Read Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage Online
Authors: Barney Frank
The noneconomic explanation for our weakness with these voters was not totally invalidated, but only one-third of the alliterative trilogy could still be assigned a share of the blame. Guns remained an obstacle for us, but God and gays were off the hook. I became even more convinced that “It’s the economy, stupid” was the best guide to what we should be advocating and to winning back the support of white men. It was time to stop seeing white working-class males’ legitimate unhappiness about economic trends as a manifestation of excessive religiosity, a gun fetish, or homophobia.
I left the closet in 1987 in large part because I wanted to enjoy a personal life, and from that year on, I did. But even when I was in a relationship, my career came first. Then I met Jim Ready.
In fact, our initial meeting was wholly consistent with my career-first pattern. In the summer of 2005, I’d been asked by my House colleague Tom Allen to travel to Maine, where opponents of the state’s LGBT antidiscrimination law were trying to repeal it in a referendum. After I agreed to attend an event in Portland, Tom asked if I would add a second one in Ogunquit. This meant driving eighty miles in one evening and then taking an early flight back to D.C. the next morning—more work than such visits usually entailed. I said yes, because it was for LGBT rights. This good deed would be more richly rewarded than anything else I’ve ever done.
At the time Jim was in a loving relationship with his partner, Robert Palmer. In the happiest coincidence I have ever experienced, Robert and I had known each other in the 1980s, when he was a leading adviser to Mike Dukakis on prison issues and a senior executive at Polaroid. This was before either of us had ever met Jim, and we were both closeted—including to each other.
After Robert retired, he moved to Maine and began a fourteen-year partnership with Jim. But by the fall of 2005, he was seriously ill. In an extraordinary example of love at its most generous, he began to think of Jim’s future after his own death and mentioned me as a potential partner. With this in mind, he insisted—as Jim later told me—that they attend the Ogunquit fund-raiser at which I spoke.
Jim introduced himself and said that he remembered when I’d come out of the closet—he was living in Massachusetts at the time—and brought me over to say hello to Robert, whom I hadn’t seen for years. I was very attracted to Jim, and struck by his unselfish commitment to doing everything possible to ease Robert’s obvious pain. Jim and I stayed in touch throughout the next year. I visited Ogunquit several times, staying at the home of a mutual friend, and on one occasion visiting Robert, who was by then bedridden. He and I reminisced about our political joint ventures in Massachusetts, and I was gratified when Jim told me that during that conversation Robert was more animated than he had been in some time.
Robert Palmer died on January 4, 2007. Jim settled his estate and began his own healing process, in part by organizing memorial services in the two states where Robert had lived, Massachusetts and Maine. By the early spring, Robert’s intuition became a reality, and Jim and I started dating, discreetly at first out of his respect for Robert’s memory. By that summer, I was deeply in love, experiencing at sixty-seven more profound feelings than ever before. Even though I was much older than Jim, he was the emotionally mature one in our growing relationship. His love and understanding of what love entailed sustained me through the extraordinarily challenging and stressful years ahead, and has enriched my life ever since.
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As the 2006 elections approached, Bush’s popularity was at its nadir, and Democrats anticipated large gains. In an attempt to hold us off, some Republicans began using my advocacy of LGBT rights as an argument against a Democratic takeover of the House. I had recently become the Financial Services Committee’s senior Democrat and was in line to become chairman. And so one of their fund-raising letters invoked the ominous prospect that three important House committees would soon be run by Charlie Rangel, John Conyers, and me. Apparently the impending committee leadership of tough, effective straight white liberals like George Miller, Henry Waxman, and David Obey lacked the pocketbook-opening power of two African Americans and a gay man. When I received a copy of the letter from someone who’d apparently received it by mistake, I proudly showed it to Rangel, whose immediate response was, “Gee, Barney, I didn’t realize you were colored.”
Some Republican candidates were more blatant. One Southern Democrat told me that thanks to his opponent, I was better known in his district than he was, and he thanked me for drawing so much of the Republicans’ campaign fire that his own record went relatively uncriticized. My favorite foe was John Hostettler, an extreme right-winger from Indiana who had famously denounced the Democratic Party for warring on Christianity in a debate over the propriety of forcing Jewish and other non-Christian Air Force Academy students to attend Christian religious services. If you make Nancy Pelosi Speaker, Hostettler told his constituents, she will enact “her radical plan to advance the homosexual agenda, led by Barney Frank.”
My feelings about Hostettler’s charge were mixed. On the positive side, anyone wanting to know what gloating looks like should have seen me on election night. Thanks to Indiana’s early poll closing time, Hostettler was the first incumbent to publicly lose his seat. In a year when many Republican incumbents were defeated, he lost his reelection bid by the widest margin in the country. On the other hand, I knew I could not live up to the billing. As I told the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce the next morning, I felt a little inadequate. Apparently, I noted, at least one district in Indiana expected me to promote a radical homosexual agenda, but I didn’t have one to offer. I hoped to secure our marriages, our jobs, our safety from hate-inspired violence, and our right to serve in the military. Any self-respecting radical would sneer at the incorrigibly bourgeois nature of my legislative goals. With profound apologies to those who had served in combat, I added that the Republican effort to make me a bogeyman called to mind Winston Churchill’s comment after the Second Boer War: “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”
When the new Congress convened, we knew that President Bush would veto any important pro-LGBT legislation. But we decided to try anyway, for two reasons. Sometimes, the only way to pass breakthrough legislation is to put it out there and learn what you can about the reactions it elicits. Supporters can then tweak a bill to preserve its substance while curing some of its political problems and come back later with a new, improved, and more viable version.
Meanwhile, the LGBT community had become an invaluable part of that famed political animal—our base—and Democrats owed it our best effort. LGBT leaders were a major source of campaign funds—the best kind, because what the community wanted in return was legislation we could feel proud of. LGBT people were also, after African Americans and Jews, our most reliable bloc of votes.
The top two items on our nonradical agenda were bringing LGBT people under the protection of the hate crimes bill and the self-explanatory Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). On both bills, public opinion was clearly on our side. That had been true of hate crimes for some time, but banning employment discrimination was now also more popular than not. I received an unexpected confirmation of this at the press conference we held to announce the introduction of ENDA: One hostile reporter noted that we were obviously pushing for a vote just to gain political capital at the expense of the Republicans, forcing them to choose between the pro-ENDA general electorate and their anti-LGBT primary voters. We had come quite far.
But not far enough. In a series of floor votes, we demonstrated that we had majority support on both issues, yet to my considerable frustration, we were unable to send either bill to the president’s desk and force a veto. I had badly underestimated the difficulty of getting the various factions on our side to reconcile their differences, given the reality that nothing we did was about to become law. “He’s going to veto it anyway,” was the response I got as I tried to forge agreements, “so why should I give in on a point that’s important to me?”
At least the fate of the hate crimes provision was familiar. Once again, the House strongly supported a hate crimes provision while the Senate attached the language to the annual defense authorization, and having done that, declined to take it up as a separate item. Then, with a Bush veto threatened, and the Democratic committee leadership in the House fearing for the defense authorization, the conference committee dropped the language.
It was not a total loss. Once we had a Democratic president, we’d clearly have the votes to enact the law easily—which we did in 2009. And I made a speech of great personal importance. At a closed caucus of House Democrats, several African American members said they needed help responding to clergy in their districts. The ministers were concerned that the legislation would criminalize their religiously based denunciations of homosexuality. I was eager to respond, and not only so I could firm up votes for the bill. I was enormously grateful to my colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus for their staunch support of our fight. I made a point of telling LGBT groups that members of the CBC voted for us more consistently than almost any other group in Congress, and even had a better voting record on our issues than the gay members—although they were not quite as good as the subset of us openly gay ones.
My answer for the clergy came easily. The original hate crimes law did not make anything criminal that was not already illegal behavior, and our amendment very explicitly reaffirmed that it did not criminalize any form of expression. What it did was enhance sentencing in cases where hate was the motive for acts of physical violence or property damage that harmed individuals. As I stressed this point, I added the personal element that’s so important in persuading one’s legislative colleagues.
“I’m a big shot now,” I noted. “I’m chairman of the Financial Services Committee of the U.S. House, and a lot of very important people are now being very nice to me. But I used to be fifteen, desperately afraid that people could find out who I really was, and I know how important it is to vulnerable LGBT people all over this country for the Congress to offer them this protection.” I closed by adding, “Even if this bill becomes law tomorrow, it will still be legal to call me a fag. I just wouldn’t recommend it to anyone in the banking business.”
The opportunity to use my elevated official position to fight the prejudice that still blighted the life of so many other fifteen-year-olds meant a great deal to me. And the raucous hilarity with which my colleagues greeted my last remark was powerful confirmation that we had the bigots on the run.
Our effort to pass ENDA was equally unsuccessful legislatively and, sadly, much more embittering. Providing job protections for gay, lesbian, and bisexual men and women was a popular cause. But majority opinion had not yet embraced the rights of transgender people—especially the large number who identified with the other gender but had not had surgery as part of their transition. By 2007, LGB groups had embraced their cause, evidenced by the addition of “T” to their names. The antidiscrimination bill we submitted that year was the first to be fully inclusive: It would contain the key words “gender identity.”
Unfortunately, we were not at the point where rationality would govern the outcome. I had forgotten “the ick factor.” Senator Nunn and the Republicans had once skillfully exploited the majority’s anxieties about sharing showers and other intimate spaces with people of the same sex who might be attracted to them. In the case of transgender people, the problem was exacerbated by the worry that people who identified as female but retained male sex organs would gain the legal right to be naked in the presence of other women. Some men, it was feared, would even pretend to be transgender precisely for that purpose.
The bill fell within the jurisdiction of the Education and Labor Committee, whose chairman, George Miller, was a committed liberal and one of the best legislators in the House. Along with Miller, the leadership fell to me and Wisconsin Representative Tammy Baldwin.
In 1998, Tammy became the first out candidate to be elected to the House. That year, many Democrats had declared their intention to run in her district, and a well-founded concern arose among LGBT leaders, including Baldwin herself, that the House Democratic leadership feared an open lesbian would lose the race to a Republican. Learning of this, I spoke with the leaders of our House campaign committee and pointed out emphatically that it would be a terrible mistake to oppose her, morally and politically. As was often the case in lobbying my colleagues, I thought the pragmatic approach would be more persuasive than the moral one, so I noted that if our community believed the Democratic leadership had hurt the chances of a popular, successful out lesbian, it would be very angry. I believe I helped ensure their scrupulous neutrality in the race.
Nine years later, Baldwin, Miller, and I set out to pass ENDA. Unfortunately, we encountered strong resistance to the full inclusion of transgender people in the bill’s scope. It became clear that when it came to the floor, there would be overwhelming Republican support for an amendment that would either remove the transgender protections entirely or, more dangerously, put serious restrictions on them. While House rules let the majority party block the minority’s amendments, the minority still has the right to offer what is called the “motion to recommit.” This is the last step before a bill is passed. At that stage, the minority can offer any provision it wishes, as long as it is germane. To the Democrats’ envy, the Republicans have developed a strong ethic that this vote is a matter of basic party loyalty. While we hoped we could hold 90 percent of our side, we would still need at least fifteen Republicans to defeat the amendment. And we couldn’t be sure of the 90 percent.