This exclusive excerpt goes behind the scenes of Ronald Reagan’s Washington to meet the powerful Dolan brothers: Terry the fiery founder of the notorious National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), which pioneered the 30-second attack ad; older brother Tony the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist turned chief Reagan speechwriter.

But one of these fierce pillars of the conservative community had a secret: Terry was gay — a reality his fellow Republicans could no longer ignore after he died of AIDS a few days after Christmas, 1986.

Here, Kirchick traces the story of Terry Dolan’s posthumous outing in a Washington Post obituary, and Tony Dolan’s outraged response — including an allusion to Post editor Ben Bradlee’s own gay brother — that subsequently ran in the Washington Times.

Tony Dolan would serve as Reagan’s top wordsmith for all eight years of his presidency, and go onto work for a procession of powerful Republicans including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and President Donald Trump. Terry’s loyalties, however, lay not with the GOP, but the conservative movement. “I used to be a Republican,” he confessed to The Washington Post three months before Reagan’s election. “I used to be a political hack, but then in 1972, it was like a sexual awakening. I couldn’t understand these strange urgings to do conservative things.”

It was an ironic comparison for Terry to draw, considering how his actual sexual awakening would come to overshadow his political one. Of all the many gay men working in the Reagan administration and conservative movement during the 1980s, none more vividly exposed the punishing contradictions of their precarious existence than Terry Dolan. By day, he attended Catholic mass and delivered speeches containing assertions like “I can think of virtually nothing that I do not endorse on the agenda of the Christian right.” By night, he frequented the Eagle and cruised the steam room at a Capitol Hill gym. Dolan spent a lot of time at these temples of bodily self-perfection (three hours in the weight room every morning and sometimes a quick cardio exercise during lunch) to maintain his footing in what author Randy Shilts called the “aristocracy of beauty” that defined the 1980s urban gay male subculture. Though Dolan was careful never to acknowledge his homosexuality outside the environs of that world, he was not exactly a model of discretion. One evening, after addressing a business trade association at a Denver hotel, Dolan descended into the lobby for a night of prowling the local leather bar scene decked out in the era’s “gay clone” uniform (tight jeans, leather cowboy boots, flannel shirt, and studded leather wristband), the attendees to whom he had, just moments earlier, served up a generous helping of right-wing rhetorical red meat none the wiser. Dolan’s organization, meanwhile, sent out fundraising letters like the one signed by far-right Republican congressman Dan Crane, declaring, “Our nation’s moral fiber is being weakened by the growing homosexual movement and the fanatical ERA pushers (many of whom publicly brag they are lesbians).”

On January 8, 1987, the cream of conservative Washington once again convened to celebrate Terry Dolan. But whereas, less than four years earlier, the purpose had been to praise him, on this day, it was to bury him.

Dolan had been hospitalized the previous summer, according to his colleagues at NCPAC, for a combination of anemia and diabetes. But the signs that his malady was of a different nature were difficult to ignore. At one of his last public appearances, a celebration of NCPAC’s tenth anniversary held aboard a Potomac River cruise, the 36-year-old activist looked conspicuously lethargic and gaunt, his face heavily covered in makeup to disguise the lesions that had sprung up across it. Dolan’s debilitated condition mirrored the state of the organization he had founded, which in the weeks leading up to the 1986 midterm elections was $3.9 million in debt, enmeshed in a dispute with its direct mail consultant, and listless without its once-fiery captain at the helm. The subsequent election, in which the Republicans lost eight Senate seats along with control of the body, marked a humiliating fall for NCPAC, and the furious refusal by the man who replaced Dolan as leader to acknowledge this sobering fact revealed yet another similarity between the group and its pugnacious former president: denial. In a letter to the Post challenging a story about NCPAC’s financial woes and atrophied political muscle, L. Brent Bozell III asked if the paper had not grown “tired of writing biennial obituaries about NCPAC and other conservative groups,” answering his own rhetorical question with the statement that “expecting the Post to be consistent is like expecting the Democrats to cut wasteful spending.” Published less than two months before Dolan’s eventual demise on December 28, the headline over Bozell’s missive was morbidly ironic: “NCPAC’s Death Has Been, Well, Exaggerated.”

At the Catholic monastery where Dolan’s evening memorial service was held a few days after his burial, the controversy over his alleged AIDS diagnosis presented the hundreds of friends and political allies in attendance with an uncomfortable realization: Here was the conservative movement’s most effective strategist reportedly struck down by a plague many of them considered divine punishment for an immoral lifestyle. Perhaps the most incongruous of the mourners at the Dominican House of Studies was White House communications director Pat Buchanan. “The poor homosexuals,” Buchanan had written with mock sympathy in his syndicated column four years earlier. “They have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.” Vicious as those words might have been, the casualty of nature’s awful retribution whose life was being commemorated that evening had been willing to overlook them. “Terry held a deep affection for you and asked that you be invited,” Bozell wrote in the Mailgram invitation sent to Buchanan at the White House. Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich, who had once tried to interest the Washington Times in publishing an exposé of Dolan’s secret gay life and AIDS diagnosis, was also in the pews. So, too, was New Hampshire senator Gordon Humphrey, who credited Dolan with playing a “pivotal” role in his 1978 election and who, the following year, attended a “Clean Up America” rally on the steps of the Capitol Building alongside Jerry Falwell. “You can tell the boys from the girls without a medical examination,” the preacher declared while looking proudly over the crowd of 8,000 gender-conforming supporters.

Two days later, a delegation from the secret city where Terry Dolan dwelled congregated at the Cathedral of St. Matthew on Rhode Island Avenue, the cavernous Catholic church that hosted Joe McCarthy’s wedding and John F. Kennedy’s funeral. About 50 gay men and women, most of them involved with the conservative movement, gathered to remember their fallen brother. Presiding over the mass was Rev. John Gigrich, a closeted gay priest (and World War II spy) who was the diocese’s unofficial minister to people with AIDS, Dolan included. Whereas the first memorial service, attended by Dolan’s family and political allies, was held in the open, the one at St. Matthew’s was conducted in secret. Still, despite all the precautions undertaken by its organizers to keep the event from leaking to the press, some of those who had been invited stayed home. Afraid the media would hear about the ceremony and stake out the church, they, like the man they had been invited to memorialize, were desperate to protect their secret.