Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series Real Time with Bill Marl.

Okay, we're back on our turn.

Okay, here are the questions.

Jamie, in your new book, you write that Ronald Reagan's administration proved to be the

gaiest of any residential administration.

Yeah, why is that?

Just a sheer number of gay people working in it.

Did he know?

Well, actually, one of the big scoops in the book was that in 1983, before the Republican

National Convention, it was brought to the attention of Ben Bradley, who was at the time

the editor of The Washington Post, the allegation that Ronald Reagan was being controlled, and

I'm not lying here, that he was being controlled by a homosexual network of right-wing anti-communist

gays.

They were controlling him as a minchurian candidate.

And the Washington Post investigated this.

They sent out Bob Woodward was one of the reporters, several other reporters.

They investigated it.

And they did find that there were some gay men working for Reagan, but the notion that this

was some sort of conspiratorial plot.

When the log cabin Republican started?

It sort of started two years earlier, actually, in California, when there was a ballot initiative

to ban gay school teachers.

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