In Defense of the Gay Sex Scene

How "Fellow Travelers" and "Passages" reveal why depictions of on-screen gay sex are a vitally queer project.

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It’s almost impossible these days to avoid the discourse around sex scenes in popular culture. Organizations run polls about it, Twitter erupts into periodic scuffles over it, and I daresay that even people in the real world talk about it. Everyone has an opinion about whether sex scenes are exploitative or life-giving, whether they should be excised or included, and whether they move the plot forward or are intended just for titillation. The question of sex scenes takes on an added charge when queerness is thrown into the mix. It’s no secret that Hollywood has been more than a little averse to showing queer sexual intimacy on-screen, particularly in the cinema (which, for that matter, has been reluctant to show queer love in any form, let alone sexual), though TV has been more forward-looking in this regard. 

However, the last few years have seen a remarkable flowering of queer love stories on both the big and small screens and, mercifully, this has been accompanied by a more frank depiction of actual queer sex. All of this brings us to two of the more extraordinary offerings in this regard: the Showtime series Fellow Travelers (based on the novel of the same name by Thomas Mallon). Through their use of explicit on-screen gay sex, both Fellow Travelers and Passages show us the extent to which such scenes remain an essential component of queer screen storytelling.

Fellow Travelers, as anyone who has seen it can attest, doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to the on-screen depiction of same-sex sex. One of the very first scenes we get is of Matt Bomer’s Hawkins Fuller having passionate sex with a trick, but it’s only when he starts hooking up with Jonathan Bailey’s Tim Laughlin that the real fun starts. Any time the two men are on-screen it is nothing short of viscerally electric, and there is more palpable chemistry between Bomer and Bailey than I have seen in almost any other on-screen couple. Whether it’s toe sucking or doggy-style, mutual masturbation or fellatio, these two men do it all, and the series asks us to enjoy this pleasure with them, to abandon ourselves to the libidinal desires of our bodies. 

Obviously, this is all very hot, and judging from the many GIFs and memes I’ve seen on Gay Twitter, I’m not the only one who thinks so. Indeed, there’s something uniquely potent about the shared experience of encountering a series like Fellow Travelers, and this communal encounter with queer desire ratchets up the intensity. We’re not just isolated little people enjoying the meeting of two hot men; we can’t help but be aware of all of the other queer folks out there in their own spaces indulging in the same pleasure.

There’s more to the sex scenes in Fellow Travelers than just erotic stimulation, though I would argue that that’s reason enough for their inclusion (not every single scene has to move the plot forward, contrary to what some media illiterates like to think). Instead, sex provides Hawk and Tim one of the few islands of pleasure in a world that remains steadfastly hostile to them through the decades of their lives. This is obviously very true during the insidiously repressive era of the Cold War and the Lavender Scare, but it’s also true as they make their way through their lives. When they are in the privacy of their own home they can, for a time at least, leave behind all of the darkness and terror of the world outside; they can be, for just a few moments, totally uninhibited. There is power here, of course, but there is also a profound joy that both of them struggle to find anywhere else. In sex, it seems, there is absolute honesty.

Gay sex plays an equally important role in Ira Sachs’ Passages. At the heart of the film is the fraught dynamic between Martin and Tomas (Ben Whishaw and Franz Rogowski), a gay couple, and Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), the woman with whom Tomas begins an affair and for whom he leaves Martin. As with so many things, however, things become ever more complicated for the three, and at one point Tomas and Martin have a late-night tryst that is conveyed to us in astonishingly frank detail. 

Though not quite as frenzied or as visceral as the sex scenes in Fellow Travelers, it is nevertheless a radically intimate moment, precisely because the dynamic between Tomas and Martin has been so strained already. For Martin, it seems to represent a chance to reclaim some of what he’s lost as a result of Tomas’ frantic infidelity, while for Tomas the blissful escape entailed in bottoming seems to offer him something he can’t gain with Agathe and the burdens of heterosexuality. The explicitness of the entire scene reminds us of how important, how vital, even, sex is to relationships between people, even as we are invited to see these characters in all of their raw humanity, shorn of the complications of the outside world. 

In a film like Passages emotions are treacherous things, however, particularly for someone like Tomas. Like many another man-child, he careens from one emotional extreme to the next, and his sexual interlude with Martin, in all of its rawness immediacy, ultimately proves the undoing of both relationships. What seemed to both characters and viewers to be a meaningful interlude proves to be but the beginning of a dissolution. 

We unfortunately seem to be standing on the threshold of a new puritan age, with the sex negativity of Gen Z and enduring homophobia and transphobia of American society dovetailing to create a toxic brew. In such a milieu, on-screen queer sexual intimacy takes on an even more intense charge than it has possessed in the past and, for this reason, it must be defended. Whatever the purity brigade might have to say about the matter, the truth of it is that sex is a key part of what makes us human. For many queer people seeing it represented on screen in a drama–rather than, say, pornography–allows them to see how sex is also a key part of many queer lives and loves. If, as many people have pointed out, films and television shows teach us how to be human, then they can also teach us how to be sexual subjects. 

In a world in which it is increasingly dangerous and distressing to be queer, Fellow Passengers and Passages, as well as other queer-love-centric offerings such as All of Us Strangers, remind us of the joy, the power, and the devastating pleasure of gay sex on screen.