Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (8 page)

I was initially dismissive. I had spent all of my adult life, as well as part of my teens, convinced that I was unelectable. At the time, the only Boston Jews in public office represented heavily Jewish neighborhoods. I spoke too fast (my poor diction had not been improved by the elocution classes my mother had insisted I take twenty-five years earlier), and I had lived in Boston—albeit in the proper district—for only four years. Boston voters were not then in the habit of conferring elected office on people who were, by Boston standards, barely more than visitors. (Shelley and Steve were not, to my knowledge, aware of my sexual orientation at the time, though as close friends who knew my life well they would not have been surprised by the news. In fact, just a few years later, Shelley was the first friend to tell me—very supportively—that she had figured it out.)

Steve and Shelley effectively countered my objections to running. They did not deny that I would be an atypical candidate, but they pointed out that I would be running in an equally atypical district. Boston’s Ward Five covered Beacon Hill, the Back Bay, and small pieces of the South End and Fenway areas. By every demographic indicator, it differed from the rest of the city in ways that were favorable to me—or, more precisely, that minimized my electoral disadvantages. The median length of residency in the city was near the bottom, which meant that voters in the area were less likely than voters elsewhere in the city to hold my own recent move to Boston against me. The heavy dose of Harvard on my r
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would have been at best a mixed blessing elsewhere; it was a great credential in a district with the city’s highest level of educational attainment. The ward also had a low percentage of families with children. There were not yet identifiably “gay” areas, but there were more single people on the census rolls than in any other constituency. The district also included a large subsidized-housing development and one of the few genuinely racially integrated areas in Boston.

As the Cohens observed, the prominence I had gained working for White was an overwhelmingly positive electoral asset, not just with these voters but also across the ward, in which the White administration was very popular. Moreover, many more of the district’s thousands of college students were now able to vote (the voting age had been lowered to eighteen a year earlier). With McGovern running for president, they were clearly going to be very helpful to any Democratic candidate.

I was still far from optimistic about my chances—ingrained self-doubt is a powerful force. But I accepted my friends’ argument that I could win, and I realized that I was now closer to achieving my impossible dream—elected office—than I had ever expected to be. And given the partisan history of the ward, if I ran and lost as a Democrat, it would not be seen as my personal failure. Losing would leave me no worse off than if I had never run at all. The district as it was then constituted had only once in the twentieth century voted Democratic—in 1941, when a solidly Republican city council seat was won by a Democrat only because the twenty-one-year-old Republican candidate was undeniably brilliant but insufferably arrogant. He was McGeorge Bundy, later in a more likable guise to become John F. Kennedy’s national security adviser. The winner, A. Frank Foster, was one of the rare Jews to win a non-Jewish seat, probably aided by the use of the initial instead of his first name, Abraham. He lost to a better-mannered Republican in the next round, and moved south to the Jewish neighborhood of Mattapan to launch a second, more successful electoral career.

So I told the Cohens that I would run—with one big if: I was morally bound to ask Harrington to release me from my pledge to stay with him through his reelection. He had every right to refuse. Only six months remained before Election Day, and I’d been given a big role in his organizational structure. Most important, not just for my relationship with him but also for my own future reputation, I had given him my word, and he had relied on it.

Keeping commitments that are not legally binding is beneficial to most human activity, but it is essential in the unstructured world of politics. After all, politicians have no legally enforceable ties to each other, but they must collaborate to achieve their goals. Political figures who are known to abandon a promise whenever it is momentarily expedient find it increasingly hard to form partnerships, which must be built on mutual trust. In politics, you learn to be careful before giving your word, but once you have given it, you pay a high reputational price for breaking it.

Not for the last time, I was the beneficiary of a more senior politician’s generosity, which I had no right to expect. Harrington was surprised to learn that I had the candidate itch, but he said that in his experience, it had to be scratched, and he released me from my pledge with no resentment.

And so in May 1972, I returned to Boston. I was ready to run. Of course, I now had to deal with what would be my major preoccupation for the next fifteen years: what I came to think of—constantly—as “the gay thing.”

Three years after Stonewall, the country was beginning to confront the question of how to treat those of us who were lesbian, gay, and bisexual (transgender was not yet on the agenda). More stressfully, we were deciding what roles we would play in that process. Attempting to become the first openly gay elected official was not the role I chose for myself. Indeed, my candidacy reinforced my already firm determination to keep my secret. I was sure that the electorate was no more ready to receive the news than I was to deliver it.

The next question I faced was how I would respond to legislation that sought to make us legally equal. The answer was easy. I would be an active supporter of every proposal to fight anti-LGBT discrimination. I was prepared to be something of a coward when it came to acknowledging who I really was, but I was even more determined not to be a hypocrite.

I would not water down the public expression of my profound private anger. I recognized that vigorously advocating gay rights might increase the likelihood that some people would conclude I was in the closet. I also noted the contrary position that people might assume that if I were gay, I would be afraid to take that stance. I rejected the relevance of the debate. There was no way I could live with myself—a dominant consideration, since at that point I didn’t foresee being able to live with anybody else—unless I helped wage an all-out war on homophobia. I promised myself that I would.

I soon got the chance to act on my promise. Massachusetts gay rights activity had just begun, with the founding of two organizations. Women belonged to the Daughters of Bilitis. (I have never learned who or what Bilitis was.) Men made up the Homophile Union of Boston (HUB), linking gay and civic pride in one acronym. With others they had staged Boston’s first Gay Pride Parade in June 1971, in honor of the Stonewall events in June 1969. I was introduced to both groups, and to the most prominent uncloseted lesbian in the city, Elaine Noble, who was an articulate member of the faculty of Emerson College and one of a small handful of out professionals. I had met Noble through my sister, Ann Lewis, who cochaired the Massachusetts chapter of the newly formed National Women’s Political Caucus with her and a third woman, Lena Saunders, an African American leader of a public housing tenants’ group. A married straight woman, a lesbian, and an African American represented the coalition that the women’s caucus was seeking to build.

In June 1972, I rode in a car in the city’s second Gay Pride Parade. It was my first step into the world of gay politics. My next step was to help HUB form a cooperative relationship with the Boston Police Department. To my surprise, the organization was concerned not about too much police activity but too little, a problem they acknowledged was not the department’s fault. The problem was that when a gay man was the victim of a crime in circumstances that would reveal his homosexuality, he had no way to seek help without going on the public record. The police, I was pleased to discover, were happy to take information about crimes discreetly and do all they could to move against criminals without requiring victims to appear publicly in court.

As I expected, running for office required me to take a stand on LGBT-related issues. HUB sent every candidate for the state House and state Senate legislative questionnaires, asking them to sponsor gay rights legislation and support the bills when they came up for votes.

I happily committed myself to sponsoring a package of bills. One would abolish the law criminalizing some sexual acts between consenting adults (the so-called sodomy law). Another would outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation in public and private employment. I assumed that as a freshman in a chamber where seniority counted for something, I would be following the lead of more senior liberal members in the ensuing debates. This would be the ideal situation: I would take the stand I wanted to take but without the excessive prominence that I was not yet ready to enjoy.

From the outset, my focus was on the November election. There were three other candidates in the Democratic primary, but they were not well-known in the district, and I ended up receiving 80 percent of the vote.

In the general election, my most important mission was to persuade voters that I would be an effective advocate for their local, neighborhood-based problems. Living in residential enclaves of the downtown core, the inhabitants of Beacon Hill and Back Bay worried constantly about the incursion of commercial activity into their lives. They also worried about high-rise buildings and other commercial construction impinging on their eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century homes, which were tenuously protected by special architectural zoning. They were concerned as well by competition for scarce parking spaces from shoppers and commuters and overuse of the Boston Common, the Public Garden, the Charles River Esplanade, and the Commonwealth Avenue Mall—great public parks that were visited by tens of thousands every day.

My na
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and arrogance led me to presume that voters would enthusiastically welcome my candidacy. It didn’t take long for a dangerously large number of opinion leaders in the ward to let me know that they thought I was overqualified for the job. They worried that I had a broader political agenda in mind and, most tellingly, that I would spend my time on big ideological issues at the expense of the more mundane matters on which they wanted their only locally elected representative to focus. (Seats on the city council were no longer distributed geographically.) Perhaps they recalled John F. Kennedy’s remark that he would never run for governor because he didn’t want to spend his time parceling out sewer contracts.

I did all I could to alleviate these anxieties. I began with a campaign slogan that sought to turn an obstacle into an advantage:
PUT BARNEY FRANK TO WORK FOR WARD FIVE
.

Trying to dispel strongly held perceptions in the course of a campaign is extremely difficult. The time is too short and the atmosphere too highly charged. Instead, I hoped to persuade my target audience that my unusual background would lead me not to neglect nuts-and-bolts local issues but rather to address them with more clout. Skeptics had no idea of the intensity of my attraction to the governing process. I was fascinated by it intellectually and was a firm believer in its moral worth at every level. I had learned in my city job that delivering good results for my boss in the realm of the mundane was essential to advancing the ideological goals that had motivated me since the days of Joseph McCarthy and Emmett Till.

My appeal to the nonideological segment of the electorate was enhanced by another decision that joined good electoral politicking with moral rectitude: I publicly endorsed Republican senator Edward Brooke for reelection to a second term. Brooke was the only African American in the Senate, and the first to serve there since the Reconstruction era. He was a moderate liberal and a leader on housing policy. His opponent was a more conservative Democratic district attorney, John Droney, whose only claim to historical notice is that he later lost his ability to speak and was very ably represented in public by his eloquent first assistant, John Kerry.

I endorsed Brooke because I believed his defeat would be disastrous to the cause of racial progress. Serendipitously for me, doing the right thing was also helpful in a district with many Republicans and Independents. Crossing party lines to support Brooke allowed me to emulate the “Old Dope Peddler” in the popular song by comedian-lyricist-musician Tom Lehrer. I was “doing well by doing good.”

Nationally, the McGovern campaign was becoming a disaster for Democrats. His securing the nomination as the articulate champion of the angry left resulted in a demonstration of how Newtonian physics works in the political sphere: While the reaction in the electorate at large was opposite, it was also, sadly for the liberal side, unequal.

But not in my district. Thousands of newly enfranchised teenage college students lived in Boston. They had never before been a factor in the ward’s elections and represented a potential increase of 20 percent or more in its total vote. But given their lack of interest in local politics—after all, most of their homes were elsewhere—the assumption of most political experts was that they would pull the McGovern lever and skip the rest of the ballot.

My task was to change this by identifying with McGovern and by stressing my support for issues that would attract their interest. Fortunately, none of this gave me pause. Although I had supported Muskie, and was pessimistic about McGovern’s chances, I was in full agreement with his platform and knew many of those engaged in his campaign. In particular, my sister Ann was playing a major role in his Massachusetts effort at White’s request. She arranged for McGovern to have his picture taken with me—and to endorse my candidacy.

With his campaign’s permission, I then created a poster with a headline borrowed from an old Jewish joke I had first heard in the Catskills. An obnoxious name-dropping man called Goldberg claimed friendship with an unlikely range of world figures. Finally, one exasperated colleague challenged his assertion that he was very close to the pope. “Come with me to Rome and I’ll show you,” Goldberg replied. At the Vatican, Goldberg leaves his skeptic in St. Peter’s Square and goes inside. Minutes later, two figures appear on the balcony, and one Italian is heard to ask another, “Who’s that guy up there with Goldberg?”