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Jonathan Bailey played Anthony Bridgerton on the wildly popular Netflix series “Bridgerton,” but he’s about to trade in his aristocratic period costumes for a different sort of journey into the past, alongside Matt Bomer and Allison Williams in the upcoming Showtime limited series “Fellow Travelers.”

Bailey and Bomer, both of whom are gay, will play gay men working in the world of post-WWII Washington, D.C. politics, when there was no choice but to be closeted during the harrowing 1950s “Lavender Scare.” Set in moment when Joseph McCarthy hunted “subsersives and sexual deviants” alongside political operative Roy Cohn (who was himself closeted and viciously homophobic until his death from AIDS in the 1980s) and then continuing through the decades, the characters will move in and out of each other’s lives as history unfolds. The eight-episode series is created by Ron Nyswaner (“Philadelphia”) and will begin production in Toronto soon, so be on the lookout for a trip to the bad old days coming in, we’re guessing, 2023.