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.