Hawkins Fuller is a charismatic man who has a financially rewarding, behind-the-scenes career in politics. He tends to avoid emotional entanglements - that is until he meets Tim Laughlin, a young man brimming with idealism and religious faith.

They begin a romance just as Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn declare war on "subversives and sexual deviants," initiating one of the darkest periods in 20th-century American history.

Over the course of four decades, Hawkins, Tim, and three others cross paths through the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, the drug-fueled disco hedonism of the 1970s, and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, while facing obstacles in the world and in themselves.

Based on the novel by Thomas Mallon.