The New York Times article opens with:

ON the morning of Saturday, Feb. 26, a day before the Academy Awards, the actress Carrie Fisher [right] woke up in her Beverly Hills home next to the lifeless body of a gay Republican political operative named R. Gregory Stevens.

Turns out they were close friends, although I doubt they talked about politics very much. She is a second generation Hollywood leftie. Stevens worked in the first Bush White House at age 26, who went onto be “political fixer manipulating elections in backrooms and palaces from Costa Rica to Croatia, Thailand to Togo, South Korea to the former Soviet Union.”