Community Conversations

Fellow Travelers, the journey

Join us for a conversation with partners from across Florida to sustain advocacy for equality and inclusion. Together, we will work towards shifting social attitudes toward greater respect and acceptance of LBBTQ+ communities.

This year FGO’s Community Conversations series focuses on composer Gregory Spears’s opera Fellow Travelers, based on Thomas Mallon’s 2007 novel Fellow Travelers. The opera is set during the McCarthy era of the 1950s and focuses on the “lavender scare,” a witch-hunt and mass firings of gay people from the United States government. The story centers on the love affair between two men working for the federal government—Hawkins “Hawk” Fuller, a State Department official, and Timothy Laughlin, a recent college graduate working in a senator’s office.

Community Conversations are a series of thought-provoking discussions that connect the opera art form with religion, politics, and the humanities. Using the mainstage season as a catalyst, these hour-long events, in partnership with other regional cultural organizations, serve adult audiences and stimulate conversations about life and art that speak to the communities of South Florida.

Involved Florida-based organizations: Equality Florida, SunServe, HRC, Pride Center at Equality Park, Pride South Florida, Miami Beach Pride, SAVE Foundation, TransSocial Group

FGO Studio Artists stars will also be part of the program performing selections from the opera.

Broward

April 12, 2022
7:30 PM Welcome Bubbles; 8:00 PM program start
Center for Spiritual Living
4849 North Dixie Hwy
Oakland Park, FL 33334

The event is free, but reservations are recommended.
Click here to reserve on April 12.

Program:
Fellow Travelers, the journey. FGO Community Conversation in Collaboration with Stonewall Museum and Sunserve

Culture and history; fiction and reality; let's explore the essential aspects of the production of Fellow Travelers composed by Gregory Spears, libretto by Greg Pierce, based on Thomas Mallon's 2007 novel Fellow Travelers.

Panelists:
Thomas Mallon (Author, Fellow Travelers novel)
Gregory Spears (Composer, Fellow Travelers opera)
Susan Danis (Florida Grand Opera General Director and CEO)
Hunter O'Harian (Stonewall Museum Executive Director)

Moderator:
Tony Lima (Sunserve Executive Director)

Miami

April 19, 2022
6:30 PM Welcome Bubbles; 7:00 PM program start
Art Deco Museum
1001 Ocean Dr
Miami Beach, FL 33139

The event is free, but reservations are recommended.
Click here to reserve on April 19.

Program:
Fellow Travelers, the journey. Community Conversation In collaboration with Art Deco Museum, Miami Beach Pride, and SAVE Foundation

We are all fellow travelers, forming bonds of empathy across community groups supporting our basic human wants and needs. All of our relationships are established through a cultural and historical lens. Personal stories focus as we explore history as a reference point for forming and creating our relationships. Key community stakeholders compare experiences from their reality to the opera fiction, lives from 1950 when young journalist Timothy Laughlin and State Department official Hawkins Fuller swept into a passionate love affair, just as Senator McCarthy began his hunt for “sexual subversives” in the government. This is the story of Fellow Travelers, the opera.

“Fuller and Laughlin aren’t based on any particular historical figures. Both contain bits and pieces of people I’ve known in my own life, which makes them like the characters one finds being created by just about any novelist of the ‘non-historical’ sort.” —Thomas Mallon (Excerpt from 2008 interview with Littoral, the journal of The Key West Literary Seminars)

Panelists:
Orlando Gonzales, Executive Director at SAVE Foundation
Philanthropists and community influencers featured at the Legacy Couples exhibit at the Art Deco Museum:

• Todd Delmay and Jeff Delmay (20 years together. One of the two couples who became the first to be legally married in Florida.)
• Laura Cadorette and Jessica Davis (30 years together)

Moderator:
Michael Gongora (Miami Beach Commissioner and former Vice-Mayor)