Travels in a Gay Nation: Portraits of LGBTQ Americans

Barney Frank

116 Barney Frank One day, back in the late sixties, when Barney Frank, fresh from a stint at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, was working as an assistant to Boston mayor Kevin White, a man came into the office complaining about police brutality at a gay club called the Punch Bowl. Frank, whose job it was to act as the mayor’s liaison with the police, told the fellow to come back with a few of the others who had witnessed the alleged incident. “I figured it was a twofer,” Frank recounts on the afternoon I meet him in his district office in Newton, Massachusetts. “I’d be able to do my job and meet some other gay men. He never came back.” Some forty years later, and now a congressman from Massachusetts and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Frank has no problem meeting other gay men. They come flocking to see him. As one of the very few openly gay members of Congress, Frank has been an intrepid fighter for gay and lesbian rights. He filed his first gay rights bill almost forty years ago, in 1972, when he was a maverick legislator in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and a closeted gay man. “I remember the first time I testified on behalf of gay rights legislation . I was terrified that they would ask me if I was gay.” In the years since then, Frank has witnessed the emergence of what he calls 117 Bar ney Fr ank “one of the most important movements in the history of the world.” Moreover, he promises, “in the next twenty, thirty years, you’re going to see fully legal and social equality for gay men and lesbians in this country. But it’s going to be a fight.” A fight, one among many, that the feisty, brainy Frank is only too willing to take up. As he stated at the outset of his 1992 book, Speaking Frankly, Barney Frank is in the business of “trying to translate progressive ideas into actual public policy.” Representing the Massachusetts Fourth Congressional District, the liberal core of a liberal state, Frank has, since his election to Congress in 1980, achieved a dazzling reputation for intelligence, honesty, wit, and pugnacity. He also has an indefatigable commitment to getting things done. “He decided the way to be most effective was being a powerful insider,” David Mixner once wrote. “In many ways he was right.” Frank’s lifelong embrace of progressive issues, his unwavering faith that there will always be broad public support for those causes “when they are properly understood” by American voters, and his consummate talent for articulating his views fairly, clearly, and forcefully have made him one of the most effective Democratic leaders in the House. Fellow congressman Ed Markey has called him “the smartest and funniest member of Congress.” With a “nuclear power plant for a brain” (Markey again), Frank is considered the best floor debater in the House today and, according to The Almanac of American Politics, “one of the best of all time.” Nobody is neutral about Barney Frank. His constituency has consistently reelected him by wide margins. Writing in the New Republic , political commentator Morton Kondracke once noted that Frank was “an almost universally acknowledged legislative superstar, and a national treasure, who ought to be preserved.” He has been called “political theorist and pit bull all at the same time” (The Almanac of American Politics); “an equal opportunity curmudgeon” (CBS correspondent Leslie Stahl); “saber tooth” (George W. Bush). Nevertheless , many of Frank’s opponents tip their hat to him. “He overwhelms you with rapid rhetoric,” Rep. Henry Hyde, a Republican from Illinois, once said, “but there is usually substance behind it. He’s a fearsome adversary.” The man whom Out magazine named to the “number one spot” in its third annual “Power 50” list, Frank tells me the time has come for major advances in gay rights: a hate crimes bill, an end to employment discrimination (including discrimination against transgender people), and the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” “Those of us,” he wrote toward the end of Speaking Frankly, “who believe that America is good and just but capable of being better and fairer have a decided political advantage over those who view our society as a mean and selfish one in need of radical surgery.” Frank grew up in Hudson County, New...