Donald Trump’s big gay government

Washington: 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. 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.

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 Donald 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,” Moran said. “Everywhere you want to be.”

The most powerful out gay man in the Trump administration is Bessent. There are a handful of others in the Treasury Department. Other A-Gays include Tony Fabrizio, the president’s longtime pollster; Trent Morse, a departing deputy assistant to the president; Richard Grenell, who was put in charge of the Kennedy Center; and Jacob Helberg, an undersecretary 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. 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.

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 Trump, 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 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 Trump.

In 2019, 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.

Part of the A-Gays’ power comes from the fact that they (mostly) stick together. “Even within the bureaucracy, the bureaucracy is overwhelming,” 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.”

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 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 HIV vaccine research and funding for LGBTQ+ suicide prevention services. 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 how conservative the Supreme Court has become, thanks to 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 Trump.

There have always been gay men in power in Washington, but they were rarely open about it. 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,” Kirchick said one recent afternoon. He recalled a famous quote about politics, spoken in 1983 by former Rep. Edwin Edwards, D-La., 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.”

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 Trump, George W. Bush. “There were high-ranking gay people in that administration, but they had to be very discreet about it,” he said.

Kirchick has been a vocal critic of 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, 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, 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 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 Gov. Mike Pence, who had a long record of opposing gay rights. And then there was the fact that the political base 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. 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. Trump often talked about the hotness of men he spotted in the front row or who appeared onstage with him.

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.”

In early June, the president and first lady, Melania Trump, went to the Kennedy Center for the opening night of a production of “Les Misérables.” 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 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 gay left just can’t handle the fact that President Trump <em>loves</em> 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 fundraiser.

“This idea that Republicans hate gays — that’s just so not the case, as clearly evidenced by all of us,” Flores said, referring to all of his gay friends who moved to Washington to work for Trump. “We’re<em> so</em> over it. We just want to help the country.”

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 Joe 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 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.”