Gregory Spears and Greg Pierce's opera Fellow Travelers will embark on a national tour in 2026, with stops at Seattle Opera, Portland Opera, San Diego Opera, New York's Glimmerglass Festival, and more.
The touring production will partner with the American LGBTQ+ Museum on the Lavender Names Project, a "nationwide grassroots archival research and community outreach initiative" to collect and share stories of members of the LGBTQ+ community who have been "systematically discriminated against, fired and mistreated by federal and local governments in the United States." The tour will include a lobby exhibition featuring these collected stories.
Based on Thomas Mallon's 2007 novel of the same name, Fellow Travelers tells the story of queer federal government workers facing discrimination during the "Lavender Scare," the 1950s panic about homosexuals working in the U.S. government leading to a mass purge of queer government workers. The novel also inspired a 2023 Showtime miniseries which starred Matt Bomer, Jonathan Bailey, and Jelani Alladin.
Said director Kevin Newbury: “The national tour of Fellow Travelers and the Lavender Names Project arrives at a moment when we are experiencing a dramatic rise in systemic attacks on the rights of LGBTQ+ people in the United States and a deliberate attempt to erase LGBTQ+ history. We are asking members of our community to share their stories so that we may uncover and preserve this history. The photos will be part of an ever-growing visual archive that will appear on stage at the end of each performance as a living memorial to the many LGBTQ+ people who suffered this decades-long persecution.”
“The American LGBTQ+ Museum is proud to partner with the Fellow Travelers team to be the archive for the Lavender Names Project," said Ben Garcia, Executive Director of the American LGBTQ+ Museum. "These stories and pictures will live on in our Museum as testaments to the courage, creativity, patriotism, and strength of queer Americans who served their nation. We hope that their stories will inspire change and provide safety to future generations.”
Fellow Travelers premiered in 2016 at Cincinnati Opera, and has since become one of the most-produced American operas of the 21st century. A production had been planned as part of Washington National Opera's 2025-26 season at the Kennedy Center, but was withdrawn by the writers due to concerns over President Donald Trump's takeover of the institution.
