It was the last Wednesday in July, and many of Washington’s top players were hanging out at the Ned, a private club around the corner from the White House.
The Secretary of the Navy, John Phelan, was waiting for an elevator in the lobby when he bumped into Dr. Mehmet Oz, the surgeon-turned-daytime TV star now in charge of Medicare and Medicaid. Howard Lutnick, the secretary of commerce, was bouncing around the Library bar upstairs. Scott Bessent, the secretary of the Treasury, was wandering around up there too.
Sitting in a brown leather armchair in the center of this social whirl was a high-ranking official at the Department of Energy named Charles Moran. His abstruse-sounding title is associate administrator for external affairs for the National Nuclear Security Administration. What this means is that he works in the part of the Energy Department that develops, tests and keeps safe America’s nuclear weapons stockpile.
But that’s not why administration officials kept approaching his armchair to schmooze, or why some of the cabinet secretaries at the Ned that night seemed to be so chummy with him.
Mr. Moran, 44, is the pasha of a new power tribe in the capital: the gay men of the Trump administration.
These are the A-Gays. They’re (mostly) out, they’re proud (to work for President Trump) and they have big jobs inside (or alongside) this administration. They wield influence all over town, from the Pentagon to the State Department to the White House to the Kennedy Center.
“We’re like Visa,” Mr. Moran said. “Everywhere you want to be.”
He sipped a dirty vodka martini and surveyed the room. Two Republican men waved at him from across the club. “Both gay,” he explained. This was also true of the middle-aged Trump appointee who ambled over a moment later to catch up. But apparently not so of the young-looking White House aide who approached a few minutes after that. “Straight as an arrow,” Mr. Moran said as the aide walked away.
He laughed and added, “I hang out with my straights just as easily as I hang out with my gays.”
The most powerful out gay man in the Trump administration is Mr. Bessent. There are a handful of others in the Treasury Department. Other A-Gays include Tony Fabrizio, the president’s longtime pollster; Trent Morse, an outgoing deputy assistant to the president; Richard Grenell, who was put in charge of the Kennedy Center; and Jacob Helberg, an under secretary of state. These are just some. There are lots of other lesser-known men who make up the tribe.
They’re overwhelmingly white and tend to have a certain kind of look. Close cropped haircuts. Windowpane suits. Golf shorts. They’re not the type to be telling anyone their pronouns or using the word “queer.” And they aren’t the least bit offended that the leader of their party continues to stoke a moral panic about transgender people.
They’re gay. But they’re still Republicans.
Life in Hostile Territory
Mr. Moran knows a lot of them because he’s been “on the Trump train,” as he put it, from the beginning.
In 2015, back when the Republican establishment was still trying to thwart Mr. Trump, Mr. Moran said that he and some other gay Republicans he knew became intrigued by the brash New Yorker’s history of saying nice things about gay rights. These men had experienced homophobia from their fellow Republicans at one point or another, so they saw Mr. Trump’s ascendance as something new, especially after the 2016 Republican National Convention, when Peter Thiel was given a prime-time speaking slot and used it to endorse Mr. Trump, saying: “I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all I am proud to be an American.”
Mr. Moran was in the front row when that happened. He recalled bracing for boos or a walkout. Instead there was big applause. He ended up helping out on all three of Mr. Trump’s campaigns. Along the way, he met the various members of the Trump family, all of whom treated him with a respect that couldn’t always be expected from Republican power brokers of the past, he said.
There were some gay appointees during the first Trump administration, but it wasn’t like now. Mr. Trump initially arrived in Washington as a true outsider; he had to draw from the disparate parts of the old G.O.P. he had vanquished in order to staff his government. This time around, he has his own establishment. And it turns out that the MAGA establishment has a lot more openly gay men than the Republican establishment that came before it.
In 2019, Mr. Moran took over Log Cabin Republicans, the gay Republican group, aligning it fully with the MAGA movement and increasing its ranks. He stepped down in January after nearly five years hoping he would be rewarded with a job in the incoming administration. Though he didn’t expect it would involve nukes.
Although he is now very busy learning the inner workings of the National Nuclear Security Administration, he said he feels a certain responsibility to continue looking after the “community” of gay MAGA Republicans he spent nearly a decade cultivating. He keeps a spreadsheet with dozens of names and titles of other gay compatriots working inside the administration. “I love it when I find out there’s somebody new,” he said.
Part of the A-Gays’ power comes from the fact that they (mostly) stick together. “Even within the bureaucracy, the bureaucracy is overwhelming,” Mr. Moran said. “I love having this community as a resource. Back in the day, these groups had to be closed off and hidden, but now we use it as a tool.” Just the other day, he recalled, a gay acquaintance of his was trying to figure out who in the government could help him get something done for his boss. “He called and was like, ‘Hey, do we have somebody at such and such agency?’” They had somebody.
But there is a kind of paradox about these men’s existence in Washington. They live in the gayest city in America, which is also pretty much the most Trump-hating city in America.
The gay men who work for him here are keenly aware that they are in hostile territory, surrounded by other gay men who consider them self-deluded traitors or worse. At gay bars around town and on dating apps they are either iced out or confronted about the things this president has said and done. He cut AIDS relief around the world and H.I.V. vaccine research and funding for L.G.B.T.Q. suicide prevention services. He called drag shows “anti-American.” His defense secretary announced during pride month that the Navy Vessel named after Harvey Milk would be renamed. Perhaps most worrying for many gay people is the how conservative the Supreme Court has become thanks to Mr. Trump. Could same-sex marriage go the way of Roe? It’s not out of the question.
Gay Trump appointees interviewed for this article — some of whom said they weren’t authorized to speak on the record — dismiss such opprobrium as overheated liberal whining. They argue that the battle for gay rights has basically been won, and that there has never been a Republican as friendly to the gays as Donald J. Trump.
Aren’t they themselves proof that this is so, they ask?
‘I Love the Gays’
There have always been gay men in power in Washington, but they were rarely open about it. The plot of the most famous novel ever written about this place, “Advise and Consent,” revolves around a gay senator who got blackmailed.
A few years ago, a Washington journalist named James Kirchick published, “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington,” a sprawling, definitive history on this subject.
“Being gay was the worst thing you could be in American politics,” Mr. Kirchick said one recent afternoon over lunch at the Bombay Club, the Clinton-era power lunch spot across the street from the White House. He recalled a famous quote about politics, spoken in 1983 by Edwin Edwards, the Louisiana Democrat who bragged: “The only way I can lose this election is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.”
Mr. Kirchick, 41, said one way to see how much has changed in recent years was to look at what things were like under the most recent Republican president before Mr. Trump, George W. Bush. “There were high-ranking gay people in that administration, but they had to be very discreet about it,” he said. “It was tough, and there was a lot of outing at the time.”
Mr. Kirchick has been a vocal critic of Mr. Trump, but he did note one important difference when it comes to this president: “Trump himself is obviously a huge part of what’s changed. He’s clearly comfortable around gay people.”
Before his political turn, Mr. Trump mostly talked publicly about gay people the way one might expect of a New Yorker in show business. He once asked a contestant on “The Apprentice” if he was “a homosexual.” When the man said that he was, Mr. Trump replied: “I like steak, somebody else likes spaghetti. That’s why they have menus in restaurants. It’s a great world.”
He allowed gay people to join Mar-a-Lago when other clubs in Palm Beach still discriminated. One associate of his said that in the period when Mr. Trump was preparing to become a presidential candidate, he privately explained his thinking on gay-related policy issues, such as marriage equality, this way: “I love the gays. They pay the most for the weddings.”
But then he went on to pick as his running mate Indiana governor Mike Pence, who had a long record of opposing gay rights. And then there was the fact that the political base Mr. Trump had cobbled together and then needed to mollify included many gay-hating constituencies; he would never have made it without evangelicals. Once he got into office, he barred transgender people from the military. His most recent campaign for president pumped out videos ridiculing gay people in the military. He recently mocked Pete Buttigieg’s same-sex marriage.
Bring any of that up to the A-Gays and they just laugh and insist that no one can say with a straight face that MAGA is homophobic. They delight in what they see as the camp aspects of gay culture that suffuse their movement: On the eve of his inauguration this year, the president danced onstage with Village People as the group performed “Y.M.C.A.,” the ode to gay cruising. The soundtrack at MAGA rallies includes Abba, Queen, Elton John, Sinead O’Connor and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Mr. Trump often talked about the hotness of men he spotted in the front row or who appeared onstage with him.
Mr. Kirchick called the president a “camp icon,” adding: “He’s like a drag queen. He’s outrageous, he’s transgressive, he’s catty, he’s a narcissist the likes of which we haven’t seen since Alexander the Great.”
The A-Gays also worship Melania Trump and she seems to appreciate them, too. One of the few events she participated in during her husband’s last campaign was a fund-raiser with gay Republicans in Trump Tower (for which she was paid). Mr. Moran was there, of course. He keeps a framed photograph of himself with Mrs. Trump from that night at his desk at the Department of Energy and said he’s met the first lady “a dozen times.”
In 2021, she came to a dinner Mr. Moran threw at Mar-a-Lago to accept the Log Cabin’s “Spirit of Lincoln” award. He called it “the most incredible experience of my life.” But what is it like to actually hang out with her? “I mean, she’s Melania Trump, it’s not like we’re sitting around on the couch with our heels off eating pizza,” he said.
He said that he and his fellow MAGA gays consider her an icon because she has, as they feel they have too, gone through “trials and tribulations, the ups, the downs, the good, the bad.” (Also because of her fashion.)
All of this can be somewhat surprising to some of the other MAGA tribes who have come to the capital to get in on the action of the Trump redux.
“The funny thing is, I had a lot of girlfriends who wanted to move here,” said Natalie Winters, the D.C.-based right-wing media darling who is a protégé of Steve Bannon. “They thought the dating scene would be really great, that MAGA would bring in a whole wave of, like, you know, eligible, conservative, smart, enterprising men.”
Instead, she said, “everybody’s freaking gay.”
On the Town
In early June, the president and first lady went to the Kennedy Center for the opening night of a production of “Les Miserables.” This constituted a big night out on the MAGA social calendar — there was even a red carpet — and the A-Gays turned out in force. They stood around the Kennedy Center’s grand foyer in tuxedoed packs, swilling champagne and making after-party plans as they awaited the president’s arrival.
They soon came face to face with their ideological counterparts when a troupe of drag queens showed up to crash the party. Their very presence was a political statement, since the president had been railing online about how there would be no more drag shows allowed at the Kennedy Center.
The drag queens made their defiant march through the theater to find their seats near the stage. The right-wing gay men glared and shook their heads. The president and first lady, dressed all in black, hovered above the melodrama from their seats up in the balcony.
“The gay left just can’t handle the fact that President Trump loves the gays,” said Casey Flores, a 34-year-old MAGA gay who moved to Washington in April and started a job at the Kennedy Center as a fund-raiser.
“This idea that Republicans hate gays, that’s just so not the case, as clearly evidenced by all of us,” Mr. Flores said, referring to all of his gay friends who moved to Washington to work for Mr. Trump. “We’re so over it. We just want to help the country.”
Mr. Flores, who is not married, said he’s “not particularly worried about gay marriage being repealed,” mostly because of some “protections” he heard were put in place not long ago. (He was referring to the Respect for Marriage act, which President Biden signed into law in 2022; it mandates federal recognition of same-sex marriage and was passed by a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers.)
But what about some of the more homophobic-seeming constituencies and characters in MAGA world — is it ever difficult, as a gay man, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with evangelicals and people like Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary who has a history of criticizing policies allowing gay people to serve in the military?
Eh, not really, said Mr. Flores.
“Nobody is meaner to gay people than other gay people,” he insisted. “Left-wing gays hate socially conservative Christians more than that group of people hates the gays, and I think that’s on public display every day on social media and elsewhere.”
A few weeks after the opening of “Les Miserables,” Mr. Flores was out for dinner at the Occidental, a retro-chic chophouse on Pennsylvania Avenue that draws in many Trump officials. (Mr. Bessent happened to be dining two tables away that night.) Printed in the center of each menu is the restaurant’s motto: “Where Statesmen Dine.”
Mr. Flores was there with his friend Jon Levine, a 38-year-old gay reporter for The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication. Both men are in some ways typical of the new kind of gay Republican in town. They moved here after Mr. Trump returned because there were suddenly new professional opportunities. In Mr. Levine’s case, the dawning of a new Trump era meant lots of stories to report and sources to meet. For Mr. Flores, there was a job at the Kennedy Center, which he landed because he is friendly with Mr. Grenell, who was put in charge of the performing arts center.
There were new social opportunities, too. A whole scene has sprouted up for gay Republicans. Just the week before, both men had been at a rooftop party in Logan Circle with about 50 other like-minded guys, many of whom had jobs in the administration (“No libs allowed except significant others” read the Partiful invite.) There have been similar house parties in Dupont Circle, and pool parties on Capitol Hill. But the most coveted invitation for a MAGA gay in Washington is to one of the parties that Mr. Thiel, the gay Trump megadonor, has been throwing at his mansion near Embassy Row. (Mr. Thiel declined to comment for this article.)
“A lot of gays across the Trump administration are very inspired by Peter Thiel,” Mr. Flores said. “He was the first contrarian to kind of open the door.” (Mr. Flores has yet to be invited to one of his parties.)
And yet, this is a relatively small world. It’s still coming together, and not everyone gets along. “Just because we’re all homos doesn’t mean we’re all friends,” Mr. Levine said.
But when these men do step outside their world, they are often reminded that they are not welcome in the flourishing gay scene that surrounds them.
“I will say, if people at a gay bar find out that you’re in the Trump administration or you’re working somewhere like the Kennedy Center, they are not nice to you — they instantly come at you,” Mr. Flores said. “I definitely don’t lead with it.”
That seemed to be true based on a spin through the room one recent night at the Little Gay Pub in Logan Circle. Patron after patron said there was no way they’d ever be friends with — much less date — a gay Trump appointee.
“If you work in the Trump administration, and you’re a gay person, clearly you have no respect for yourself,” said Jason Melton, a 44-year-old Washingtonian who works in health care policy. He was sipping vodka with pineapple juice and looking rakish in a gray Calvin Klein Suit.
Asked if he considered it morally acceptable to date a Trump appointee, he said: “Look, it’s OK to date whoever you want. It’s not up to me to say who you should or should not date. But, in any case …” he trailed off. What if the Trump appointee were super hot? “No, they would go from a 10 to a negative 10 if I found out they worked for Trump,” he said.
Across the room, one young, gay Democratic staffer who works on Capitol Hill stood with his friends, drinking pinot grigio and eating pigs in a blanket. He said he’s always viewed himself as open-minded and thus tried to play nice with some Trump gays he knows. But ultimately he just couldn’t stomach what he saw as their hypocrisy. The way he put it: You can either party with the gays on Fire Island, or you can cut funding for AIDS programs, but you can’t do both.
Mr. Moran said many of his friends encounterthis sort of attitude all the time in their adventures throughout Washington. It gets them pretty down.
“But you know what I tell people?” he said. “If you’re not getting invited to the cool kids table, go make your own cool kids table.”
Or your own spreadsheet.
Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.
The post Donald Trump’s Big Gay Government appeared first on New York Times.
