Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (11 page)

*

While I remained slow to recognize how unpopular government was becoming, I was happily aware that we were making real progress on the LGBT front. Even so, I was not ready to respond forthrightly when I took up another gay-related issue and was at last asked “the question.”

On the border of my ward’s Bay Village neighborhood, there were two gay bars that were frequent trouble spots. They attracted rowdy, sometimes violent patrons, and the owners made no effort to keep the disruption out of the adjacent residential area. After the owners derisively rejected the neighborhood association’s requests for cooperation, requests that I strongly supported, I joined the residents in petitioning the Liquor Licensing Authority to close the bars or, at the very least, cut back their hours of operation at night. The bars tried to rally support in the LBGT community, but their justifiably shady reputation, and the fact that the neighborhood included more LGBT residents than most others, undercut that effort. The owners did ask me to a very private meeting to see if we could come to some arrangement that would allow them to continue to operate without restriction. In an episode out of a B movie from the 1940s, Henry Vara, the principal owner, began by telling me in injured tones how aggrieved he was that I had said he had some form of Mafia connection. I acknowledged that I had passed along a rumor to that effect but added that I had never claimed to know if it was true. “Well, it’s not true,” he answered. “I don’t know those people and I have no dealings with them.” At that point, his bar manager–bouncer interjected indignantly, “Besides, we hear you were connected yourself back in New Jersey.” This was an accurate reference to some of my father’s associates when he ran his truck stop, and to the dealings my mother and I had with them in winding up his estate. But it did not help Vara’s disavowal of mob ties, which he acknowledged by snarling at his aide, “Shut up!”

Once I declined to be his ally, I became Vara’s target. He knew exactly what to do. When we took up the neighborhood’s request for relief at a hearing, his lawyer, Frank DiMento, suddenly asked me—under oath—if I was gay.

The hearing was presided over by the chairman of the Liquor Licensing Authority, a very decent former police officer named Charlie Byrne. He immediately volunteered that I did not have to answer. That was the good news—evidently, using anti-gay prejudice to discredit an opponent no longer worked as well as it had for the great civil libertarian Joseph Welch twenty-five years earlier. But the bad news is that I answered anyway—by denying it. I report this with a lingering sense of shame—though not with fear of criminal liability since the statute of limitations for perjury has long since elapsed. I answered as I did because I feared the inference that would be drawn from my silence. (The number of times heterosexual public figures decline to discuss their sexuality on privacy grounds is very small.) Clearly, I was still struggling personally with how to deal with “the gay thing.”

And I stress
personally.
Had my resistance to honesty been based wholly on fear of the electoral consequences, I would have had more courage. That was because Elaine Noble had just become the first openly gay winner of a partisan election for public office in the country—in a newly created district that consisted largely of areas that had previously belonged to my own district. While San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk’s forceful style, passionate eloquence, and martyrdom make him the best known of our early openly gay elected officials, Noble herself was the first person with the courage and skill to break the barrier.

If she could do it, why couldn’t I? That was the question I faced—from myself and, I learned a few years later, from others in the LGBT community whose “gaydar” had worked. I rationalized that it was easier for a woman than for a man to come out—a partial truth—and also that she had been elected by the most left-wing, countercultural constituency in Massachusetts. Most important, though, I simply was not ready to expose my previous masquerade and to share the deep secret I had kept for twenty years.

In the public realm, I perceived some progress on LGBT issues. My bill to ban employment discrimination was losing by smaller margins, after debates conducted respectfully. I continued to intervene on behalf of gay men with the police department. And for the first time in my life, I felt free to joke about it all.

When one of my pet causes was being debated on the floor of the House, a socially conservative Democrat from New Bedford challenged me angrily and accurately: “If it’s not prostitution, if it’s not fornication, if it’s not support of rights for homosexuals … it’s this bill. Mr. Speaker, I want to know when the gentleman from the Back Bay is going to stop.”

I responded: “Mr. Speaker, it is true that I have introduced bills relating to pornography, gambling, prostitution, adultery, marijuana, and homosexuality. But I am going to make a commitment to my colleague from New Bedford. I will keep on trying until I find something he likes to do.”

Meanwhile, my support for LGBT goals was evolving quickly into friendships with leaders of the community. I regularly attended functions that combined political and social purposes—and regretted that my self-imposed silence kept me from fully sharing in the comradeship.

Beyond Massachusetts, I met the movement’s rising national leaders. I was delighted when the activist Steve Endean was elected to the board of one of the leading liberal organizations in the country, Americans for Democratic Action, as its first openly gay member in 1974. Endean shared my preference for political organizing over public theatrics, and my eagerness to collaborate with him, combined with a need to break out of my total personal isolation, led me to confide to him that I was also gay—one of the very first times I admitted this to anyone. His reaction at first disappointed me, though it confirmed my confidence in his political judgment. “Shit,” he said, “you’re the third lead sponsor of a state gay rights bill to come out to me this year. Here I’ve been bragging about all this straight support we have, but it turns out to be mostly from closet cases!” His preference for electoral coalitions over sexual solidarity was complete—and one of our earliest assets.

My next trial as a gay advocate came in November 1974, when a public referendum mandated that the Massachusetts House shrink from 240 seats to 160. Eighty seats had to be abolished. I was not on the target list—my relationship with the House leadership was still characterized by mutual tolerance. But geography compelled reuniting Ward Five. This meant that Elaine Noble’s district and my own would be merged into one.

This was the kind of crisis over “the gay thing” that I had dreaded. I would win against Noble in a primary. Many more of the new Ward Five’s voters hailed from my district than hers, and while I had once represented many of her constituents, she had never represented any of mine.

And, candidly, I had a better reputation as an effective liberal legislator. I had by then realized that while there were many things I could do barely, if at all—such as writing my dissertation—I had a combination of talents that made me successful at the unique job of legislating.

*

Three aspects of legislative work define it. The first, which it shares with the work of chief executives, is that it has an all-encompassing jurisdiction. Even though representatives and senators specialize in various subjects, every one of them has to vote on everything. Second, unlike presidents and governors, legislators rarely control the timing of the issues before them, which gives their work an improvisational quality, especially as they have significantly less staff.

Finally, and most crucially, legislatures operate in a uniquely unstructured forum. Generally when people engage in legally binding transactions, one or both of two principles apply. One is money: I will pay you so much if you will do this in return—sell me your car, paint my house, work in my store. The second is hierarchy. In every formal organization, there is a person at the top who is legally empowered to give binding instructions to others, who may in turn have that power over workers below them.

Except in legislatures. Legislators do not pay each other for votes, and every member of a parliament in a democratic society is legally equal to every other member. Some are of course more influential than others, but not even a long-serving Speaker of the U.S. House can order any other member to do anything. (With one exception: A presiding officer facing the lack of a quorum can send the sergeant at arms to physically compel absent members to attend a session. As the formal parliamentary expression goes, good luck with that. When boycotting members do show up to a session, it is public opinion, not armed officials, that is the cause.)

This formal legal equality among legislators puts a premium on personal relations as the basis for legislative influence. Indeed, the similarities between gaining respect in a legislature and becoming popular in high school deserve serious attention from sociologists. For example, it is very helpful in both situations to be good at what you do but not to seem overly impressed with yourself when you do it. Exhibiting any sense of superiority invites debunking. Sociability is highly prized—loners are suspect, and an inclination to nonconformity is a serious handicap to the goodwill of your peers. And as I’ve mentioned, reliability in your personal dealings is essential.

This last point is even more essential in the legislative context than anywhere else. Because parliamentary bodies have to arrive at binding decisions on the full range of human activity in an atmosphere lacking the structure provided by either money or hierarchy, members have to find ways to bring some order out of what could be chaos. And so once you have promised another member that you will do something—vote a certain way, sponsor a particular bill, or conduct a hearing—you are committed to do it. You have, in the most solemn of obligations, “given your word.” It is permissible later to ask that member to “release” you if you can plausibly plead some unforeseen change in circumstances, and the convention is for that colleague to do so if your reason is good enough—usually political necessity; breaking your word because you changed your mind rarely qualifies.

The need to minimize instability accounts for another highly valued parliamentary norm: the strong bias against relitigating an issue that has been legitimately decided. If every issue is always on the active agenda, if an issue that was already disposed of by a majority can be reopened whenever the side that lost regains an advantage, instability infects not just the body that made that decision but also the society that it is governed by. It is the explicit rejection of that principle by the Tea Party Republicans that contributes heavily to political gridlock.

A representative or senator’s effectiveness thus is based on his or her ability to deal with a very wide range of issues, with never enough time, and with little guidance from others. You do this in a forum where personal ties are as important as substance, and where you and the people you seek to influence are continuously filtering decisions through the screen of public opinion. For many highly intelligent people, working on important issues in this fluid atmosphere is distracting at best and deeply frustrating at worst. Having to vote yes or no on a politically conceived response to a complex economic or scientific matter, with little opportunity to study it and no chance to improve it, is a source of constant dissatisfaction. The opportunity to shape that response yourself may only make things worse. Accepting the compromises arrived at by others is bad enough; deliberately omitting important ideas and intentionally inserting undesirable provisions yourself is much worse. But you will not be an effective legislator if you cannot tolerate a steady diet of this. I could. After a few years of legislating, I came to adopt as my guiding principle the wisdom expressed by a great twentieth-century student of human affairs, Henny Youngman, in an immortal two-liner: “How’s your wife?” “Compared to what?”

Better than some other liberals, I was fortunately able to maintain the personal relationships essential to legislative influence. My experience working at my father’s Jersey City truck stop, negotiating with Mafia figures to settle his estate, and campaigning in Mississippi left me more comfortable than some of my high-minded allies in dealing with a broad cross section of people. I also possessed other useful gifts: I was able to shift intellectual gears rapidly, assimilate information quickly, and speak with little preparation.

Legislative skill is not transferable to other lines of work, and I acknowledge that some of my assets would be drawbacks in other occupations. My short attention span, and my ability—and, consequently, predilection—to make snap decisions with incomplete information can be defects in more structured institutional settings. And even in legislating, one trait that is usually helpful—a willingness to settle for the best achievable outcome in a given set of circumstances—poses a danger. It diminishes the chance to achieve a better result by altering those limiting circumstances. I kept this danger in mind but was not always successful in avoiding it. Henny Youngman was a good guide, but not a perfect one.

*

Fortunately for my career, a group of lesbian political leaders in Boston applied the “compared to what?” standard when they met with me to discuss the Elaine Noble situation. When Noble’s district was combined with mine, my original, agonized decision was to step aside in her favor. That was based on a single factor: She was out of the closet and I was in it. Eight years after Stonewall, it was clear that being honest about our sexuality was the best political tool we had. As much as I wanted to continue being a representative, I could not single-handedly eliminate the only openly gay elected official in the state. After explaining this to some friends in the LGBT community, I was summoned to meet with the state’s lesbian leadership at the home of Byrd Swift, a respected activist. (It was a very nice home on Commonwealth Ave., reflecting her membership in both of the prominent families whose names she bore.)