Timothy J. Burger, a former reporter for Bloomberg, Time and other publications, is a consultant in Washington, D.C. Follow him @BurgerInfo.

“I t was a slap in the face.” Steven Levine is remembering that day in 2006 when President George W. Bush took the stage in a small-town school gym in Indiana. It was October 28, right before the midterm elections, and Levine was a 22-year-old White House advance aide. He’d been camped out in Sellersburg all week, working to get the details just right for Bush’s campaign rally. The flags hung just so, the big presidential seal on the podium. Then Bush started talking, his standard stump speech about taxes and supporting the troops. But a new applause line took Levine by surprise. “Just this week in New Jersey,” the president said, “another activist court issued a ruling that raises doubt about the institution of marriage. We believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman, and should be defended. I will continue to appoint judges who strictly interpret the law and not legislate from the bench.”

The crowd loved it. Levine was crushed.


He was gay and working for a Republican and convinced it was possible to be both at the same time.

Like dozens of other gay colleagues in the Bush White House, many of them closeted, Levine had been sure that Bush himself was personally tolerant even if the GOP was not—and uncomfortable with gay-bashing as a way to win elections. But this was a rebuff, and it was hard not to take it personally: “To be working extraordinarily hard with all of your energy, working through many nights for somebody that you believe in, and to hear that person that you work so hard for come out against something that you are.”

Levine knew, of course, that Bush had officially backed the Federal Marriage Amendment, a proposed amendment to the Constitution to define marriage as solely between a man and a woman. But this was also the president who had made combating AIDS in Africa a personal cause (later, at Levine’s urging, he would even decorate the White House North Portico with a giant red ribbon to mark World AIDS Day), who had met with previously ostracized gay Republican leaders and whose hard-line conservative vice president had an openly gay daughter. And besides, opposing gay marriage just “wasn’t a centerpiece of the campaign to date,” Levine recalled when we talked recently. “So it wasn’t something that I was expecting to have been sort of his rallying cry at that event.”

Afterward, Levine made what small protest he could, telling his bosses he refused to work advance for future campaign events. Back in Washington, Levine says, “I told the folks in the [White House] advance office that I couldn’t do that anymore. … I told them why. These are my friends.”

“That was sort of my quiet way of objecting,” Levine recalls.

***

Levine stayed with Bush right upuntil the president hopped into the armored presidential limo for the ride to Barack Obama’s inauguration 27 months later. As the taillights disappeared down Pennsylvania Avenue, Levine left town. A few months later, one of his gay friends who had also worked in the White House sat down in front of Facebook and counted the Bush White House staffers he knew to be gay. He came up with at least 70 (only two of them women).

That number—and after speaking with two dozen sources I have no doubt it was an incomplete tally—has surprised almost everyone I’ve told. Alberto Gonzales, the former Bush White House counsel and attorney general, for example, says he never knew dozens of gays had served on the White House staff. “I don’t think I could identify more than one or two,” he told me. “It was just something that we didn’t talk about.”

Ben Baker/Redux Pictures

Scott Evertz was Bush’s openly gay AIDS czar. He told me he was entirely unaware he had company. “I, of course—just by the law of statistics—knew that there were other gay people in the White House,” he says. “But not a single one of them was out to me, so I felt completely alone.”

The broader political environment was, to say the least, hostile. When Evertz’s appointment was announced in 2001, the religious right was furious. On the fringe, Evertz recalls the late Fred Phelps—later known for offending everyone by picketing the funerals of American soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq—calling for protesters to burn the flag of Wisconsin, where Evertz had been living, and publishing nasty posters on his church’s website referring to Evertz as “Bush’s butt buddy.” Once Evertz was ensconced in the Office of National AIDS Policy, he remembers, “People would come to my office, and they’d make appointments. And their sole purpose was to pray for me in my office.”

Evertz says Bush’s political guru, Karl Rove, for a time would only give him clearance for public appearances if he promised not to be billed as the first openly gay appointee in a Republican administration. With the politics swirling, Israel Hernandez, a deputy assistant to the president, came into Evertz’s office and gave him a hug. Evertz was sure Rove had sent him as a nice gesture. It was only much later that Evertz learned Hernandez, who had been with Bush since serving as his driver and personal aide in the early 1990s, was gay. The hug had been a quiet statement of support from a member of the White House’s gay underground.

“Did we have a lot of people in the closet in the administration?” says one former senior official in the Bush White House whose office included at least three gay staffers. “I used to say we had an entire warehouse.”

Gay Marriage, During and After Bush Americans’ support for same-sex marriage dipped during the Bush administration but has since increased dramatically—even among Republicans. Source: Pew Center

In recent months, I’ve reported extensively on life in the closet of the Bush White House, and a number of his former aides are quoted on the record in this story for the first time about their experiences as gay Republicans in an administration that was perhaps the last of the era when institutionalized discrimination against gays and lesbians was still legal, if increasingly frowned upon. Their accounts offer a time-capsule view of a Republican Party—and a president—at war with itself over an issue on which public opinion and the law have now changed dramatically. At the time, it seemed to be great politics for Bush: Coming out against gay marriage, as Rove bragged in his 2010 book, Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight, “benefited my candidate” and “helped reelect him” in 2004. But since a Supreme Court decision last year, 19 states and the District of Columbia have legalized gay marriage, just the outcome that Bush and his team fought to prevent, and a clear majority of Americans—a record high of 55 percent this year—now tell pollsters they support this right.

In retirement in Texas, Bush himself has remained largely silent about this political sea change—even as his wife, Laura, expressed support for same-sex marriage in a television interview, his daughter Barbara taped a video in support of legalizing gay marriage in New York and even his father, the first President Bush, served as a witness at a same-sex marriage. As for George W. Bush, we are left to wonder: Was he expressing his true views on that stage in Indiana, or acting out of political calculation?

Those who served in his administration tell stark stories of what that ambivalence meant in practice, of a White House where the personal was at times strikingly at odds with the political. For some of his gay aides, it was a struggle to reconcile the decency they usually saw up close with the frequent reminders, both large and small, that theirs was a party very publicly committed to the view that they were not entitled to the same legal protections as other Americans.

Ken Mehlman, a top campaign aide in 2000 who managed Bush’s 2004 reelection and then became head of the Republican National Committee, is undoubtedly the most famous of the men in the Bush closet. Mehlman came out publicly in 2010 and renounced his past work against gay marriage; he went on to help the group that sponsored one of last year’s gay rights cases in the Supreme Court.

But for all his public regrets, there remain many gay Republicans who resent Mehlman’s failure, as the highest-ranking gay person in the Bush White House, to speak out at the time he could have made a difference. “He was the only one in the room with the president and Karl [Rove]” when strategies for stoking anti-gay marriage sentiment were cooked up, a former RNC staffer told me. “He’s doing his penance now.”

Mehlman declined to comment for this article. In a handful of interviews he’s done since coming out, he has asked for understanding. “I can’t change the fact that I wasn’t in this place personally when I was in politics, and I genuinely regret that,” Mehlman told the Atlantic in 2010. “It was very hard, personally.”

It was hard for many of them, in the closet and out. When Bush surprised campaign aides in his 2004 reelection bid by defending the “sanctity of marriage” in his State of the Union address, Vice President Dick Cheney’s openly lesbian daughter, Mary, called an emergency family meeting. She threatened to quit the campaign in protest, according to her memoir, and her family spent hours counseling her. Other gay aides told me of similar conflicts between the duty they felt they had to serve the president and their own feelings of alienation and betrayal. Like Cheney’s daughter, most ultimately decided to remain on Bush’s team, insisting to often skeptical friends and family that they were making a difference.

Left: When he came out in 2012, Bush aide Ken Mehlman said he regretted running a campaign that marginalized gays. Center: Speechwriter John McConnell, far right, regularly brought his boyfriend to White House events. Right: Dick Cheney's gay daughter, Mary, nearly quit the 2004 campaign over Bush's opposition to gay marriage. | Jay L. Clendenin/Getty Images; Eric Draper/Wire Image; David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images

“We all were making our voices heard despite what was out in the press,” says Chris Edwards, who came out while working in the White House press advance office and introduced his boyfriend to the president and first lady on multiple occasions. “People say, ‘Just don’t work for him.’ Well, that’s just not reality. The reality is you need people in the party and outside the party to make change.”

***

George W. Bush started out as perhaps the most gay-friendly Republican president ever, an astonishing fact when you consider that, in his first year in office, 71 percent of Republicans thought homosexual behavior was morally wrong, according to Gallup. There’s no question that he recoiled at the gay-bashing of the religious right. “I’m not going to kick gays,” he told a friend before the 2000 campaign. “I think it is bad for Republicans to be kicking gays.” The party’s platform that year might have talked about the sanctity of traditional marriage as a foundation of American democracy, but this was nonetheless a president who, a few months before nailing down his party’s nomination in 2000, met in Austin with a dozen gay Republican leaders, proclaiming afterward, “I am a better person for the meeting.”

Ben Baker/Redux Pictures

Soon after his inauguration, in early 2001, Bush braved the ire of the religious right by naming Evertz, one of the so-called Austin 12, as White House AIDS czar. Bush also instituted the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a program providing AIDS prevention, care and treatment for millions of people in Africa and other parts of the developing world. And even when his own reelection was on the line four years later, he went out of his way to endorse civil unions—though he omitted the fact when campaigning against gay marriage.

Back in 2000, the Austin 12 had warned Bush that the Republican right would press him to rescind an executive order signed by President Bill Clinton banning discrimination among federal employees. “He said, ‘I’m not going to do that,’” says Evertz, who recalls Bush adding: “I don’t care if you’re gay.”

Evertz says that one of the 12 then advised Bush that he might revise his language. “When you say, ‘I don’t care if you’re gay,’ you’re basically saying, ‘I don’t care about something you are or the essence of who you are,’” Bush was told, according to Evertz. “Why don’t you change it to: ‘Being gay or lesbian will not be an issue in hiring’? He said, ‘Very good point. I won’t ever say it again incorrectly.’”

The group also told Bush that the Texas Republican Party was escalating its anti-gay rhetoric and that he should avoid its convention that year. Bush “turned to Rove and said, ‘We’re not going.’ And he didn’t,” Evertz recalled. Bush also granted the Austin 12’s request to have an openly gay Republican such as then-Rep. Jim Kolbe of Arizona address the Republican National Convention. (When Kolbe spoke, several Texas Republicans bowed their heads in silent prayer and protest.)

So if it seemed like this would be a different kind of Republican in the White House, in some ways it was. Cheney was transparent with Bush about his daughter Mary’s sexuality when he was selected for the vice presidency. The day Bush announced Cheney as his running mate, a Newsweek reporter pressed a reluctant Cheney about his daughter and Bush, overhearing, came to Cheney’s defense: “The secretary loves all of his family very deeply.” Both the Cheneys and the Bushes were personally gracious to members of their staff they knew to be gay and welcomed their partners generously, according to everyone I spoke with. Cheney even said publicly that “people should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to,” arguing that gay marriage should be left up to the states.

John McConnell was on the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2000 and went on to serve as a top White House speechwriter for all eight years. His boyfriend, Alessandro, regularly joined McConnell at White House events, and Bush and Cheney both knew McConnell was gay. McConnell laughed as he recalled how the ever-proper White House social office called him one day after he had brought Alessandro to a couple of White House occasions. Apparently wanting to clarify how to address future invitations, “They asked if we were married,” McConnell says. “They didn’t know he was a he. I said, ‘I’m not married to him, but we are a couple.’”

“What liberals can’t wrap their heads around is Bush is a good and decent man,” says Jeff Berkowitz, an opposition researcher and policy ace who worked in the White House, State Department and RNC during Bush’s presidency. “It’s possible for someone to hold a policy view as he did and still be a decent, normal person.” Berkowitz says that when he was “outed” by blogger Michael Rogers, whose campaign to publicize what he saw as the hypocrisy of gay Republican operatives was chronicled in the 2009 documentary Outrage, Bush staffers flocked to show their support. “It was great for networking,” he laughs. And besides, he says, he wasn’t in the closet at the time anyway.

But there was no question that some of Bush’s gay aides felt like members of a very small fraternity indeed.

Evertz told me about the day in December 2001 when he got a call from the president’s receptionist telling him it was his turn to host the president’s box at the Kennedy Center. Evertz, trying to decide which friends he would invite, asked what the show was. A holiday choral performance, he was told. They discussed the logistics further, and Evertz asked a couple more times for more details on the program. Finally, he insisted on knowing who was performing.

In a lowered voice, the receptionist told him: the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, D.C. Laughing, Evertz says he imagined the president’s receptionist must have been going down the list of Kennedy Center shows, coming to that night and going, “Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington? Call Scott Evertz!”

***

Although former staffers say they never believed Bush personally had anything against gay people, many still experienced episodes of cognitive dissonance, especially when the president went into campaign mode—and all of sudden started pushing for the constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

Ben Baker/Redux Pictures

Jeff Berkowitz was in his RNC office in February 2004 when Bush first backed the amendment during a White House speech. “This was something I didn’t agree with and didn’t know was coming,” he says now. He sat at his desk for what felt like an hour thinking: “What do I do? Do I resign in protest? What was the point? I wasn’t on the reelect because I thought Bush was good on marriage equality. It was because he was going to kill terrorists and was good on economic issues.” Besides, Berkowitz believed Bush’s Democratic rival John Kerry, who did not, in fact, support gay marriage in that campaign, was no better on gay rights.

Dan Gurley, who was also working at the RNC, was in St. Louis to teach a campaign seminar when Bush came out for the marriage amendment that February. “Up to that point I was fairly convinced that he would never support it,” Gurley recalls. “But he did, and that really felt like somebody punched me in the gut, to be honest. I understand the politics of it, but it doesn’t make it any easier to acquiesce to.”

Gurley returned to his office in Washington to find that a framed 2-by-3-foot photo of Bush reviewing the troops was waiting for him. Gurley had ordered it before the trip to St. Louis and planned to hang it in his office when he got back. “It was propped up against my desk. I saw it there, and I said, ‘Oh, shit.’ And I put it back behind my desk. It took several weeks before I could put it up on my wall.”

Later in 2004, Gurley found himself having to speak up against anti-gay political tactics. Polling showed the issue might help the GOP in states like Arkansas and West Virginia, as Gurley remembers it. So a flier was drafted that included an image of one man kneeling to propose to another and verbiage to the effect that if conservative voters didn’t turn out, gay marriage would be “allowed” while the Bible would be “banned.”

“I actually took that piece to several people internally and told them I thought it was over the top,” Gurley recalls. He was overruled, and the flier went out anyway. As Gurley had warned, the press blasted the Bush campaign for it. “Holy Moley!” editorialized West Virginia’s Charleston Gazette. “Who concocts this gibberish?”

After the election, he was up for several senior Bush administration jobs. Then Rogers, the blogger on a mission to out, posted a screen shot of Gurley’s racy profile from a gay dating website. If no one thought twice about Gurley being gay before, his prospective new bosses did mind the details of his profile once Rogers made it public.

The Rogers post “knocked me out of going into the administration,” Gurley says, “and they told me that.” The news came in a phone call from a top Republican official in the spring of 2005. “They were honest. They said, ‘Hey, we don’t care about the gay thing. But what we do care about is controversy.’”

***

The conventional wisdom among Bush’s critics, and even some supporters, is that the president pushed the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage less from deeply held principle than as part of Karl Rove’s strategy to rile up the Republican base at times of political weakness: Early in the 2004 reelection campaign, when Bush was weighed down by the Iraq intelligence disaster, and then in June 2006, when control of Congress was slipping away in the midterm elections.

Bush’s memoir is silent on this point. In his book, Rove acknowledges Bush’s ambivalence—while in effect confirming the political effectiveness of their decision to use it on the campaign trail anyway. “Bush was not fully comfortable with the issue emerging during a national campaign,” Rove writes, especially because “members of his family, some friends, and his vice president didn’t share Bush’s strong support for traditional marriage.” If anything, that was an understatement: Even Laura Bush urged her husband not to endorse the gay marriage ban. And his vice president was personally offended. “Cheney was pissed off,” a friend is quoted as saying in Peter Baker’s Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House. “And I think he blamed Karl for that.”

Still, Rove insists, “Neither Bush nor I regret his stand on gay marriage,” which he argues was an effort to block the “social revolutionary act” of overturning the time-honored definition of marriage. As for the politics, Rove writes, “I saw up close how it benefited my candidate: Gay rights activists bent on defeating George W. Bush helped reelect him by overreaching on same-sex marriage.”

But there’s more to the story. If Rove saw political gain, other Bush aides saw a legal preemptive strike—against exactly the court-driven change that is now playing out. “The president’s position was that gay marriage could be imposed on the country by a federal court decision. One judge could do it,” says McConnell, the speechwriter, who is also a lawyer. McConnell says he understood that after a 2003 Massachusetts court ruling raised the issue, then-White House counsel Gonzales advised that “the only way to prevent that is a marriage amendment. It’s not an unreasonable position. It certainly was not anti-gay.”

Gonzales confirms this. “My view was it was only a matter of time” before the courts might legalize gay marriage, he told me. Gonzales says he advised Bush that, “to the extent that the president or anyone else was interested in maintaining marriage as an institution between a man and a woman, it would require a constitutional amendment.” He hastened to add: “I’m not passing judgment on the policy. I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing for the country … or passing judgment on the morality of gay marriage.”

Gonzales says he doesn’t know whether it was his advice or Rove’s that moved Bush to propose the constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Regardless, Gonzales adds, “It would obviously have reflected at the end of the day what President Bush wanted.”

Which is the point made by Charles Francis, a public affairs executive from Texas who organized the Austin 12 meeting with Bush but left the GOP over gay rights a couple of years ago. His brother James Francis was a top fundraiser for the Bush 2000 campaign, and Charles was a Bush family friend and early supporter.

“History needs to understand how a president with his heart and his family and friends and many gay people in his administration—how they could have so totally disavowed gay America,” Francis says. “The president was really gay-friendly in the first year or two. Then the gay closeted staff, the gay silent staff and the rest of the staff went silent on us.”

Francis adds that those who blame Rove miss the point. “To talk about Karl is a cliché,” he says, since the president bears responsibility. Francis complains that Bush once and for all gave up on the opportunity “to make homosexuality a nonissue for the Republican Party.”

But McConnell says Bush’s position on gay marriage was a reasonable combination of his personal concept of “morality” and the central GOP concept of frowning on an activist judiciary.

McConnell matter-of-factly told me he likely helped write Bush’s 2004 remarks endorsing the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Even now the gay speechwriter defends that course. “I believed the president was taking a principled position, and the words he spoke on that issue were always reasonable and tolerant. That hasn’t always been the spirit of the debate, but it’s always been the spirit of George W. Bush. There was never a day I wasn’t proud of him and the vice president.”

***

A few days after the 2012 presidential campaign, during which Barack Obama became the first president to publicly support gay marriage and Mitt Romney held firm to his party’s opposition to it, I received an email from Chris Edwards, who had come out while working in the Bush White House. The politics had changed so much in just a few years, and Edwards and others were increasingly disillusioned that their party had not changed along with it.

“The Republican Party needs to reach out to minorities, gays and build a bigger ‘tent,’” he emailed me. “Lots of young gay Republicans that worked for President Bush did not vote for Romney. They couldn’t do it and put their civil rights first.”

I thought of Gregg Pitts. He had been a young campaign staffer who blew off his college graduation to do advance for Bush in 2003 and 2004. He traveled constantly, through key states like his native Ohio. Ohio, as in the state that decided the outcome of the 2004 election. Ohio, which, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center, might have been the one state where a gay marriage ban on the ballot actually “played a pivotal role” in Bush’s win. Pitts rose from Bush White House intern in 2002 to run the White House travel office in Bush’s second term. In the pitched battle of Ohio in 2004, he says, he wasn’t even out to himself yet. In fact, he married a woman the following year. It wasn’t until 2008, he says, that he did in fact come out to his family and friends, and last fall he married Brooks Brunson, a former Republican congressional aide. He is still a proud Republican, he says, and he’s optimistic that the party can “change from within.” In fact, he insists to me, “If you look at the arc, it’s going in the direction that it should be going, not just in society but in our party as well.”

Still, he acknowledges, he has traveled a long way from the Bush White House closet. “I hadn’t come to terms enough with myself,” he says of his time on the 2004 campaign. “But there are no do-overs in life.”