favorite piece of behind the scenes content is when armand is doing the whole like rashid cosplay for the first season We see Asad Zaman holding like a fucking iPad. He was legit playing games in that iPad because he was just chilling in a lot of these scenes.
00:32:17
Speaker
God. A nice behind-the-scenes tip Armand playing games in the first season. Like that puts a lot of distance between him and actually paying attention to anything that Louie's saying.
00:32:30
Speaker
I'm so sorry to the Tumblr user whose username I don't remember, but they did a really cool like screenshot. You had to give me a research. project of louis and the start sharing a coffin and then like armand and louis sharing a bed and how much distance is between louis and armand versus how close the start and louis are as you were saying nini the set design just really speaks to like the warmth and the closeness i would not say that house is like maximalist but it's definitely more so than armand and louis penthouse
00:33:02
Speaker
Armand will never say, come to coffin. Exactly. in the middle of that, you have the 80s with Armand and Louis' apartment with Malloy's first interview. did not really grok into the set design of that apartment.
00:33:18
Speaker
It wasn't really their apartment. It was more like a dump house. Yeah, it doesn't feel germane to their lives. It doesn't feel like their home. It feels like a place where they were. It feels like the 80s. It's just a place where you go to shoot up. Mm-hmm.
00:33:31
Speaker
I'm not even being funny. Like, that's legit what that house was. It was a place for Louis to fuck boys and sometimes eat them. Eat them and eat them.
00:33:44
Speaker
I'm going to insert rimshot sound effect right here. Incredible. Sorry, I'm 12 tonight. these relationships just don't work but in really interesting ways like louis will clearly never be happy with armand but he'll also never be settled with lestat despite his inability to get over him okay i gotta to talk about sam reed now sam reed is my favorite performer in this whole series jacob anderson is an incredible talent and talent at
00:34:19
Speaker
accent and voice work like he gets to basically play louis straight louis is an incredibly tortured character and jacob gets to lean into how fucked up and tortured the louis character is but what's so monstrous about lestat isn't just the fact that he is selfish and cruel is that he's a fucking clown about it like Lestat is so French about his sense of humor.
00:34:49
Speaker
He behaves like he's a fucking mime half the time. I'm so compelled by Sam's performance as Lestat, especially hallucination Lestat.
00:35:02
Speaker
Sam knows exactly what he's doing because Lestat is an evil clown and he knows it. And Lestat knows it, which is even more fun. Yeah.
00:35:13
Speaker
Lestat. He is very focused on seeming Cavalier and Bravais d'Angers. He's the ultimate poser. Everything with him is, oh, it's ironic.
00:35:24
Speaker
He is the poster boy for the modern era, honestly. I can't wait to see him be a rock star. He's gonna do great. He's gonna do fantastic. Lestat deserves to be high on cocaine 24-7.
00:35:37
Speaker
I mean, does cocaine even get vampires high questions? Anyway, he's doing this whole act. To hide the abandoned child within.
00:35:48
Speaker
It's very much a, oh, I don't really care. It's fine. I'm so cool. Just let me wear my leather jacket and smoke this cigarette. I am le tired.
00:36:00
Speaker
I think I will have sex with my sister. Ben's right. It's very French. And like, he's fucking crushing it. Honestly, he's doing amazing, sweetie. Good job. Yeah, you can tell he's having a lot of fun.
00:36:19
Speaker
I think it's interesting, too, that Louis and Claudia end up in Paris without Lestat. I would have be interested to see their dynamic with Lestat, who is French, being in France. He never would have taken them.
00:36:30
Speaker
He would have never taken them there, first of all. And second thing, I find it really compelling... that Paris is where they went because they know that's where Lestat is from and they're looking for other vampires.
00:36:42
Speaker
Lestat warned them about other vampires and they went directly to his home looking for other vampires. It's almost like they were daring him I was like, my God, really? Y'all are not even subtle about this.
00:36:59
Speaker
They were both obsessed with him to the point that they had to go to the source. They found the source and the source was hell and it got Claudia killed. There's so much about Paris. The fact that Armand has always hated that he is constantly put in charge of ah He despises it. Like, he is wallowing when Lestat finds him.
00:37:22
Speaker
Lestat's like, I refuse to be gay and sad. Y'all can cut this ugly shit out right now, take a shower, put on some fucking colors, and we can go do other shit.
00:37:33
Speaker
Armand was waiting for someone to blow that up for him. He's always waiting for someone else to take charge of the scenario he's in. We get this whole situation with the Paris Coven where they were all just like morose assholes. And Lestat's like, we can at least have fun with this.
00:37:50
Speaker
Embrace the clown in you. Join my theater. And then he leaves that because he gets bored or whatever. He fucks off to do something else. They stumble into this later and we get Ben Daniels, fantastic Santiago, who is...
00:38:05
Speaker
over Armand's bullshit and wants to take control, has to get rid of Louis and Claudia as a result, puts them on trial for violating vampire laws. The fact that they did that in front of a crowd of actual humans.
00:38:21
Speaker
Incredible cinema. who The whole Théâtre de Vampire is wild. The fact that it exists, the fact of what they do. Honestly, Claudia looking at their show with her eyes like saucers, I got it.
00:38:35
Speaker
Because i couldn't believe that they were this bold. But that sounds very much like what Lestat would have put them up to. Because as you said, Ben, he is a fucking club.
00:38:46
Speaker
And he would have enjoyed rubbing people's faces in something like that. Armand being in charge of this little fucking freak show is wilder because as you point out, he doesn't want to be.
00:38:57
Speaker
When Santiago makes the attempt to take over, he was like, fine, you can have it. It's okay. I will go back to not being in charge. I will be really happy with that.
00:39:08
Speaker
But Santiago didn't believe him. That's the problem. It's always the problem. Nobody will believe that he doesn't want to be in charge. So they keep fucking with him when he's just trying to give it up.
00:39:20
Speaker
He doesn't want to be in charge of his relationship with Louis either, but he has to be. He's the one person who shows up for the group project. He hates that this is who he is, but he cannot stop himself.
00:39:33
Speaker
Like everyone in this story, I really love when Daniel has pieced together enough that he's able to unlock for Louis the truth that Stott saved him in that whole sham trial shit.
00:39:48
Speaker
the fact that Armand was behind all of it. I mean, let's talk about your reveals here. When I realized that, I realized how fucking unreliable a narrator everybody in the story is.
00:40:02
Speaker
Nobody is telling anybody else anything close to the truth over hundreds and hundreds of years. And I am obsessed with it. obsessed with these fucking crazy liars who are doing this because they are bored you live for hundreds of years you've run out of shit to do you start fucking with each other everybody is looking for something new and interesting to happen to perk up their little nipples and they can't get it
00:40:36
Speaker
ah ah It's so, like, it's tragic, don't get me wrong, but it's also fucking ridiculous. It's a farce, which is perfect.
00:40:48
Speaker
Going into Daniel's stuff, it's fun watching him just be so fucking over these vampires and their bullshit. And then he becomes one. He's throwing cunt around like nobody else. He's doing great.
00:41:02
Speaker
If there's anybody built to be a vampire, it is Daniel Malloy, and I will stand behind that. He's going to fun with Eric Boghossian has played gay before and he's like, I'm ready. I will do whatever they want. like, old man yaoi. Yes.
00:41:16
Speaker
I'm so happy for him.
00:41:24
Speaker
So before we get hopes for season three, I want everybody to highlight their favorite tragic story from this series. Start with you, Nene.
00:41:35
Speaker
What's your favorite tragedy? Fucking Claudia. Which Claudia tragedy? Can we just look at it as one never-ending, until-it-ends tragedy?
00:41:46
Speaker
That's the whole show, baby. Successify. She's born. She suffers. She's undead. She's not just stuck in the body of a child as her brain gets older.
00:41:58
Speaker
She's stuck in puberty. Of all the periods of life to be stuck in. No wonder does she feels she's going crazy at all times. She finally, finally, after so many years, has made a bid for some level of autonomy.
00:42:15
Speaker
And the minute she does that, everybody around her aspires to snatch it away. And then she is put on a show trial for shit she didn't do and then killed.
00:42:29
Speaker
Like, fuck. It would have been kinder if they had let her die in the fire. oh yeah. Honestly. That's the real tragedy of it. The fact that Louis thought he was saving her, but he actually condemned her to hell.
00:42:43
Speaker
oh God. Psychic fucking damage. Captain Hans, favorite tragedy in the show? I'm going to say Louis' brother. That is, I think, such a foundational part of how Louis approaches his vampirism. And I think that it's the starting point of the tragedy.
00:43:02
Speaker
I'm sure that he feels like he failed his brother. His brother is the first person to really pick up on and just straight up to his face say that he knows something's going on His brother was institutionalized by their father. And the only reason that he is not locked up going even more insane is because their dad is not there and Louis has some level of control over the family now.
00:43:25
Speaker
And then to have his brother just walk off the roof is just such a horrible thing. And it fundamentally changes the way that his family sees Louis. How about you, Ben? Why don't you depress us now?
00:43:39
Speaker
ah I've been waiting. Don't you worry. My favorite tragedy in this is that despite essentially winning what every gay wants, Louis will be forever in his prime.
00:43:53
Speaker
He will be forever hot, forever wealthy, and immune to many other things that are going to befall gays in the hundred years he's been alive to He will never be happy, and his existence comes at the expense of other gay people who are looking for connection.
00:44:10
Speaker
I have taken more psychic damage. Thank you. Oh my God. Thinking about AIDS, especially. Vampires deal entirely in blood, but probably won't, almost certainly can't get AIDS or HIV.
00:44:24
Speaker
I am really hoping that we look at the epidemic in the next season. One of the interesting things we got... out of the time in war-torn Europe was that the quality of blood was making the vampires sick as well.
00:44:41
Speaker
Making them sick and making them crazy. Especially in Eastern Europe where they were at first. All the vampires that they did meet were weak and nuts. And not like nuts in a fancy way like with that.
00:44:53
Speaker
I think a lot about that vampire who was turning people because she needed a coven but they were all unwell. Is she the one that threw herself in the fire? Yep. Mostly so she can fuck with Claudia.
00:45:05
Speaker
Because Claudia's not been fucked with enough. So since we know we're getting a season three and maybe four, what is everybody looking forward to? I said, I'm not really familiar with the source material, so I'm just looking forward to what other fresh hells they're going to unleash upon us. I'm particularly interested in what happens now that Louis and Armand have broken up, now that everything is out in the open.
00:45:30
Speaker
know that Malloy is a vampire, know that it's clear that Lestat is coming back into the story in an active way. I'm curious to see how all those threads get pulled together.
00:45:44
Speaker
am so excited for Daniel to throw his hat into the messy ring. We saw him when he was younger and he was partying. He was not like super put together person. But by the time you get to him when he's doing the interviews,
00:45:59
Speaker
He's very capable of super hardcore judging everything and putting the pieces together. and i just think vampirism turns people stupid. So I'm really excited to see him like slutt it up, stir up the drama, get in fights with people.
00:46:16
Speaker
I just want him to have the best fucking life and I'm ready for him to go stupid, go crazy. Daniel was so annoying that he made Armand break his rule about not turning.
00:46:29
Speaker
I need you to speak directly into the microphone, Benjamin. I need Eric Boghossian and Asad Zaman to make out and fuck nasty on this show. Eric is ready. He's so ready.
00:46:42
Speaker
And Asad is ready. I need it to happen. But from a plot perspective, I'm really excited about Lestat setting the record straight. Like, Louis had his time.
00:46:53
Speaker
He's done his whole interview talking shit about me and our dead child. I'm excited to see... what Lestat has to say in response to all of that. but see what happens after the hurricane.
00:47:05
Speaker
There wasn't a script for that ending and we don't know and I don't think anybody in the crew either know like only Sam and Jacob know what Louis and Lestat said to each other in that moment and i think that's really fucking cool.
00:47:18
Speaker
Okay let's rate this bad boy. Captain Holmes what are you rating Interview with the Vampire? I mean it's a 10 for me. High caliber entertainment. Benjamin?
00:47:30
Speaker
I think on my like scale of who should watch this, it's probably formally like a 9.5. i Because this is a deeply unpleasant show about so many really deeply unwell people.
00:47:44
Speaker
The show doesn't really ever pretend that it's not about that. And so I think for the conversation, I'll give it a 10. On a scale of pure batshit,
00:47:57
Speaker
It's a 10, baby. oh my god. Literally, I could not stop watching it. I think the show deserves a 10 just for the levitating gay sex scene. I mean, that was quality, but I think the Armand reveal bumps it up to an 11 for me, honestly.
00:48:16
Speaker
Let's take a brief aside about the damn levitating gay sex. Like, as a visual, the levitating gay sex is great. Louis is finally connecting to this man in a real way, and he's found something that's higher than the stuff that he's found before.
00:48:31
Speaker
But also, I gotta be honest, with as much pearl clutching as there was around this show, around, like, how explicitly gay it was, I was like, this?
00:48:42
Speaker
This is what y'all got your titties all tied up about? I've watched The Novelist. I've seen Moon Indigo. This is what y'all got all pearl clutchy about? Whatever.
00:48:55
Speaker
I've watched the corn and mouse dreams of cheese. You only got nothing. You gotta remind people we're a BL podcast.
00:49:05
Speaker
Honestly, the thing that gets me about this show and why I bumped it up to 11 is like Brent said, these people are deeply unwell and they have literal eternity to fuck with each other. They have eternity to make up like crazy shit to do it to each other and then do it just for their amusement.
00:49:23
Speaker
So I am very, very excited to see what crazy shit they're going to do next. So if I give it an 11 and Captain Hans gives it a 10 and Ben gives it a 9, then it's a 10 from the conversation.
00:49:38
Speaker
it is a show that I think is one of those pieces of queer TV that you're going to want to have engaged with I think it's going to be formative for a lot of viewers.
00:49:49
Speaker
and Anyway, we have been talking about interviewing the vampire for an hour and a half. Let's move on. I'm amazed it only took an hour and a half because we didn't talk about like half of the shit we could have talked about.
00:50:00
Speaker
I feel like if we had done like a season by season, would be a little bit easier to talk about it. Yeah, that's the hard part about discussing these multi-season shows. But also, what's the use, really, in talking about the events in Interview? The events are what they are.
00:50:16
Speaker
What's really important is the absolute nutcase behavior that these characters are exhibiting. Before we go on, mega shout out to Ben Daniels for not getting his ass handed to him by Jacob Anderson, Sam Reid, and Asad Zaman.
00:50:33
Speaker
Holy shit, did he put on an incredible performance as Santiago. Like, whole pussy in kind of behavior. Ben Daniels delivered. He was having whale of a time. His stomach is full of the scenery because he chewed it all up.
00:50:49
Speaker
It was incredible performance. If you watch nothing else, go and find this first scene when Claudia and Louis go to the Théâtre de Vampire and watch Ben Daniels do the monologue. and Like, insane.
00:51:17
Speaker
Now that we're done talking about the crazy vampires, let's talk about some insane toxic humans. Then let's talk about Fellow Travelers. Tell the people what Fellow Travelers is about.
00:51:28
Speaker
Fellow Travelers is based on a book written in like the early 2000s, in which we followed two political operatives working in government in the McCarthy era.
00:51:41
Speaker
We followed them in their lives through to... eighty 80s in the height of the AIDS crisis. It's a simple overview.
00:51:53
Speaker
We follow Hawkins Fuller, who goes by Hawk. He is a war hero fought in Germany in World War II. He now works as a political operative for a powerful progressive senator and is ultra-closeted and a total top.
00:52:16
Speaker
He becomes interested in a young man who is new to Washington. His name is Tim Laughlin. He is a Catholic struggling with his queerness and is really into the conviction of Joseph McCarthy.
00:52:33
Speaker
That Joseph McCarthy. Anyway, Hawk fucks him enough that he gets over that. We follow their troublesome relationship across about 30 years and we have to deal with Hawk who is this ultra American vision, maintaining his closet for decades.
00:52:53
Speaker
And Tim's genuine inability to do that. And the fact that both of these guys love each other and really just cannot get over each other.
00:53:05
Speaker
Hawkins Fuller is played by the incredible Matt Bomer. One of my favorite white gays. If you are a homo, who wants to see Matt Bomer cry for gay reasons, please go watch Poppy Chula and then message me on Tumblr.
00:53:25
Speaker
I'll be waiting for you all to find me. The beautiful heartthrob Jonathan Bailey is playing Tim Laughlin. Supporting the white gaze of this, we have Jelani Aladdin playing Marcus Gaines, who is a black writer and also a total top and friend of Hawk's, who is a reporter struggling with his pro-Black politics and the inherent masculinity of the era.
00:53:57
Speaker
He is in a relationship with Frankie Hines, played by Noah Ricketts, who is a drag queen and is clearly experiencing gender. Hawk is also married to Senator Smith's daughter, Lucy Smith.
00:54:13
Speaker
played by Allison Williams, who I really like in this role. i knew about this show for a long time because I'm a queer cinephile. Hard not to know that Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey were fucking every episode in this show in 2023.
00:54:29
Speaker
And the white gays and white girl, what we call BL fans, were losing their minds over it. wasn't in the mood at the time. i did not even know there were Black plot lines in this story.
00:54:43
Speaker
Or that Stormy had a role in this. Stormy Delivery played a role in the Stonewall events. Did not expect him to pop up in this. I sat up immediately and like, hold on.
00:54:56
Speaker
I did not know that there was any Black people in this show at all. It says a lot about the fandom, unfortunately. I did not know that there were meaningful Black storylines in this show until I started watching it.
00:55:12
Speaker
I would watch this a lot sooner if y'all have told me about Marcus and Frankie. I also did not know that the show went all the way into the 80s. I thought it was going to be eight episodes of McCarthy-era gays growling at each other and having unsafe sex the whole time.
00:55:33
Speaker
We start off in the 50s. We get into the complexities of McCarthy, the queer rumors around him, Roy Cohn, that motherfucker and all of his documented bullshit.
00:55:46
Speaker
And then we move into the sixties and the anti-war movement and the complexities of the seventies. Hawk is closeted and married. He has a son who is probably queer as well, who never feels connected to his dad.
00:56:03
Speaker
I really love that. We got to see 30 years uh, thirty years oh complex mess with these guys and that the show really cared about the interiority of that existence nene you are finally free of higher education for now and i'm like stop everything here's jelani aladdin's back i need you to watch this show immediately
00:56:36
Speaker
Ben did what everybody does on Tumblr when they want you to watch something. They s seduce you with gifts. I showed you Jelani Aladdin's ample back and you watched the show.
00:56:48
Speaker
What's your experience watching this? Because you've watched a lot more of this era of TV from America than I have. One of the tags that's going on this episode is Prestige TV is gay now.
00:56:59
Speaker
So because of the era that the show starts in, of course, it's drawing comparisons to golden era TV shows like Mad Men, especially with the character of Hawk, because hawke is the ultimate sort of Don Drapery kind of character. It's obviously pulling connections from there.
00:57:18
Speaker
But as you get more into the story, it's just like, oh, this is not that. They use that to sort of suck you in. which I thought was really clever. People don't want to think, I think, ah about the very real history that's shown here.
00:57:35
Speaker
They want to think of this time that the show starts it in, at least, as some kind of a magical history where everything was better. So putting this period in a gay story is just showing you that, no, everything was actually shit.
00:57:51
Speaker
I mean, you've got... a literal gay guy working for McCarthy in an era when McCarthy was hunting, and that's not an exaggeration, hunting gay people.
00:58:04
Speaker
Hunting them, hounding them. People went to jail. People lost their jobs. People lost their livelihoods. Some people lost their lives. That always gets swept under the rug when you're looking at TV that's depicting this era.
00:58:19
Speaker
So looking at this era from a queer lens is like, no, no, the shit's always been like this. You were just insulated from it. And especially then as they start going through the eras, you get into 60s proper, you get into the 70s, you get a little bit of the eighty s and you see how the bullshit continued and continued and continued even as it quote unquote got better that was what stuck with me aside from the severely toxic relationship at the center of this captain hands think i just kept coming back to like hawk being alone at the end of all of this and how tragic it is that hawk and tim only got like a couple of moments with the years in between
00:59:09
Speaker
It made me really happy to see Marcus and Frankie living together and taking care of a kid because Marcus finally started to be more open in ways that Hawk was never really able to do.
00:59:23
Speaker
The thing I got out of this the most was the loneliness of the masculinity. How Hawk and Marcus were so scared of being seen as queer.
00:59:36
Speaker
Comparing that to Tim and especially Frankie. the characters that can't hide and can't pass or refuse to do so are so fucking brave and are living ah life that is far more ah authentic to themselves.
00:59:50
Speaker
I really like having them in the show for that comparison. i like that we got to use Marcus's passion for Black intellectualism to highlight the fact that McCarthy and them went after motherfucking Langston Hughes during their anti-gay, anti-communist sentiments.
01:00:07
Speaker
You don't know who the fuck Langston Hughes is? You better ask somebody. I find myself thinking a lot about the fact that Hawk has no actual political motives. That's what makes him such a useful political operator.
01:00:23
Speaker
The fact that Tim actually does have political goals. makes him such a terrible political operative. The sequence in which they subject Hawk to a polygraph test, and he's like, the fundamental of it is they want you to feel ashamed they get to react to that, as long as I don't feel ashamed. That's the most ashamed man.
01:00:44
Speaker
They can't catch me. He is able, in that moment, to use his own personal righteousness to shield himself That's so specific and I understand it completely.
01:01:04
Speaker
I am obsessed with that man. I also think a lot about Mary and Caroline and and how when they got into trouble, Hawk executed a plan instantly.
01:01:20
Speaker
And Tim was like, Mary will never do that. They love each other. You're about to learn something important about mary ah Caroline ends up being sent back to the Midwest to go marry a man and pop out babies.
01:01:35
Speaker
And then Mary becomes a Congresswoman and is out now. I think about Marcus and how he wants to impress his dad. So he gets his job at the Washington Post.
01:01:48
Speaker
He ends up super unhappy there because he knows he's not making a difference. His life doesn't work out for him the way he wanted either. Whatever he wanted to write about, he never reached the people he wanted. And I think ah an unspoken part of that is his inability to write authentically about himself is likely what holds back his writing fundamentally.
01:02:09
Speaker
When their gay bar gets raided, they're trying to run out. Frankie wants to help Stormy because she falls. She calls out to Marcus for help.
01:02:20
Speaker
And Marcus just turns around and walks away and pretends like he doesn't see anything. They have a racially charged moment at this restaurant that Frankie's performing at. They don't want to let this big black ass into their restaurant. And they're like, absolutely not.
01:02:37
Speaker
We've got enough homos in here tonight. They don't say homos. Frankie is like, they called both of us fags. And then when he writes about it, he doesn't write about Frankie or his connection to him.
01:02:52
Speaker
This is, I think, fundamentally the flaw in Marcus's writing. The reason that he can never write something truly great is that he absolutely cannot be honest.
01:03:05
Speaker
He can't get to the heart of the matter because he can never let himself be. And there's so many different reasons for that as the years go by First, it was his father. He was basically living his life with his father. It's all about making his father proud, which is why he leaves a Black publication where he was really doing some good to move to the Post and get shit on just so he could be the Black guy at the Post.
01:03:30
Speaker
because that's what his father saw as progress. That's why he's drawn to Langston Hughes. His ideas of progress are not a about being the one black guy.
01:03:41
Speaker
His ideas of progress are community-based, but he subsumes those to society, to his father's ideas, to everything else. He is never truly honest with himself.
01:03:54
Speaker
Even coming down towards the end, this is after his father's died. He's openly living with Frankie, but he and Frankie are still fighting about this because he's still not being honest and still not being true to himself, even as he lives with a man. Even as he's raising a gay kid, he's still...
01:04:13
Speaker
hiding. He still can't show himself and that's why his writing can never rise to the level that he knows it could be at which is why he never gets where he wants to go. It's actually quite tragic.
01:04:26
Speaker
Marcus and Hawk I think for me are the most tragic characters in this because of their complete inability to be vulnerable and take that risk.
01:04:39
Speaker
Music
01:04:44
Speaker
It's also so sad in Hawk's case because inflicts this upon his family. I feel bad for the Lucy character because she knows what's going on.
01:05:00
Speaker
But the structures of her era put her in this awkward place where she sort of just has to go along with it. Hawk tells his dad on his dad's deathbed to go fuck himself.
01:05:12
Speaker
So Hawk doesn't have... access to independent wealth. Part of why he ends up marrying Lucy Smith is to marry into the senator's family.
01:05:24
Speaker
Senator Smith is clearly based upon another senator during the McCarthy era. His son is arrested for soliciting sex from men caught during a raid, and he's pressured to back off, and he ends up killing himself.
01:05:44
Speaker
hawk has this heroic view of senator smith in his mind and senator smith was super homophobic his son was gay and he immediately killed himself the irony of the last sentence he writes in his fucking statement being fight for america or whatever and then and he just shoots himself and i'm like dude for real Hawk, a known gay, jerked off with the senator's son, put that man into conversion therapy, and then he disappeared from the narrative.
01:06:21
Speaker
My stomach hurts when I think about that. He did that to him. And he didn't feel no type of way about it either. He didn't feel conflicted. you didn't feel guilty.
01:06:32
Speaker
he felt literally no type of way about it. The image right after that is Hawk standing in front of the car with this giant American flag flying above his head. That's the second gay man that he's turned over into a situation where they're clearly going to die in the narrative.
01:06:49
Speaker
Oh, let's talk about Eddie. or Poor, poor Eddie. Eddie's so fast. I'm so sad. I mean, to be fair, Eddie was not smart and Eddie was going to cause big problems for him.
01:07:02
Speaker
But also we just spent an hour and a half talking about a vampire show where these guys get to live forever. off of the corpses of the gay men they leave behind them.
01:07:13
Speaker
Yikes! I was already taking psychic damage from this episode, and that just made it worse. I had a lot of thoughts about Roycon at that point, because he's gay, and he is a huge part of this manhunt for all these queer people in government.
01:07:34
Speaker
He is ruining people's lives with no remorse. Even as he secures special treatment for his own boy toy. Those events are real too. Like Roy Cohn died very not long ago.
01:07:47
Speaker
But nobody sells Cohn out. It is wild to me that Cohn's going on this witch hunt and so many people in Washington know this man is gay. And they don't out him.
01:08:00
Speaker
I don't know how I feel about that. It's more grotesque for the fact that it was true. Like, this is a semi-dramatized tale, but all the stuff about Cone is 100% true.
01:08:11
Speaker
true That shit actually happened. And that's the part I just can't even stomach. I'm watching that interview with Cone in the 80s, where he still, after all this time, he still refuses...
01:08:29
Speaker
He's like, look at me. How could I be a homosexual? I'm a man. It's really interesting that the period that the show ends in is the Reagan era. I think it's just a good demonstration of how this is continuously repeating. So it's McCarthy, it's Reagan, it's Trump now.
01:08:45
Speaker
It's not like this is new. It just never ends. Something I really enjoyed about the exploration of the McCarthy era investigations into whether or not people were gays.
01:08:55
Speaker
So many things were absolutely ridiculous. Like, can you walk for me? They raided underwear drawers. This is ridiculous. What is that telling you? This is such a so stupid thing.
01:09:07
Speaker
And it got people, like, people killed themselves. Just as, like, such a good insight into the ways in which authoritarianism, fascism, all of this stuff is so fucking ridiculous.
01:09:18
Speaker
Let's talk about how Hawk failed his son. His knows that his dad is a motherfucking liar and never feels really secure in that relationship.
01:09:28
Speaker
He meets Tim and the two of them bond. And Tim's like, you have a very smart son. He's a little sensitive. We know what that means. He wants to be a poet.
01:09:39
Speaker
We know what that means. Hawk is never able to reach his own son properly. And they lose his son to drugs. And this is what finally breaks Hawk to the point that he finally reaches out to Tim for help. And Tim talks to Lucy about it.
01:09:57
Speaker
I really like that Lucy knows about Tim and spends her entire marriage with Hawk resenting him. I get that in her mind, if she beats Tim, she'll win Hawk.
01:10:12
Speaker
But that's not what's going on here. At the end of Tim's life, she finally understands this. And i love the way Tim, who is a fairly empathetic individual, will not give ground to her.
01:10:28
Speaker
It's like he calls her Mrs. Fuller the whole time to make the point of however you feel. You had him. She's like, no, I didn't. And he's like, fuck you.
01:10:43
Speaker
I loved it that final conversation between the two. I love that it ends with both of them realizing what they already knew. But Hawk hurt both of them.
01:10:54
Speaker
ah Hawk is a fucking bastard. Both of them were just like, yeah, it's not your fault. It's his fault. They come to rapprochement at the end and then Lucy Smith leaves her. Good for her. Happy for her. i have so many feelings about Jackson as a character and the aftermath of Jackson's death.
01:11:18
Speaker
Because I have a harm reduction background, I'm always very grateful when shows don't demonize drug users. Jackson dying because of a heroin overdose is straight up a tragedy and there is nothing about The way that he died that is played as anything but that.
01:11:36
Speaker
I was really appreciative of like the card that Tim sent and the positive things he said about Jackson and that card. You see, acknowledging how difficult it is for her to get out of bed.
01:11:48
Speaker
Hawk utilizing drugs to try to like avoid having to feel anything about his son and the breakdown that he has on Fire Island when he sees the picture that his plug pulled out of his drawer.
01:12:02
Speaker
Okay. He has a name. His name is Craig. The picture that Craig pulls out of his drawer. The whole sequence on Fire Island is just devastating.
01:12:13
Speaker
I completely understand why after that, Tim never wanted to see him again. It was just such a violation. I think they portrayed Tim's now background with the social work super well.
01:12:24
Speaker
Hawk being like, I'm going to put your name on the deed. And Tim going, are you going to kill yourself? Because that's the way you handled that kind of conversation. He's looking at Hawk, giving away these massive things, trying to offload his private space on Fire Island, like the place where he can be arguably the most himself, trying to pass it on to Tim.
01:12:47
Speaker
We know partially so that his name's not on the deed, but Tim is looking at the amount of drugs that that Hawk is doing and the reckless behavior that he's exhibiting and the ways in which he is starting to give away items.
01:13:04
Speaker
See those warning signs and do what you're trained to do. i think refusing to take the offer was the best thing he could have done for Hawk in that moment.
01:13:22
Speaker
Nina, you're the sex and story girl. We had ah total top going verse for Tim. On the day of McCarthy's funeral. On the day of McCarthy's funeral. Poetic.
01:13:34
Speaker
like When I saw that he decided to bottom for Tim that time, i was just like, oh, they're not coming out of this one. This is the end of it for them. This is his quote unquote final gift.
01:13:49
Speaker
this is the end of their relationship as far as he's concerned. And we also know from the whole thing with Mary and Caroline, how he was going to do it.
01:14:00
Speaker
So when I saw it happen, I was like, we're at the end. And then Fire Island. It's the ah cabin first and then Fire Island. Yeah. Hiding from the law.
01:14:12
Speaker
And then he goes to jail anyway. The other time that he has a fight with Hawk, he joins the fucking army. Like, this man has to get himself as far away from Hawk as possible because he has no ability to control himself.
01:14:26
Speaker
The first time he goes into the goddamn trenches, and the second time he goes behind bars! Promise you won't write. What a line. It's not just that he gets as far away from Hulk as possible.
01:14:41
Speaker
He also gets into dangerous situations. It feels like an ideation, honestly. it feels like he's telling himself, if I can't have you, then it's the end for me.
01:14:55
Speaker
Because, I mean, the army and jail at those specific times, those are highly dangerous situations for a court man. There was no guarantee that he was going to come out of either of those things alive.
01:15:07
Speaker
That feels like a Catholic guilt thing for him. It sure is. I know my people when I see them. But I also understand like the obsession. There's this intense loyalty that I think he feels for Hulk. And I get why. Like,
01:15:22
Speaker
Hawk's a war hero. He led men into battle. He has ah magnetism about him that you feel drawn to. Something that has continuously played in my head since I finished the show is how many times the line, I'm bulletproof or your bulletproof was uttered either from Hawk or towards Hawk. And he has a literal fucking bullet wound. Well, shrapnel wound.
01:15:48
Speaker
He's not untouchable. He just hides it very well. I'm so glad that at the very end, Tim got to use Hawk to advance his political goals.
01:16:00
Speaker
It feels like the right ending for them. And I like that Tim gave Hawk a kind exit. Was it really though? I think it was. don't know. think it's as kind as you're going to be.
01:16:13
Speaker
Yeah, it was kinder than it needed to be. That is true. But also one of the first things you see in the show is the older hawk at this party where he's celebrating his appointment to ambassador.
01:16:28
Speaker
Then you go back and realize literally how long this has been a dream of his and how everything that he did was because he was fixated on this idea that one day he would be free. Mm-hmm.
01:16:42
Speaker
not realizing that he had the opportunity to be free the entire time. That's the whole point about Frankie and Tim having sustainable lives in California. Hawk could have had that too.
01:16:55
Speaker
Exactly. But he has this dream of moving to Italy and being an ambassador and doing the dream in this specific way. And he couldn't bend from that to the point that it destroyed basically his only chances at happiness.
01:17:09
Speaker
And no he comes to the end. He's finally gotten this thing that he spent 30 years grasping at. And what does he do? He finally realizes somewhere in him that it's not going to do fuck all for him. And he runs off to take care of his dying ex.
01:17:29
Speaker
I did enjoy in the taking care of Tim portion that Hawk had done enough reading about transmission that he wasn't panicked.
01:17:44
Speaker
It made me super excited from the medical point of him being pretty chill about coming into contact with Tim's. but I was so fucking happy that that happened.
01:17:56
Speaker
We haven't really talked about the shared toxicity of this relationship between tim and Hawk. We've touched around the edges of it, but don't be mistaken. This man spent 30 years being gaslit by Hawk.
01:18:19
Speaker
30 whole years knew being gaslit and manipulated and he knew it the entire time and he still until the end could not really walk away diabolical see i don't know that i would call it diabolical because tim expected all of this the whole time like it hurts that it happens anyway but hawk consistently showed him that despite how clear it was that he was important to Hawk, Hawk's ax image was the most important thing to him.
01:18:54
Speaker
He was explicit about that. That's what makes it so inherently tragic. Tim knows it intellectually the whole time, but he can't help but be drawn to him anyway.
01:19:06
Speaker
I'm trying to decide if I think Tim is like a I can fix him kind of guy, or if he's just so caught up in this illusion that he just buries his head in the sand.
01:19:17
Speaker
No, Tim is a he'll change for me type. I don't know that I agree with that. i think Tim knows that Hawk isn't going to change as much as he maybe hopes that he will. And part of him likes that Hawk is not going to change.
01:19:33
Speaker
Like he might be miserable, but at least he knows what he's getting. He knows he can't fix whatever is wrong with Hawk. He knows that much. But he also is willingly gaslit the entire time. He knows that Hawk is never going to be what he wants him to be.
01:19:51
Speaker
Anything he tells himself about Hawk changing, he knows is a lie. He's lying to himself and he knows that he's lying to himself. It's important to note that Tim walks away from Hawk each time.
01:20:04
Speaker
Like, until the very last time, Tim is the one doing the walking away. But he's also always the one who comes back. But Hawk's also the one reaching out to him each time. They're in this twisted, sort of codependent, crazy relationship where...
01:20:20
Speaker
Tim walks away. He swears he's done. Hawk doesn't even really reach out. He just appears on the periphery somehow of Tim's life. And Tim comes running back.
01:20:31
Speaker
And Hawk is very specific about how he appears around the periphery. Like somebody tells him that Tim's in trouble and he drops everything and tries to fix it behind the scenes. Yeah.
01:20:43
Speaker
but in such a way that it's clear that he's the one who's fixing it, so that Tim is forced to come back. And Tim doesn't fight going back either.
01:20:55
Speaker
He goes back and he remembers why he left in the first place, but then it's years later. i mean, those periods get shorter and shorter every time, but he's mesmerized by Hook, and he can't let it go.
01:21:08
Speaker
And he will lie to himself in order to not let it go.
01:21:20
Speaker
Final thoughts on fellow travelers. I cried so hard when they put Tim on the AIDS quilt. That hurt me. I was down for 40 minutes. I and feel like the Harvey Milk stuff was a little forced.
01:21:36
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think that it really fit with the narrative that they were telling. me Like, I understand that they wanted to get Marcus to the point where he would finally put his body in the fight.
01:21:47
Speaker
And he literally did that by shielding Jerome literally with his body from the police batons. But they forced that a little bit. You cannot write a character like Marcus, who has very valid reasons for distrusting the role of white people in the movie.
01:22:06
Speaker
And just trying to force it out at this point. It just did not feel right to me. Like, I understand that a big part of the show is putting things in the historical context. And I understand that Harvey Milk was also an incredibly charismatic person.
01:22:21
Speaker
I understand how a bunch of people active in the era would feel Kenship with him. Because apparently he had that kind of electric quality. But I just really did not really and enjoy the tacked on feeling of Frankie's like, I really like Harvey.
01:22:40
Speaker
And now he's dead. I feel like because they put these people in the direct orbit of figures like Conan McCarthy and Stormé, that they also wanted to put them in the direct orbit of Milk, which is why they made Frankie know him personally.
01:22:58
Speaker
It doesn't feel natural in the way that the other parts of this felt natural. Especially because Tim is away with Hawk during these events. From my perspective as somebody who was not around,
01:23:13
Speaker
for any of this. Like, I knew Harvey Milk was assassinated. i don't know about the fucking Twinkie, like, I think some of it was, like, also to root in history for viewers who are not necessarily as aware of the history.
01:23:27
Speaker
I learned so much about the McCarthy area and so much about, like, the 80s. Like, I can see the Harvey Milk assassination being put in there just as a way to tell you, like, how much time has passed between, like, the last time we were in the 80s and the next time we're in the eighty s It does feel very underdeveloped if they're trying to have Frankie grieve somebody he said was a friend. me like don't ever see him interact with milk.
01:23:52
Speaker
Yeah, I just felt like if they were going to do that, either they should have cast Milk and brought him into the story, or they should have left it as the background event that the characters are reacting to.
01:24:05
Speaker
Not so personally, but more as a societal thing. I respect the impulse, but I'm flagging it as a little weird and a little forced.
01:24:19
Speaker
Captain Ants. I really loved this show. I think the performances were phenomenal. I really loved the way that they were able to show how lonely Hawk was because he was so scared.
01:24:36
Speaker
And i really and super appreciative of them having a character like Frankie in there, constantly pushing Marcus in ways that like I don't think Tim ever really did for Hawk. I like the parallels.
01:24:51
Speaker
My final thoughts on fellow travelers are I'm very glad that Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey put so much ass out there that they introduced a whole generation of people to the concept of queer elders and the idea that queer political history, at least in the United States of America, goes back far further than Gaga releasing Born This Way.
01:25:18
Speaker
Sir, you didn't have to go there. O'Shea to Gaga. You did not have to go there. I also want to thank Jelani, Aladdin, and Noah Ricketts for the work they did as Marcus and Frankie.
01:25:31
Speaker
I'm so glad that this show became a vehicle to say things that we've been saying. That fems have always been the stronger ones. I also am really glad that Marcus's arc ends with him questioning whether or not he can be a good enough father to Jerome.
01:25:47
Speaker
I cried so hard at the You Are Innocent scene. Oh, chills. I also love that the last time we really see Marcus, he's handcuffing himself on stage and he's fully joining in to queer protest.
01:26:04
Speaker
Hawk's never going to do that. The biggest thing Hawk has ever done and probably will ever do is tell his daughter that Tim the man that he loved. And she fucking knows that. He does, but I think it's important for him It's important for him, not just for her to hear it from him, but for him to say it to her.
01:26:21
Speaker
I like to think that after we leave him in the story, things get better for him because now he's able to be honest. He's an old gay now. He's got work to do.
01:26:33
Speaker
Marcus and Frankie are still in the story, so maybe they pull him into it. I do have to shout out Matt Boomer and Jonathan Bailey. Both of these men are openly gay.
01:26:45
Speaker
They made their bones playing the straight romantic hero. And then they're like, we are going to this really gay fucking show because it's important to us. Y'all need to understand that we play straight boys, but we are not straight boys.
01:27:00
Speaker
Y'all need to understand who we are. And then they went and put their whole pussy in. My final thoughts are honestly, thank you for this story.
01:27:12
Speaker
was a great story. Ratings! I'm gonna give it a nine because the milk thing really did land Funky and also while I am mostly satisfied with where Marcus and Frankie end up I would have liked to see more closure their side of the story.
01:27:38
Speaker
I think I'm similarly at like a nine. It was phenomenally performed. And also, it was very clear to me that there were gaps in the writing where they kind of just like set whole characters aside for a while. It's like, I don't think Marcus and Frankie were a slush show.
01:27:56
Speaker
They could have been. Mary disappeared straight up for like three episodes. i was like, did we forget about Mary? There wasn't much to say. Which sucks. Lesbians are so important. Anyway, it's a nine.
01:28:08
Speaker
It's a nine for me. I understand why Tim and Hawk are drawn to each other, but Hawk hurts Tim so consistently. I don't really think Tim got enough out of being with Hawk to warrant the 30 years of obsession.
01:28:22
Speaker
Okay, three nines, that's going to be a nine from the conversation for fellow travelers.
01:28:38
Speaker
there are some definite parallels between these two tales. Long-term relationships are hell anyway. They're worse when you are with a pathological lunatic.
01:28:50
Speaker
That's one. Two. People who... live in guilt for whatever reason are never going to be truly happy until they release that guilt that is where landed for me and that is what hope that louis gets what we can take away from this is that one lot of room in queer storytelling for more than just saccharine he was a boy he was a boy also bl does not have to just be a young man's game because matt bomer was 45 filming this that ass is 22 at best anyway let's get too lost into that there is so much room in our genre for complex stories
01:29:49
Speaker
about long-term companionship, the struggles they're in, and also separation. These are two shows about guys who really genuinely just didn't work.
01:30:02
Speaker
And I think it's intriguing to reflect on the lives of queer people and what those lives cost them, what it takes to make things work or not work.
01:30:17
Speaker
It's compelling sometimes to look at relationships that are failing and reflect on the kind of partner you might want to be. I'm so glad that we got really interesting stories ah about separation and not being able to be there for your partner.
01:30:35
Speaker
Because if you're watching this and you're sad about the way Marcus could never be the type of writer he wanted to be and be with Frankie, or how Hawk could never be with Tim, or how Louis and Lestat, despite loving each other more than anything in the world, consistently ruin each other, you have the opportunity in your own relationships to not be these guys.
01:30:59
Speaker
And I think that's beautiful. I think both of these shows are really great examples of complex queerness, both in the ways in which people approach and engage in their own queerness and just in the way that queer people are portrayed. And that is something that is really important to me because I feel like we are in a point where we want to tie everything off in a pretty little bow.
01:31:29
Speaker
I think there's some fear around adding flaws into queer stories. And I think that both of these shows are evidence that you can make complex, toxic characters who are queer.
01:31:44
Speaker
That is going to wrap us up on, what are we going to call this? I'm going to call it American Toxic Yaoi. Say bye to the people, Captain Hans. Bye.
01:31:55
Speaker
Thanks for listening to me. Say bye to the people, Ben. Peace.