Rep. Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Congressman who over the course of more than three decades in Congress became one of the most consequential political figures in U.S. and LGBTQ+ history, died this morning at the age of 86.
He was the first member of Congress to come out as gay voluntarily (more about that in our interview). This occurred in 1987, the same year that ACT UP formed and as AIDS was devastating gay communities across the US. Barney often says that coming out showed him that our country is far less homophobic than we are told, but also far more racist than we realize.
By the time he left office in 2013, there were six LGBTQ members of the House, and for the first time, an openly gay Senator, Tammy Baldwin.
Barney occupied the most visible openly gay political role in the US for roughly 25 years, a forceful voice in Washington as attitudes toward gay people were dramatically transforming around the country.
He was instrumental in removing homosexuality as grounds for excluding immigrants from the US, in getting Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repealed, and in getting The Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act passed—this expanded federal hate crime law to cover crimes motivated by the victim’s sexual orientation or gender identity, the first federal law to explicitly protect gay and transgender people. And he spent decades advocating for marriage equality, eventually becoming the first sitting member of Congress to marry a partner of the same sex. (Check out a picture of Barney and his husband in the header photo above.)
One of the loudest criticisms of his record centers around ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which was a predecessor to The Equality Act. In 2007, Barney narrowed the focus of the bill, stripping its protections for trans people in order to attract Republican support. He framed this to the many in the LGBTQ+ movement who were outraged as pragmatism: Isn’t protecting gays and lesbians in our community better than protecting no one? In the end, the bill still failed. The backlash to Barney’s decision ultimately proved to unify the community around trans inclusion in a lasting way.
Barney Frank was brilliant, complicated, and famously forthright. I had the opportunity to speak with him in 2024. This interview has been edited and condensed.
JM: You’ve said that when you were growing up, you thought that being gay and being a politician were mutually exclusive. Why run for office originally if you thought it was impossible?
BF: Well, things changed. Very few single events in American history have had the impact that Stonewall had, in 1969, in giving people a signal that change was possible. I did not publicly acknowledge being gay until 1987. In fact, when I was in the state legislature in 1972, I became the first person in Massachusetts history to file a gay rights bill, but I still didn’t come out. I don’t think I could have been elected if I was. At the time I said I couldn’t get elected if I was out, that was true. What happened was that things changed.
JM: When you joined the U.S. Congress in 1981, at that time, did you assume that you would stay in the closet forever?
BF: No, no. Things were getting better in the country by the late seventies. When I was still in the state legislature, I had begun to come out. I told close friends and my siblings that I was gay. I was terribly troubled by being closeted, and the restrictions I put on my personal life. I really didn’t want to live like that. I would go to parties celebrating some advance in gay issues, and everybody would make speeches and have fun, and then the dancing would start, and I’d go home alone. That got to me.
So I decided I would run for one more term in the state legislature. At the time, knowing, inaccurately as it turned out, but believing, that I could not get elected to higher office, I went to law school and got a law degree and passed the bar. My plan was: I’ll graduate from law school, pass the bar, practice law, and also come out and be an advocate. That’s what I was planning, until on a Sunday afternoon in 1980, I got a phone call from the then-wife of a good friend of mine, and she said, “Did you hear Father Drinan isn’t running for reelection?” So I decided to run for Congress, and at that point the coming-out process stopped. I remember calling my sister and brother-in-law and saying, “Well, you just heard a closet slamming,” because I was not coming out. But I was determined to come out if it was possible.
JM: That’s fascinating, that Barney Frank almost became a lawyer and came out of the closet, but instead you went to Congress and stayed in the closet for six more years. Did you ever think about that other version of you, how different your life would have been?
BF: I made up for it to some extent, from a moral standpoint, by becoming one of the leading advocates of gay rights in American history. There weren’t a lot of them before then, but I was driven to come out, to a great extent, by my personal misery, not having the outlet for the emotional and physical life that everybody wants. I got to Congress, and what I found was there were a lot of gay people in Washington, a big network of them. I thought, well, maybe I can now have a private life without coming out. That was the question: could I meet other people, could I be seen at parties? I tried that for a little while. I figured, okay, I’ll have a gay personal life and advocate for gay rights, but I won’t talk about my own sexuality. That didn’t work. Trying to have a half-and-half life when you’re prominent, it doesn’t work.
JM: What did that look like? Were you going to gay bars and gay spaces?
BF: I dated, I had a partner. Being gay then was considered such a terrible thing that the press would cover it up. A lot of members of the press thought I was gay, including a couple of gay members of the press I’d meet at parties. That’s how it was possible for me to live a pretty gay life and not worry about it becoming public.
By the mid-eighties, here was the problem: the taboo against mentioning someone’s sexuality didn’t protect them if they’d done something wrong, or if they had AIDS. So by the mid-eighties there were public outings of prominent people, and I’m proud that when I came out, it wasn’t due to any scandal. I did think it was important for some of us to come out who hadn’t been forced out.
JM: Why was 1987 the right time for you to come out?
BF: One of my close friends and congressional colleagues was actually the first member of Congress to announce he was gay, Gerry Studds.
JM: He’s an example of someone who came out after a scandal.
BF: He’d been sexually involved with a congressional page. He shouldn’t have been, although the page said he had no problem with it. Gerry was censured by the House in 1983, and had to run for reelection in 1984. I might have come out a little earlier, maybe ’84 or ’85, but I wasn’t going to do it in the midst of that issue. That’s why I delayed, and I didn’t want to do it in an election year either, which ’86 was. I wanted to do it with enough time for people to get used to it before they had to vote.
I might have lost, I couldn’t be sure. But I did think it would lead to a diminution of my influence. Most of my very supportive straight friends in Congress, wonderful heterosexual members, told me not to come out. All my gay and lesbian friends were eager for me to do it, of course, understanding the public importance. But on the whole, my straight political allies said, well, if you do that, you might get marginalized, we regard you as an ally on this whole range of issues, and we don’t want to see you become a single-issue guy. I said, yeah, I don’t want to be either, but I can’t live like this.
I was persuaded by a good group of political professionals that I’d better do a poll. It asked two sets of questions. First, whether people thought it would hurt me politically, something like 45 percent said yes. Then it asked, are you personally less likely to vote for me because I came out, and 22 percent said yes. In other words, half as many people were personally anti-gay as they thought others were. Americans were much less homophobic than they thought they were supposed to be.
JM: It sounds like your colleagues in the House responded positively to you.
BF: Yes, there was no problem there. I thought I might have had a problem two and a half years after I came out, when a hustler went public and talked about our relationship. He greatly exaggerated it, and ultimately most of the charges he made were dismissed by the Ethics Committee. But that had two aspects. First, it helped me explain to some of my friends why I’d felt compelled to come out, even though they’d wanted me not to. I said, now you understand how crazy I was, because of being in the closet, this inability to form normal emotional and physical relationships.
JM: You’re saying that this relationship with a sex worker, when it came out, and to your colleagues in the House, being in the closet helped them understand it, that it wasn’t a salacious thing, that was simply the reason?
BF: Why I had to come out, yes.
JM: Oh, that’s so interesting.
BF: But the other thing that made ’87 better was this: attitudes among my colleagues were changing. Here’s the deal. When I first came to Congress and started working on gay rights in ’81, we had a couple of votes, and maybe 35 percent of Democrats would be supportive, but a lot of people, moderate Democrats, even some liberal Democrats, some moderate Republicans, I’d ask them to vote for it, and they’d say, you’re right, nobody should be prejudiced against these people, that’s wrong, but it’s not a big deal, so I’m not going to take the risk of voting for it. Because we’d done such a successful job of hiding the pain and discrimination we were encountering up through the eighties, people were able to dismiss it.
Then came AIDS, and we had a series of votes where people tried to interfere with good treatment for AIDS. I had to lobby people, and I watched gay rights go from a “no way” issue to an “oh shit” issue. An “oh shit” issue is when you go to a colleague and tell him you need him to vote a certain way, and his reaction is, “Yeah, I should, but I hate it, because it’s going to cost me politically.” For the first time in Congress, by the late eighties, majorities in the House and Senate, not consistently on every issue, but on some important ones, were voting pro-gay. Many of them did it gritting their teeth, but it’s a two-part thing. First, they voted that way because lives were at stake and they couldn’t rationalize taking a duck. Second, in the elections, it turned out, and there was a good guy, Joe Cantor, at the Library of Congress, who tried to be a political analyst, and did his own analysis of how gay rights votes affected members of Congress. It turned out, not at all. So by the end of the eighties, a large number of members of Congress, unfortunately many more Democrats than Republicans, had voted in ways interpreted as pro-gay and survived politically.
JM: Going back to AIDS, I think for most people we imagine, we think about New York City. How visible was the AIDS crisis in DC?
BF: Oh, it was very visible. You had groups like ACT UP, you had the quilt on the mall in Washington. I’ll say the activism, some of it was misdirected. I don’t think the activism affected members of Congress much. Where it had the most effect was on the private sector, in terms of getting research taken seriously. If you’re a corporation, you’re the chairman of the board, you run for election, and your shareholders only give you 73 percent, you’re very worried about your job. If you’re in Congress and you get 73 percent, you’re very happy. Politicians aren’t as easily frightened as people in the private sector. That was a major factor. But yeah, there was a lot of publicity, and for a while AIDS was one of the most important issues before Congress.
JM: Talking about the rate of change in support for LGBTQ people, how it’s transformed and accelerated in recent years, especially compared to progress on racial issues in this country, what do you attribute that rate of change to?
BF: Reality. The prejudice against us was made out of thin air. We have this whole religious tradition about sexuality, but in terms of the average person’s real day-to-day life, other people’s sexual orientation was a myth. What happened was we began to come out, and we were able to demonstrate there was real discrimination, people testified to it. More important, a whole lot of people suddenly realized they had lesbian teachers, students, friends, cousins, doctors, and so on.
That’s one difference, we made much more progress on sexuality than on race. I wish we’d made more progress on race, but here’s the deal: every gay or lesbian person I know has a lot of straight relatives. Very few Black people have white relatives. The fact is that those family networks took effect. That’s why I said coming out first, and then that dissolved the myths.
JM: And politicians now, compared to when you were in Congress, for every Democrat, they have to be pro-gay, right? And that’s happened so quickly. I think a lot about how, when Obama first ran for president, he wasn’t for gay marriage. In that first race, you were supporting him in the House, what did it feel like to hear him say things like that?
BF: Well, one of the sad parts is it’s become very partisan. Democrats are now overwhelmingly pro, but the Republicans, sadly, have become even worse. The most pro-gay Republican president we’ve ever had was Gerald Ford, fifty years ago, and they’ve deteriorated on the issue ever since, for a variety of reasons, the religious right and others.
With regard to marriage, I learned that the most effective weapon we had against gay prejudice was us, the reality of who we were and how we acted. When they raised the issue of gay marriage, here’s the setting: there was still, maybe less so now, a kind of libertarian bias in America, that you’re not supposed to tell other people what to do. So generally, when people tried to ban gay people from something, what they’d say was that what we wanted would have a negative effect on society. With gays in the military, for example, Colin Powell, who disappointed me on that issue, said, oh, plenty of good gay and lesbian soldiers, but it would have a negative effect on the morale of the others. That was their argument on marriage too, not that there was inherently something terrible about us marrying, though some thought that, but that if we got married it would somehow undermine marriage in society. It was a nonsense argument.
I remember saying on the floor of the House: I don’t understand, there’s a man who loves a woman, they’re happily married, and then he reads in the paper that I married a guy. Does he become like V8 juice? “Gee, I could have married a man”? How does it work? I asked, would anybody tell me how a same-sex marriage is going to injure your marriage? One guy, Steve Largent, said, well, it doesn’t injure my marriage, it injures the institution of marriage. And I said that argument should be made by someone in an institution.
JM: We can all point to these big victories, like marriage equality, or Bostock recently with employment protections, as signs of progress. I think everyone knows and has experienced those. But for you, what personal moments have you had in your life where you saw and felt this progress?
BF: When I, let me say hello to my husband, he’s doing a gay podcast.
JM: Hi, Jim.
BF: He’s saying hello, how are you?
JM: I’m good, nice to meet you.
BF: I have my appropriate shirt on today, can you read it?
JM: “Trophy husband”?
BF: Yeah.
JM: Do they give that to every gay spouse of a congressman?
BF: No, no, I got this at Kittery Trading Post. Nice to meet you.
JM: Yeah, you too.
BF: How I felt personally: when I came of age and went to college, it was illegal for gay and lesbian people to even visit the U.S. Immigration law said no gay people were permitted. Marriage, of course not. Sex between people of the same sex was illegal in ninety-plus percent of the country. You couldn’t serve in the military. You had no protection against being fired. Every one of those things has been changed. I believe that in most of this country now, being gay or lesbian subjects you to no legal disadvantages whatsoever. The fight has moved on to transgender people now, and there are similarities, but I really can’t think of any gay rights issues today in most of the country. There are some state courts involved, but there’s nothing I want to do, or any gay man or lesbian wants to do, that they’re legally prohibited from doing. And I’ll say there’s a lot more racism in this country than homophobia.
JM: There are drag bans coming out, they’re banning books, they’re starting to chip away at tiny things.
BF: In the first place, book banning isn’t just against gay people. Secondly, I think book banning is a terrible idea, but it doesn’t negatively affect most of us. There is an issue with kids, but let’s talk about progress. Do you think there are more drag shows being banned now than there were forty years ago? You know what’s an even greater disparity? How many more drag shows there are compared to forty years ago. You never used to have one in a school. So it’s not perfect, but I can’t think of an area where we’ve regressed on matters of sexual orientation and gender.
JM: With all these attacks in state legislatures on the trans community, trans youth, trans healthcare, it feels like we’re constantly on defense. Is there something we could be doing?
BF: Of course we’re on defense, because we’re change agents, and a change agent is always on the offensive. We’ve won all the fights. Every gay rights fight we’ve had, anti-discrimination, immigration, marriage, the military, whatever, we’ve won them all, including, in most states, not every one, the right to have children, the IVF fight is an example. That doesn’t mean we’ve had a hundred percent victory everywhere, but on every one of those issues we’ve made big progress. That doesn’t mean the game’s over, but we’re on the ten-yard line of the other team, not our own twenty.
JM: Yeah, but—
BF: That’s what we have with transgender people. At the federal level, when I was there, we worked on people’s ability to change the designation on their passports and so on. So I agree, transgender issues are still a fight.
JM: At the state level, the fight for trans people is much, much more grim, though.
BF: In some states.
JM: Yeah.
BF: Truthfully, one of the worst parts, in my judgment, is the health issue. Although I was slightly interested to see the National Health Service in England just decided to restrict some gender-related care. But let’s make this clear, children should have rights, but almost none of this is affecting adults in the health area, it’s all about children. That doesn’t make it not an issue, but it doesn’t mean adults aren’t protected. We’ve got to fight this children’s issue now, and I think the best argument for us is one of the right wing’s own arguments, about the autonomy of the family. I think that’s going to give way eventually.
JM: Sorry, what is the argument about, sorry?
BF: The right of parents, the problem with these states—
JM: Parental rights, yeah.
BF: Right. You’re often in a vicious cycle fighting one of these things. They say you shouldn’t do that because it’ll have negative effects, and because they say that, we can’t do it, and because we can’t do it, we can’t disprove the negative effects. A breakthrough happened in Massachusetts, a very courageous Supreme Court chief justice and her colleagues said same-sex marriage is okay. So we had same-sex marriage, and within a couple of years we were able to disprove the argument that it had negative effects. I think with transgender care, in those areas where young people can get the medical help they want, the results will be sufficient that we’ll be able to beat back those efforts elsewhere.
JM: So you’re optimistic, long term, about the trans community and their rights. Wow. Going back to the ongoing battles for gay rights, is there something you want to see accomplished in your lifetime? You’re eighty-four now. The passage of the Equality Act, anything like that?
BF: No, actually, I think we’ve gotten most of the Equality Act through the Supreme Court decision interpreting existing law. And by the way, you notice there’s been no effort, even by the worst MAGA Republicans, to undo anything, they really haven’t tried. What the Supreme Court did, banning discrimination in private employment, was a statutory interpretation, subject to being overturned by Congress, but even the most right-wing members of Congress aren’t pushing an anti-gay agenda right now.
With regard to the gay and lesbian agenda, frankly, if I were back in Congress now, I can’t think of any issue on the gay rights side that would occupy me in a major way. On transgender issues, yes. But not otherwise, because of the medical care issue, particularly for transgender people. Tell me, what do you think we need that we don’t have?
JM: I think I’m a bit more pessimistic than you.
BF: Well, give me, as we used to say, give me a for-instance. What right do you want that you don’t have because you’re gay?
JM: Well, I feel good today about my personal rights. I have a little voice in my head that wonders about how stable marriage equality is.
BF: What do you mean? Now you’re not saying there’s a right we need—
JM: Yeah.
BF: You’re saying we have it and we’ve got to prevent it from being taken away. Look how stable it is, it’s rock solid. There’s no way you could undo all these marriages, the ownership of property, the children, it’s ridiculous, and they don’t even try. Congress passed it overwhelmingly, and Tammy Baldwin did a great job legislating it after the election. So again, you’ve proved my point. I ask you what right you want, and you tell me a right you don’t want taken away. But what right don’t you have now that you wish you had?
JM: No, you’re exactly right, and I don’t have a good answer to that. But when it comes to the trans community, this year alone there have been over 500 state bills proposed in state legislatures. I find that terrifying.
BF: Only in some states, not others. It varies between red and blue America, but I agree, transgender issues have to be fought. The other issues do not.
Click here to listen to the full interview on the LGBTQ&A podcast.
LGBTQ&A features interviews with the most interesting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in the world. Hosted and produced by Jeffrey Masters. @jeffmasters1
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