Barney Frank, Throwing Cold Water Instead of Rice
By Hanna Rosin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 23, 2004; Page C01
The typical response by gay rights activists to the weddings in San Francisco ranges from tickled pink to giddy: "Light-years forward in just one week," said Jon Davidson, senior counsel for Lambda Legal's Western Regional Office, for example.
Then there's Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the nation's most prominent gay politician, raining a cold shower on the city of bliss: "Now is not the time to be pushing this issue," he said, or, in his more generous mode, he'd call the whole West Coast love-in a "well-intentioned mistake."
"When you're engaged in a political fight, if you're doing something that really, really, really makes you feel good then it's probably not the best tactic," he says.
It's tempting to think that Frank is taking the buttoned-down view to keep things safe for the Democratic Party, which just happens to be holding a presidential convention this summer in his home state, the East Coast ground zero for gay marriage. But that interpretation would overlook the irritable side of Frank, who never seems content just playing nice.
Frank supports gay marriages, just not the ones in San Francisco. Those were not legal marriages but acts of civil disobedience, he says, a mass "spectacle" that accomplished only one thing: increasing support for President Bush's proposed constitutional amendment to limit marriage to unions between men and women.
What they should have done, he says, was do it the legal way and wait for Massachusetts to start issuing licenses to gay couples in May.
"I'm not doing this for the Democrats. I'm doing it for the cause," he says.
Partly this is Frank just saying out loud something many gay leaders privately think about San Francisco but feel it's heretical to express publicly -- a hesitation Frank doesn't share. And partly this is Frank playing his familiar role of scold, this time to the segment of gay activists schooled by the Stonewall riots of 1969, suspicious of the political process, still fighting their battles the Stokely Carmichael way, still "singing, singing, stomping their feet," Frank says.
Activists such as Sue Hyde, New England director for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, who says: "When I heard about San Francisco, I did a back flip." And then came Frank "landing like a big ton of bricks. . . . But I'm not surprised. Barney Frank is a congressman who plays absolutely by every rule in the book in politics and in law."
Frank, however, doesn't buy the dichotomy of the passionate and the practical. Imply that his pragmatism is a killjoy, that he's somehow lacking the expected celebratory mood or emotional gushing about the whole affair, and he will turn belligerent.
"What the hell is wrong with you?" he responds when asked if he has any personal, as opposed to strategic, reaction to the weddings in San Francisco. "Look at that goddamned picture," he says. "Look at that picture, please, of me and a boyfriend.
"I have known all these people for years. I care very deeply about this issue. But the more deeply I care, the more sensible I have to be in achieving it."
Could he imagine himself getting married?
"I want to keep this nonpersonal," he says.
Then, after a pause: "Could I imagine it? Sure."
Then he loosens up and repeats a joke he made at a speech in California. Frank was introduced by Rep. Lois Capps (D-Calif.) as the greatest single authority on housing, and he quipped that one day he'd like to be the "greatest married authority."
Then finally: "I'm kind of old." (He's 63.)
Then finally finally: "Yeah. I lived with a man for 11 years," he says, meaning Herb Moses, with whom he split up six years ago. "I'd say that's roughly the equivalent of marriage."
Even before he was publicly out, Frank's political career tracked the history of the gay rights movement. In 1973, his first year as a state representative, he introduced Massachusetts's first two gay rights bills, to repeal the sodomy laws and outlaw discrimination against gays. The state's first gay rights group, the Homophile Union of Boston, had asked every representative and he was the only one willing.
By that point he had stopped taking women to public events but was still in the closet, a situation he's described as "frustrating" and emotionally unhealthy. "I thought there was something the matter with me, some flaw. Why can't I relate to people better?" he told Playboy in a 1999 interview. "I finally realized it was because I was keeping this secret."
In 1987 he came out publicly in an interview with the Boston Globe. At that time he was living happily with Moses, and later asked the New York Times Magazine to publish a picture of them together because "the fact of gay couples is important," he said.
He's had a few boyfriends since, always fodder for the gossip pages. Now he's crossed a crucial line in his life as a public official: "Fifteen years in and 17 years out" of the closet, he says.
Before it all happened out west, the mayor of San Francisco called and asked him to write a memo on how they could construct a lawsuit to challenge the law. "But instead he decided to ignore the laws," says Frank.
"They have this notion that Martin Luther King and the rest of the gang just let it all hang out, that the civil rights movement was just a series of spontaneous outbursts," he says, "they" being the foot-stomping gay activists who thrilled at San Francisco. "But it was, in fact, a series of strategic decisions."
Frank has played irritable parent to the activists before. In 1993, during the gays-in-the-military debate, nearly every gay rights group opposed the don't ask, don't tell compromise. Frank chose to engage instead of boycotting the whole discussion.
Aversion to foot-stomping is in his bones, he says. Frank was in Mississippi signing up voters when Lyndon Johnson signed the civil rights bill. An order came down from the civil rights leadership not to take the confrontational route to integrate lunch counters or movie theaters, and Frank happily complied.
Back then an interviewer asked Frank if black Americans would become the vanguard of an American revolution. "No," he recalls saying, "they just want to sit back and relax and have a house in the suburbs like everyone else. . . . I've always thought of it in pragmatic terms."
For most of his life, Frank has been slightly dubious about the prospects for gay rights. When people asked him to predict where the movement would be three years out, he was always "too pessimistic," he says.
But now changes are coming at warp speed. In less than four years, support for civil unions has gone from being a radical notion to the default position. In less than a month, the percentage of Americans who think Bush has mishandled the gay marriage issue has tipped to more than half.
By now Frank has formed a unified theory that "homophobia turns out to be less deeply rooted than racism. . . . We were never segregated, never enslaved, never relegated to economic inferiority," he says.
"We've made progress," he says, which for Barney Frank counts as giddy enthusiasm.
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