“I’m a left-handed gay Jew,” Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank told in 1996. “I’ve never felt, automatically, a member of any majority.” But he did win majorities — Frank served more than three decades in Congress and made history as a deal-maker and a ground-breaker. He died this week at the age of 86.
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During the subprime mortgage crisis that led to the Great Recession, Frank chaired the House Financial Services Committee as it passed sweeping reforms to the U.S. financial system. He helped write laws that protected homeowners from foreclosure and credit card users from unfair lending practices; banned commercial banks from certain risky trades and returned more than 21 billion dollars to defrauded American consumers.
Frank was also the first member of Congress to voluntarily come out as gay, following the death of a colleague who had concealed his own sexuality. In 1987, he invited a reporter to his office to outright ask him, “Are you gay?” Frank answered, “Yeah. So what?” 25 years later, he became the first U.S. Representative to marry someone of the same gender.
And Frank spoke out so sharply, President George W. Bush called him “saber tooth.”
He said he found it hard to read the 1998 Starr Report about President Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky because it was “too much reading about heterosexual sex.”
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He told a constituent who heckled him at a meeting in 2009 that “It is a tribute to the First Amendment that this kind of vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated.”
In a 2006 campaign ad, Rep. John Hostettler of Indiana accused Frank of having a “radical homosexual agenda.” Hostettler lost that election, by the way. In a speech not long afterward, Frank made his position clear:
“I do think we should allow gay and lesbian people to serve in the military and get married and have a job,” he said.
“But, by tradition of radical standards, being in the military, working for a living and getting married are not the stuff of radicalism.”
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Frank’s frankness helped open the American Dream.