There’s a thread running through queer cinema and television, stitched in longing, shame, and inevitability. It’s the tradition of the tragic romance: stories where desire is undeniable, but survival is not. Fellow Travelers is the most recent entry in this lineage, but it doesn’t stand alone — it’s part of a canon of heartbreak that’s defined how queer love has been framed on screen.

For many, Brokeback Mountain was the cultural earthquake. Heath Ledger’s Ennis Del Mar and Jake Gyllenhaal’s Jack Twist gave mainstream cinema its first searing, unapologetically queer love story — and then shattered it. Their affair was tender and combustible, but in a world that allowed them no safety, tragedy was inevitable. The film ended the way so many queer lives did in mid-20th century America: with silence, isolation, and grief. For audiences, it wasn’t just a love story. It was a mirror, and a warning.

The release of Brokeback made queer desire visible on a global scale, but it also reinforced the notion that queer love stories were doomed to end in heartbreak. That visibility came with a cost — one that would echo in the stories that followed.

If Brokeback broke hearts with intimacy, Angels in America cracked them open with scope. Adapted from Tony Kushner’s stage play, HBO’s miniseries was part hallucinatory fever dream, part historical indictment. Set in the crucible of the AIDS crisis, it showed how politics, religion, and abandonment collided with the private devastations of love and loss.

Where Brokeback whispered through silence and landscape, Angels shouted through angels and prophecy. It was furious and unrelenting, a demand that queer suffering be remembered, not erased. It didn’t just offer a tragic romance; it offered an elegy for a generation, showing that queer love was never separate from queer politics.

A decade later, Call Me By Your Name wrapped tragedy in sunlight. Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of André Aciman’s novel gave us Elio and Oliver, a summer affair drenched in peaches and Italian afternoons. Unlike Brokeback, the violence was subtler. The tragedy wasn’t a hate crime or public outing; it was the inevitability of separation, the quiet devastation of a love that could not last.

That final shot of Timothée Chalamet crying into a fire has been memed and replayed endlessly, but the pain behind it is real. It’s a softer heartbreak, one that lingers because it feels like a universal story of first love — yet framed by the knowledge that queer love stories still so rarely end with permanence.

If Call Me By Your Name gave us a summer’s warmth, Portrait of a Lady on Fire gave us inevitability painted in chiaroscuro. The French masterpiece followed Marianne and Héloïse, who fall in love on borrowed time — before an arranged marriage tears them apart. Their romance is lush, sensual, and charged with longing, but always shadowed by patriarchy.

Unlike Brokeback, there’s no external act of violence. Unlike Call Me By Your Name, there’s no illusion of choice. The tragedy here is structural, societal, inescapable. Their love survives only in memory, in a painting, in the act of looking. It’s heartbreak elevated to art — a story where love becomes immortal, but only because it cannot endure in life.

And then there is Fellow Travelers. What sets it apart from its predecessors is its scope: it dares to span decades, weaving one romance through the Lavender Scare, Vietnam, the civil rights era, and the AIDS crisis. Hawkins and Tim’s love is personal, yes, but it’s also political — shaped by history, battered by shame, and haunted by survival.

If Brokeback gave us two men in the wilderness, Fellow Travelers gives us two men at the heart of the American machine. If Portrait asked us to remember in paint, Fellow Travelers asks us to remember in blood and policy. It shows that queer tragedy isn’t just about forbidden desire; it’s about the systems that decide who gets to love freely and who doesn’t.

Taken together, these stories reveal a pattern. Straight romances can end in marriage, divorce, or reconciliation. Queer romances, for too long, have been framed as either tragic or exceptional. To love as a queer person on screen has been to pay a price — in death, in exile, in memory.

And yet, there’s power in this canon. Each of these works carved out visibility where there was none. They carried our grief, but they also carried our history. Fellow Travelers doesn’t just inherit that tradition; it reframes it, reminding us that our stories are not marginal footnotes but central to understanding love, power, and politics.

The algorithm already knows you want to. Follow @glitchesinthegaydar.