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.

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, a departing 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.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5776356&forum_id=2!#49276775)

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 felt 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.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5776356&forum_id=2!#49276776)