“I WROTE a new speech for the gays and I don’t have it memorized yet!” said Ann Coulter, as she ducked into a hallway in the Union Square apartment of the venture capitalist Peter Thiel on a recent Saturday night, flicking a half-empty packet of Habitrol gum between her fingers. She was there to speak at Homocon 2010, a party for the one-year anniversary of GOProud, the Washington-based advocacy group for gay conservatives.

For a right-wing, evangelical Christian who has made fun of homosexuals and opposes same-sex marriage, Ms. Coulter seemed awfully ... game. Wearing a black lace-up cocktail dress and high black heels, she posed for a photograph with the founder of Boy Butter, a maker of sex lubricants. She joked about her fellow conservatives. “Yes, that was Elton John at Rush Limbaugh’s wedding, not Velma from ‘Scooby-Doo,’ ” she said, as listeners chuckled. She warmly greeted a pornographic film director, and admired the “freedom is fabulous” T-shirt worn by one volunteer. “Can you be gay and conservative?” she shouted at the mostly male crowd, many of whose shirt collars were soaked with sweat after the air-conditioning had faltered. “You have to be!” Conservatives, she surmised, are tough on the war against Islamic terrorists. “And you know what the Muslims do to gays,” she said, flashing a knowing look.

Ann Coulter has made a lucrative career out of being the outspoken, sometimes outrageous Cassandra of the far right, denouncing a group of New Jersey 9/11 widows for what she saw as enjoying their husbands’ deaths too much; using an anti-gay epithet to describe Senator John Edwards; and blaming the mainstream media for conspiring against God-fearing Christians. Now that members of the Tea Party movement have stolen much of her thunder, Ms. Coulter is taking some surprising new positions. She called the decision to send more troops into Afghanistan “insane,” warning that it could be a new Vietnam. She has decried fellow Republicans for continuing to insist President Obama is Muslim. And perhaps most startling, she wants to bring more gay Republicans into the conservative fold.

“Except for me, they are the most politically incorrect people you will ever meet,” said Ms. Coulter, 48, one recent evening over a glass of pinot grigio at a hotel bar after a speech in Raleigh, N.C.. Capitalizing on her flamboyant, anything-goes persona, she has gone so far as to describe herself as “the right-wing Judy Garland.”