Along My Fellow Travelers
Source: https://admission.princeton.edu/blogs/along-my-fellow-travelers Parent: https://admission.princeton.edu/undergraduate-student-blog
December 5, 2025
By
Lake Liao '27
Lake Liao '27
Hello everyone! My name is Lake and I am currently a sophomore (Class of 2027) at Princeton intending to concentrate in Philosophy. I'm interested in climate politics, elections, Russian literature, ancient Greek thought, and applications of rights in constitutional law. I am a member of Butler College, one of Princeton's seven residential colleges. I grew up in Troy, Michigan, just outside Detroit. Some of my hobbies include making coffee ...
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I seem to be always searching for something to lose myself in completely... It’s like we say in seminary — ‘beyond measure.
Thomas Mallon
Fellow Travelersby Thomas Mallon is a novel and series about two gay men named Timothy Laughlin and Hawkins Fuller. They are DC political staffers in the Senate and State Department during 1950s McCarthyism where alleged communist and queer staffers in the federal government were purged from jobs under the guise of national security.
At Senator Joseph McCarthy’s campaign victory party, he proclaims,
Well, we did it.
We have a new president. One who doesn’t want party-line thinkers or fellow travelers.
A fellow traveler referred to someone who was not a Communist Party member but nonetheless friendly to the ideology as the Cold War unfolded. The McCarthyism movement deliberately linked homosexuality to subversion, deviance, and communism. Queerness was depicted as un-American – a threat to national unity.
Tim and Hawk fall in love, starting a passionate clandestine affair across the decades. Through the 1960s Vietnam war protests, 1970s disco craze, and 1980s HIV/AIDS crisis, they find their way back to each other against all odds. They can’t help themselves. Years later, Hawk finds a Capitol Hill snow globe that brings back each formative memory. DC represented the crucible of shame, privacy, and persecution that forged a love equal parts beautiful and painful.
Throughout my own high school years, I dreamed of the East Coast for college, and moving to Princeton brought me to DC for my first summer. Right away, I realized that the capital for politics is also a capital for queerness. Men hold hands on the way to the Trader Joe’s in Noma, where I lived in a 6th floor apartment. Queer women frequent As You Are, a lesbian cafe in Capitol Hill. During pride month, the streets in Dupont Circle flood with rainbows, festivities, and kisses.
And I heard that there’s a special place
Where boys and girls can all be queens every single day
…
Black lights and a mirrored disco ball
Every night’s another reason why I left it all
Chappell Roan
It was a brave new world for me. I grew up in the Midwest suburbs where the topic was hardly discussed. I didn’t know any other gay men at my high school, or that men somewhere in the world held hands in public, or that queer community institutions even existed.
70 years after the story of Fellow Travelers,I could live as both a patriot and gay man. I could work on Congressional ethics trainings while living a life deemed ethically corrupt by the same government a century ago. My experience of queerness, which once seemed like a private matter, now reverberated back in the architecture of the city. My new friends and I danced in the streets. We gossiped on rooftops. Moved with the liberating abandon that generations of queer people before us were denied or punished for. And for the first time, I wasn’t alone in the way I experienced life itself. I wasn’t the only one who rejected the drab march of politeness and pragmatism – I found others who wanted to wake up each day and dream in every wavelength of color.
We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything — what a waste.
Andre Aciman
The imprint from that summer closest to my heart isn’t a professional accolade, but rather the way I learned to love – with queer friends, lovers, and strangers alike. How wonderful is it, to live in these times. Along my fellow travelers.
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