Exit, Stage Left



Like many gay men of his generation, Mr. Frank ventured into politics as an aide, a role he had resigned himself to play given the “irreconcilability between my sexuality and my political ambition.” Unhindered by the obligations of family life and driven by an unfocused idealism borne of living in a society that would not accept them, gay men in postwar America flocked to government service in numbers far out of proportion to their percent of the population. They often wound up in influential behind-the-scenes positions—modern-day viziers.

Mr. Frank worked his way up the greasy pole of Massachusetts state politics and won a seat in Congress in 1981. He originally intended to stay closeted, and the emotional story of his internal struggle should resonate with many readers, gay or straight. In 1987 Mr. Frank made history by becoming the first member of Congress to voluntarily declare his homosexuality, previous such disclosures having come out as the result of sex scandals. The late House Speaker Tip O’Neill once sympathetically told Mr. Frank that he would have been the first Jewish speaker of the House had he not been gay. (“I think Barney Frank is going to be coming out of the room” is how the ward-heeling Irish pol related Mr. Frank’s impending revelation.)

Mr. Frank’s courage, however, would later be conflated in public memory with the ignominious outings of his colleagues after it was revealed that he had engaged in a dubious relationship with a male prostitute, fixing his parking tickets and generally acting oblivious to the man’s operating a house of ill repute out of Mr. Frank’s apartment. Here he glosses over this embarrassing incident, which led to his being reprimanded by the House.


By Barney Frank
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 387 pages, $28

It’s rare for a congressman not in a leadership position to become a national figure. That Mr. Frank is so recognizable owes less to his status as a gay-rights trailblazer than it does his oratorical prowess, which is even more impressive in light of his admittedly “poor diction” and “rapid speech.” Writing of his relationship to Judaism, Mr. Frank concedes that “my Hebrew pronunciation is not perfect, but on the other hand it is probably as good as my English.” That ability helped make Mr. Frank the public face of Democratic opposition to two great occasions of Republican overreach: the impeachment of President Clinton and the attempt to prevent the removal of a feeding tube from a comatose Florida woman, Terri Schiavo. In both cases, Mr. Frank’s keen understanding of congressional procedure, biting wit and legal expertise enabled him to run circles around his adversaries.

Thanks to such visibility, Mr. Frank became a bogeyman for conservative fundraisers. Yet in his memoir, he strikes a decidedly pragmatic tone and is most insightful in his discussions of fellow liberals. For instance, though he has long been a proponent of major defense spending cuts, Mr. Frank was never woolly-headed about communism, unlike many of his ideological peers. “The Soviet Union was indeed the head of an evil empire, and I was never one of the liberals who mocked Ronald Reagan for saying so,” he writes.

Mr. Frank has little patience for those to his left who made the ideologically perfect outcome the enemy of the good compromise. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who, like Mr. Frank, opposed some of the Clinton administration’s more centrist economic policies, is described as speaking with a “sneering tone of superiority.” Mr. Frank disputes the widely accepted thesis that the reason why poorer white men vote Republican is because of the hoary old “alliterative trilogy” of “god, guns, and gays” (though he admits that there is genuine ideological disagreement on the second). He clashed with gay activists who preferred outrageous tactics (such as a group of gay soldiers performing Rockette-style kick-lines at a rally protesting the ban on gays serving openly in the military) over reasoned moral suasion directed at the proverbial middle American.

“Frank” makes fascinating political history. It helps that it’s funny. Challenged by an opponent to follow his lead and take an AIDS test in 1990, Mr. Frank comments that “passing tests was probably not a common occurrence in his life.” Many readers’ eyes will nonetheless glaze over at his recounting of the crises that struck the housing and financial markets, in which he was intimately involved as chairman of the Financial Services Committee.

Mr. Frank, who recently retired after serving 16 terms in the House of Representatives, is unrepentant about his longtime advocacy of government subsidies and increased regulation. “My tolerance for intellectual uncertainty is very low,” he writes earlier in the book about why he considers himself an agnostic rather than an atheist, a statement that can just as easily be applied to his political temperament. He often writes in a tone of haughty bewilderment, puzzled at how anyone could disagree with him about anything, describing nearly all those who question his preference for ever more “active” government as free-market “fundamentalists.” This is particularly striking given Mr. Frank’s role in advocating for taxpayer-backed mortgage guarantors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In 2003, responding to those who warned about their risks, Mr. Frank said that he wanted to “roll the dice a little bit more in this situation.” We all know how that turned out.

Mr. Kirchick is a correspondent for the Daily Beast and is writing a history of gay Washington.
