Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (19 page)

Two, I had to wait. Asking the people of southeastern Massachusetts to host both of the only high-ranking openly gay elected officials in America was a chance I was willing to take, but only after giving them at least a few years to get used to the idea.

5

COMING OUT

I was ready to leave the closet at last—but how would I do so? I had lived too long with the burden of “the gay thing” to treat coming out as a political matter alone. For thirty-two years, I had been in hiding. For much of that time, I’d been ashamed to belong to a universally despised group. Then I’d been afraid of exposure, and angry at myself for my self-denial. Finally, I felt shame again as I watched younger gay men and lesbians confront the bigots openly with a courage that I lacked. After all those years, lying to people was much easier emotionally than finally admitting my lie.

By 1986, I was as ready as I would ever be. But the circumstances of my disclosure were complicated by another factor: I talk too much. Specifically, I shared my decision with more friends and allies than was prudent, and word was starting to get around. This led to an unusual interaction with several members of the media. They remained committed to the “rule” that prominent people should not be outed unless they had been enmeshed in a gay-related scandal, but they were understandably eager to break the story. So various journalists asked me from time to time if they could do so. I consistently said no—I didn’t deny I was gay but invoked their own nondisclosure principle. This arrangement was tested in mid-1986 when a book was published that implicitly, but unmistakably, told the truth about me.

The author was Robert Bauman, who’d been a stridently right-wing Republican member of the House in the 1970s. His primary concern was outlawing abortion, but he had followed the conservative movement’s anti-gay line as well. In 1980, before I arrived in the House, he was charged with soliciting sex from an underage male prostitute. His denial of his homosexuality was universally—and accurately—disbelieved, and he was defeated for reelection that year.

In his memoir describing his own gay life, he cited my attendance at a gay pride rally in the company of a friend whom he inaccurately assumed was a romantic attachment. No one reading it could miss the clear import: I was a gay man who enjoyed a media silence that he had been denied.

I was scared. I was ready to come out, but not at his hands, not in that way, and not at that time. This led to two important conversations in the early summer of 1986. The first was with Speaker O’Neill. As a great admirer of his leadership, I felt obligated to let him know that there might be another sex-related controversy in our party that he’d have to handle. I approached him on the floor of the House, as we were watching a majority vote doom our effort to curtail Reagan’s aid to the Nicaraguan contras. I knew this was an inauspicious moment, but I couldn’t stand the suspense of not knowing what his reaction would be. “Tip,” I said, “Bob Bauman has just written a book that says I’m gay.”

“Aw, Barney,” he consoled me, “don’t pay any attention. People are always spreading shit about us.”

“But, Tip,” I said, “the problem is that it’s true.”

He looked stricken, though he immediately made clear it was not my sexuality that troubled him but the negative impact its disclosure would have on my career. “I’m sorry to hear it,” he said. “I thought you might become the first Jewish Speaker.”

As upset as I was at the prospect of a premature outing, the fact that a man I respected so much had said such a flattering thing made me feel better.

I felt even better when I confirmed he wasn’t just trying to be kind. Shortly after, I encountered one of my closest friends and allies, Congresswoman Pat Schroeder, leaving the cloakroom. “Oh, good,” she said. “You’re okay. I just talked to Tip, who said, ‘Pat, have you heard the sad news about Barney? It’s too bad; he was so talented.’” She was relieved when I explained that he was referring to my political standing, not my physical health.

Meanwhile, O’Neill set about warning his press secretary, Chris Matthews. “Chris,” he said, “we might have an issue to deal with. I think Barney Frank is going to come out of the room.” With his unerring ability to translate O’Neill’s malapropisms, Matthews quickly made the necessary metaphoric adjustment.

When news of Bauman’s book broke,
The Boston Globe
’s Bob Healy called and asked if he could come to D.C. to talk with me. As the man in charge of political coverage at
The Globe
, he faced a dilemma. He did not want to break the no-outing rule, especially as it applied to a politician in good standing with
The Globe.
But he could not allow his newspaper—by far the dominant source of news in New England—to be scooped on a national story in its own backyard. Healy hoped I would give
The Globe
the story, but Bauman’s book was not getting much attention and I told him I was still not ready. When I was ready, I assured him I would give
The Globe
an exclusive—that is, I would let them publish the news first. And I promised that if any other media outlet got hold of the matter, I would call him right away, guaranteeing
The Globe
no worse than parity.

Throughout 1986 and 1987, I continued to speak with friends and colleagues about my impending declaration. The reaction in the LGBT community was unrestrained happiness. This itself was a sign of improvement. When I had asked Steve Endean to take me to a gay bar in 1980, during Congress’s lame-duck session, he was chastised by a senior gay political leader for threatening my cover, thereby endangering an important LGBT political asset. By 1986, the movement’s leaders unanimously believed my coming out would do little if any harm to me and a great deal of good for the cause.

Many of my straight political allies and supporters, by contrast, tried to talk me out of it. They said I was a valuable ally on a wide range of other issues—helping the poor, fighting racism, reducing military spending. Their fear was that my influence would diminish. Not surprisingly, perhaps, they signally failed to understand the anguish of life in the closet. “Of course we have no problem with your sexuality,” many said, “but why can’t you keep on the way you’ve been—leading your private life as you want to but without the political baggage of coming out?”

By the spring of 1987, I was ready, but still apprehensive. What followed was a peculiar pas de deux with
The Globe.
As I had promised, I called
The Globe
’s editors and told them that the time had come to go public. They happily replied that they would be glad to receive my statement and interview me about it. I then explained that I did not intend to announce anything, but that I would answer honestly if a reporter asked if I was gay.

I’d thought more carefully about this process than about any other decision I’d ever made. It seemed to me the best way to contain any political damage was to minimize the entire subject. I would do everything I could to downplay the significance of the revelation, and subsequently to insist that my sexuality was “no big deal.” Executing this strategy obviously precluded my initiating the discussion. If being gay was no big deal, people would reasonably ask why I announced it. Politicians are not in the habit of issuing public statements about subjects that they prefer to be ignored.

This was a problem for
The Globe.
Asking if I was gay—even with my permission—would break the no-outing rule and require them to explain why I was a one-time exception. But failing to ask would risk losing a big scoop. And so once it became clear to them that I would not volunteer, they asked.

The reporter they sent was Kay Longcope. She was a lesbian and I believe the only out reporter on the paper at the time. I had met her back in the 1970s when she’d been Elaine Noble’s partner. Neither of us being big on ceremony, she came into my D.C. office, turned on her tape recorder, and asked me, “Are you gay?”

I gave the most carefully considered answer I could: “Yeah. So what?”

There was an immediate glitch. I had agreed to answer the question on a Friday for a story that would appear the following Monday. But
The Globe
’s beat reporter who covered the House, John Robinson, was infuriated that his paper had sent Longcope to do the interview. He insisted—successfully—that he should break the news under his byline on Saturday. Robinson had two reasons for being so proprietary: It was his journalistic territory, and he was himself a closeted gay man whom I had met at social functions in D.C. (Inappropriately,
The Globe
later assigned him to the “society” beat, where he often commented from his closet in a snarky way about other gay people.)

That Saturday was a day to remember. It was Memorial Day weekend, and there were two parades taking place in the most politically conservative part of my district—the adjacent communities of North Attleborough and Attleboro [
sic
]
.
(I am not responsible for the peculiarities of Massachusetts’s official orthography.) I could not think of a worse way to spend my first day out of the closet than parading myself for hours through that particular area. It started badly when an older, conservative Democrat confronted me, complaining that I had lied to him when he’d asked if I was gay during my race against Heckler. I did not remember the exchange, but given my state of mind that year, he was probably right. Fortunately, I soon received reassurance from an unexpected source: David Locke, the conservative Republican state senator from that district, approached me with a smile and asked me to march alongside him.

With Locke at my side, I began my normal parade routine, which I had learned from John Parker, the area’s previous representative. Noting my awkwardness reacting to crowds, Parker gave me great advice: “Just do what I do: Take three steps and wave to the right, then take three steps and wave to the left.” (I found this very helpful, even when it occasionally meant waving to trees and telephone poles along lightly attended parts of the route. Better to be nice to inanimate objects than to ignore live ones.)

From then on, the reactions I encountered were almost wholly positive. For the second, larger parade in Attleboro, I marched alongside a uniformed navy veteran, Gene Moore, who was married to my local office manager, Joanne. Things went from good to better as the weekend progressed. That Saturday evening I had been invited to a Cirque du Soleil performance in Boston. Christopher Reeve was in attendance and received a warm reception from the audience when he was introduced. Then my presence was announced. The response is best described in the language of the annotated transcripts that used to chronicle meetings of the old Soviet parliament: “prolonged stormy applause; all rose.” It was the only time in my experience that an entertainment-oriented crowd gave a politician a greater ovation than a genuine star. For the first time, I relized that coming out could have political advantages as well as liabilities.

That impression was strongly reinforced Sunday morning, when I joined tens of thousands of people at a rally on Boston Common marking the start of the AIDS Walk. One of the first speakers was Ray Flynn, then Boston’s mayor. He had come to political prominence as an antibusing leader, and was and still is one of the state’s leading opponents of legalized abortion, although unlike most of his allies in this fight, he was always strongly supportive of well-funded social and health services for children born to poor mothers. In a bit of well-delivered pretense, he claimed that when he’d heard a TV announcer say just before a break, “We will return with big news about Congressman Barney Frank,” he’d wondered which of my important achievements as a legislator would be described. He added that I was a great congressman who did so much to help people, and that this was still the most important thing to say about me.

When I was introduced, the outpouring of emotional support from the large crowd was tangible. I tried for a minute or so to respond without crying—unsuccessfully.

There was one slight discordant note. Michael Dukakis, in his third term as governor, greeted me warmly, but he made no reference in public or private to the news of the weekend. This was a reflection of his personality rather than of any opposition to our fight for legal equality. Though he was originally ambivalent about our cause and opposed our right to adopt, he would become a full supporter of legal equality, signing an antidiscrimination bill and naming the first openly gay judges in Massachusetts history. One of his aides later told me that Dukakis’s silence at the rally was entirely intentional. When he’d been reminded that I had just come out, and that he should praise me for it, he’d said this was not the kind of thing he did and that I would understand. I did, to some extent, but I also wish he’d spoken up. With some embarrassment, I confess that his reticence led me to what I now acknowledge was an unbecomingly petty retaliation. When he called me in November 1988, a few days after he lost the presidential election to George H. W. Bush, I consciously omitted any referrence to that event.

For the next few days in Massachusetts, and then when I returned to Washington, the responses continued to be overwhelmingly supportive. Two conversations in particular had a powerful emotional impact. Alan Simpson of Wyoming, the Republican senator who supported my efforts to remove the anti-gay immigration rule, called to apologize. “For what?” I asked him. “Well,” he said, “knowing myself and my telling outrageous jokes about everything, I figured I might have made one in your presence, and I respect you way too much to want you to think that’s how I feel.” He added that he admired my courage. I was deeply moved.

A day or two later, as I entered Roland’s, the fabled Capitol Hill late-night convenience store, Warren Rudman, the Republican senator from New Hampshire, was just leaving. (Greater awareness that members of Congress do their food shopping in the p.m. after a long day’s work might correct the wildly inflated views of our lifestyles prevalent on the Internet.) Deliberately waiting at the door until I was in the back of the store, and then speaking loudly so that everyone could hear him, Rudman said, “Barney, my friend, I’m proud of you.”