Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (12 page)

To paraphrase their words, they instructed me to cut the crap and get reelected. They took turns arguing that I was the more able legislator and that my value to the cause of equality outweighed the advantage of Noble’s openness. I do not know if any of them were influenced by the presumption that I was gay and could not stay closeted forever.

I received their message with mixed emotions. Their assurance that I could run without betraying our cause meant a lot to me. But I also had lingering feelings of guilt, which I assuaged by pledging to myself that I would come out too at some point.

Once I made the decision to run, my own electoral concerns disappeared. Noble decided not to contest our race and instead entered the party’s Senate primary, which she lost to Paul Tsongas. I won reelection easily. My district was immune to the increasing conservatism that was elsewhere sweeping the electorate, and my constituent services had been productive and well received.

But 1978 was to be a very rough year for me. Over the course of it, I angered every element in the leadership of the Massachusetts Democratic Party. In a grave error that I regret to this day, I endorsed Barbara Ackermann, the liberal former mayor of Cambridge, when she entered the Democratic gubernatorial primary against Dukakis. The problem was that Dukakis had another challenger as well, Edward King, representing the conservative wing of the Democratic establishment. Because of our close and long-standing collaboration, I allowed my disagreement with Dukakis’s welfare policies to harden into a sense of betrayal. This was compounded by my seller’s remorse. In Dukakis’s 1974 race, I had energetically rebutted his critics on the left. Two contributors to the alternative press who later became important mainstream journalistic voices, Paul Solman of PBS and Joe Klein of
Time
, saw what I didn’t—that Dukakis’s liberalism was at its strongest when it came to “reform” issues like cleaning up elections. It was not as pronounced in areas of economic policy or the regulation of personal behavior (for example, he later opposed the adoption of children by gay men and lesbians).

When the 1978 campaign began, it was widely believed that Dukakis would win decisively. He had done an excellent job of guiding the state through a devastating snowstorm earlier in the year, and King was not highly regarded. But King’s blunt repetition of conservative themes resonated with the voters’ mood. He won by a large margin—large enough, in fact, that we Ackermann supporters could not be held mathematically responsible for the outcome. Even so, we did bear a substantial part of the blame. Our criticisms made Dukakis less popular and distracted him from battling his main opponent.

In the general election, I endorsed King’s opponent, Frank Hatch. It was an easy choice. Hatch was a moderate to liberal Republican, of the sort who have of course largely disappeared from that party’s leadership. (Hatch quit the Republican Party years later on ideological grounds.) Unfortunately, he lost to King by five points.

My third break with normal political behavior that year was to endorse Republican senator Ed Brooke for reelection. When I endorsed Brooke the first time, his opponent was a Democratic district attorney—a party regular whose candidacy excited very few people and whom no one expected to win. But in 1978, Brooke’s opponent was one of the most promising younger Democrats to emerge in years: Congressman Paul Tsongas. He had come from behind in a tough Democratic primary, building on an outstanding record in two terms in Congress. To most Democrats, he was an exciting new face with a great future ahead of him.

I agreed with all of this. But I also continued to believe that coping with the legacy of racism was our single greatest moral responsibility as a nation. Although many white liberals voiced their agreement with that position, I learned to my dismay that few of them understood the depth of feeling within the black community on the matter. I experienced a particularly vivid example of that when a distinguished Harvard professor who was also one of the leading liberal voices in the country told a group in my presence that he had turned down the suggestion that he run against Brooke because he did not wish to go to the Senate, although, he said, “I would even outpoll him in Roxbury” (at the time the center of Boston’s African American population). I thought of that comment and the lack of understanding it demonstrated as I observed the anguish of Boston’s black leaders—almost all Democrats—in the campaign’s closing days when it became clear that Brooke would lose. His defeat, I believe, struck them as proof that even the liberals in the white majority were prepared to disregard their deepest feelings when they wanted to.

Initially, I encountered more resentment from my friends for opposing Tsongas than for rejecting Dukakis. Despite this, my stance in the governor’s race had the longer-lasting negative impact on my standing, for a basic, albeit often neglected, principle of political life: Losers hold grudges longer and more deeply than winners remain grateful. Almost every day of King’s governorship brought a new reason for my friends to blame me.

By the end of 1978, I had fought to defeat the outgoing and incoming Democratic governors as well as the incoming Democratic senator. But I wasn’t through alienating allies. I had strongly backed Kevin White in 1975 when he ran for his third term as mayor. He remained relatively liberal in his orientation, and he was being unfairly pilloried by the anti–school busing forces, even though his role was primarily to maintain order as the federal judiciary’s mandate was carried out.

But by 1979, I was in profound disagreement with his determination to create a citywide political machine focused less on good governance than on power. So I endorsed Mel King, my close colleague and the leader of the Legislative Black Caucus, in the primary election. When he was eliminated, I then surprised almost everybody—myself included—by endorsing White’s 1975 opponent and nemesis, Joseph Timilty, in the final. Timilty was an old-school politician, but he had matured substantially in my judgment. He had become a force for conciliation, refusing to demagogue the racial issue, and he was becoming a leader on affordable housing. In other words, I found him to be an ideologically acceptable replacement for White. I am opposed to term limits as a general principle, but I felt strongly that White had stayed too long.

White won without me—which by then was becoming a discouragingly familiar pattern.

Surprisingly, this serial alienation of the major figures in the Massachusetts Democratic Party did not damage my political standing as much as it might have and, as I look back on it now, as much as it probably should have. By 1979 it was becoming clearer that the rise of conservatism was not a temporary event but a genuine swing to the right. In retrospect, the 1976 presidential nominations were clear early signs of this. President Gerald Ford, a mainstream conservative Republican who not long before had sought to impeach the most liberal member of the Supreme Court, William O. Douglas, barely survived a challenge for the nomination from his right by Ronald Reagan. The Democrats nominated Jimmy Carter, who articulated an ethic of austerity and mixed support for some government initiatives with a harsh critique of government in general. (The contrast between Carter and McGovern was telling: You’d have to go back to 1904, when the Wall Street lawyer Alton Parker succeeded the militantly populist William Jennings Bryan, to find two adjacent Democratic nominees who were so far apart on the political spectrum.) In 1978, the antigovernment mood intensified. Californians passed the tax-limiting Proposition 13, providing a model for similar referenda restricting government activity elsewhere, including Proposition 2 ½ in Massachusetts in 1980, which limited property taxes.

Politicians took notice of this move in public opinion and adjusted their behavior accordingly. After forty years as an elected representative, I am still struck by how often people underestimate the impact of popular opinion on elected officials, and by how odd their assessment of that impact can be. Legislators who accommodate voter sentiment are denounced as cowardly, and those who defy it are just as fiercely accused of rejecting democratic norms. Both of these opposing views of a representative’s obligations are wholly defensible. Less so is the tendency of most voters to alternate between them, depending entirely on whether or not they agree with the official’s substantive position.

In any case, my own safe district allowed me to become one of the few white politicians who still loudly advocated traditional liberalism in the late 1970s. In 1976, I had strongly supported Congressman Morris Udall for the Democratic nomination. Even though I was happy to see Carter defeat Ford, I was not enthusiastic about his presidency. He did begin to move forward on LGBT issues, expressing opposition to discrimination and meeting with LGBT leaders. These important steps were facilitated by Midge Costanza, a highly placed and closeted White House adviser who resolved the question of how to handle “the gay thing” the same way I had: pro-LGBT advocacy coupled with personal radio silence. Carter’s presidency also marked the transformation of LGBT rights into a partisan issue. In 1976, Carter and Ford both sent us positive signals. But by 1980, the rise of Ronald Reagan turned the GOP into a strongly anti-LGBT party—even though in 1978, Reagan had successfully opposed an effort to ban gay schoolteachers via the longest-playing combination of high melodrama and low farce in American politics—the California referendum process.

My decision to persist in advocating the politically unpopular did not reflect any extraordinary moral courage on my part. What I was exhibiting was not a hunger for martyrdom but the political freedom that comes from having nothing left to lose, greatly strengthened by my having nothing left to win, either. My effectiveness in defending the neighborhoods I represented and the disproportionate number of liberals who lived in them guaranteed my reelection to the House. I was free to fight for liberalism from my safe seat, unencumbered by electoral worries. But I was also restless. By my seventh year in the House, with a conservative Democratic governor allied to conservative Democratic leaders in the legislature, the thrill of legislative work had diminished considerably.

I did see one beacon on the horizon. I was then writing occasional columns for
The New Republic
, and in one of them I supported the case that Ted Kennedy, the most prominent and articulate champion of unapologetic liberalism, should challenge Carter for the Democratic nomination in 1980. Perhaps I would one day leave Boston for Washington and work for him. While I never discussed the column with Kennedy, I did hear from some of his aides, and when he decided to run in late 1979, I was asked to go to New York to help run his campaign in that state. Outsiders have two advantages in this kind of work. As nonresidents, there is no chance they will put their own electoral interests ahead of the candidate’s. And they are also less likely to have personal enemies in their state of temporary residence, or to be seen as rivals by the host state’s political figures.

Unfortunately, my first experience with the Kennedy campaign was a fiasco. New York’s Kennedy supporters resented the idea that they needed a non–New Yorker, and I was sent ignominiously back to Massachusetts in a few days, with both my career plans and my ego in serious disrepair.

By late 1979, it was increasingly uncertain that there would ever be another Kennedy administration, especially after Kennedy performed uncharacteristically badly in an interview with CBS’s Roger Mudd. I decided it was time to adopt career plan B. I would publicly acknowledge my homosexuality and combine the private practice of law with a role in the national movement for lesbian and gay rights, drawing on my experience as a prominent elected official in both pursuits.

Only as I think about this now—thirty-five years later—do I recognize how profound a shift this represented. Instead of advocating a bigger role for government across the board, I would strive to achieve progress in one specific area. This was not because gay rights was intrinsically more important to me. It was because, for the first time in my life, the prospects for rolling back legally sanctioned homophobia seemed better than the prospects for advancing economic fairness.

I soon took the first step down my new career path: telling my closest friends and relatives the truth (some of them suspected it already). The reactions were wholly supportive but varied in other ways. My lesbian and gay sisters and brothers were happy for our cause—even Endean, whose sense of solidarity overcame his regret at losing a putative straight ally. And knowing the personal stress of living in the closet, they celebrated my liberation from it. My siblings were comforting. They assured me that the love and mutual support we had always shown each other would be undiminished.

Meanwhile, my political allies coupled personal affirmation with political caution. They reminded me—unnecessarily but caringly—that coming out would greatly complicate any possible political future. My response was that publicly affirming my sexuality was part of my plan for advancing social change in an unelected capacity.

I wasn’t ready to leap immediately from being a closeted elected official to being an openly gay activist, so I decided to run for reelection to the House one last time, and spend the next two years preparing for my new life. I was confident that with my Harvard law degree and what would be a ten-year record of legislative and electoral success, I could make plenty of money practicing law and play a leading role in the emerging national gay rights movement.

And then on a Sunday afternoon in May 1980, the phone rang again.

This time the life-altering call came from Margie Segel, who was then the wife of Jim Segel, my former aide and a legislative ally and close friend. She had just received a call from a liberal state representative looking for her husband. When she said that her husband was not at home, the caller asked if he knew that Pope John Paul II had just ordered Father Robert Drinan, the nationally prominent Catholic priest and liberal congressman from Massachusetts, not to run for reelection. She told the caller that she was sure her husband did not know, since it was something he would certainly have mentioned to her. The caller’s reply was, “Oh! If Jimmy doesn’t know, that means that Barney doesn’t know.” And so she called me immediately to tell me the news. Since the caller seemed glad I didn’t know, she explained, it was obviously important that I should know, and quickly.