Barney Frank once summed himself up to The New York Times Magazine as “a left-handed gay Jew,” adding that he had never felt like a member of any majority. Yet over more than three decades in Congress he repeatedly commanded majorities — as a dealmaker, a fierce debater and a barrier breaker. He died this week at 86.
As chair of the House Financial Services Committee during the subprime mortgage crisis, Frank was central to the legislative response to the wreckage that helped trigger the Great Recession. He helped craft sweeping reforms that aimed to shield homeowners from foreclosure, curb abusive credit-card practices, and constrain risky banking activities. Those reforms, along with enforcement actions tied to the fallout, returned more than $21 billion to consumers who had been harmed.
Frank was also a pioneer on LGBTQ visibility in politics. In 1987, after a colleague’s secret became public, Frank voluntarily acknowledged his sexual orientation to a Boston Globe reporter when asked directly, answering, “Yeah. So what?” Decades later he became the first sitting member of the House to marry someone of the same gender.
He combined blunt humor with pointed criticism. His candor and bluntness once drew a mock epithet from President George W. Bush, who called him a “saber tooth.” He joked that reading the Starr Report was difficult because there was “too much reading about heterosexual sex,” and in 2009 responded to a heckler by saying it was a tribute to the First Amendment that such “vile, contemptible nonsense” could be freely expressed.
When an opponent ran an ad in 2006 accusing him of a “radical homosexual agenda,” the challenger lost — and Frank used the moment to make a simple point: gay and lesbian people should be allowed to serve in the military, marry and hold jobs. By Frank’s lights, those were not radical aims but basic rights.
Above all, Frank combined an aggressive intellect with political skill. He shaped policy, shifted public expectations and, by living openly and speaking plainly, helped widen what the American Dream meant for many people.