First Openly Gay Congressman Is Dying – His Last Fight Is With His Own Party

Barney Frank is dying. He’s spending his final days calling on Democrats to stop enabling the progressive left.

Frank, the Massachusetts congressman who became the first member of Congress to come out as gay, has entered hospice care at his Maine home. He is spending his remaining time finishing a book calling on Democrats to push back on what he calls an agenda that has made the party unelectable. Frank is 86. He has congestive heart failure.

His coming out in 1987 came three years after West Hollywood became a city and elected what was then the first majority-gay city council in the United States — among them John Heilman, who never needed a closet to leave. Frank said Tuesday the reception he received changed his understanding of where the public actually stood.

“When I decided, finally, to come out in ’87, it just struck me when I did that … the American people are a lot less homophobic than they thought they were supposed to be,” he said in an interview published by Politico. “More racist, unfortunately, but less homophobic.”

West Hollywood’s example has apparently been lost on at least one politician the city currently holds. Barney Frank came out at personal and political risk. John Heilman and others built a city on the foundation of never having to. And yet, West Hollywood City Councilmember John Erickson, running for State Senate in the SD-24 race, seems to have a bad case of “pink erasure.”  He does not identify as gay anywhere on his current campaign website. The community that elected him, the identity that defines him and the city he represents, the history those men and women spent their careers advancing — none of it appears.

The book

Frank served in the House from 1981 to 2013. His name is on the Dodd-Frank Act, the 2010 rewrite of Wall Street oversight enacted after the 2008 financial crisis. He chaired the House Financial Services Committee through the heart of that crisis.

None of that makes him a moderate, he argues. It makes his criticism of progressive Democrats harder to dismiss.

“Until we separate ourselves from that agenda, we don’t win,” Frank said.

He said silence is not enough.

“For a lot of my colleagues, the argument has been, ‘well, we don’t support defund the police or open borders, and we don’t say we do,'” Frank said. “But my point is, no, it’s not enough … to be silent. We have to explicitly repudiate it.”

Frank said he is not asking activists to stop advocating for their positions.

“But it’s one thing to advocate something knowing that you’re going beyond the current viewpoints, and another to make it a litmus test,” he said.

He hopes his record on the left gives other Democrats political cover to speak up.

“I’m hoping to use my reputation and my record of being on the left to give courage to many of my colleagues who I know agree with me but are inhibited from saying so,” he said.

At home in Maine

Frank retired to Ogunquit, Maine, with his husband after leaving Congress. He said he is comfortable.

“At 86, I’ve made it longer than I thought,” Frank said. “At some point, my heart’s just going to give out, and it’s reaching that stage. So I’m taking it easy at home and dealing with it by relaxing.”

The book is set for release later this year. Frank acknowledged the timing. “I face a literal deadline,” he said, “so I don’t know how we’ll adjust to that.”

“One of my regrets,” Frank said, “is that I won’t see the continued implosion of Donald Trump.”