Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (20 page)

On the House floor, my Democratic colleagues literally embraced me. In so doing, they conveyed their willingness to protect me from any harm—political or other—that might threaten. And my first appearance before an LGBT gathering produced the greatest outpouring of emotion—from them and me—that I have ever experienced.

Shortly after the announcement, I went to lunch at a restaurant near the House with one of my oldest friends, Mark Furstenberg. It was crowded, with a long wait to be seated. As we stood there, the ma
î
tre d’ immediately escorted us to a table. Mark expressed pleasant surprise at our being singled out and wondered why. I explained that a lot of gay men worked in restaurants.

Media response was also largely favorable. The right-wing
Washington Times
, owned by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, enthusiastically added gay bashing to its regular denunciations of me—in which I took considerable pride—but they were a minor exception. One story that portrayed my decision in a favorable light was not only very important for me politically but also became a footnote in the history of journalism. Linda Greenhouse of
The New York Times
published a piece on Wednesday, June 3, that gave me the chance to explain my decision, and contained generally favorable reactions from others. But there was a small fly in the very soothing ointment. The headline across the top of the page read “Public Man, Private Life: Why a Congressman Told of His Homosexuality.” And the article described my “homosexual acquaintances” and my support for “homosexual rights.” By then, “gay” was the adjective in general use. “Homosexual” was not explicitly derogatory, but it was the preferred term among those who wanted to maintain some semantic distance from our cause. In the phrasing of certain aptitude tests, you might say that “homosexual” was to “gay” as “Negro” was to “black.” It wasn’t exactly an insult, but it was a message to the minority in question that the majority would decide what to call us, rather than let us pick a name we liked.

In this case, the message was sent by the man who ran the paper, A. M. Rosenthal. (Incidentally, because
The Times
was sensitive about its Jewish appearance, reporters with identifiably Jewish first names for a long time used their initials—A. M. (Abe) Rosenthal, A. H. (Abe) Raskin, M. A. (Myron) Farber. In a related example of bowing to bias, women were also asked to use initials. Of course, those initials more effectively hid the writers’ sex than Rosenthal’s initials obscured his Judaism. Rosenthal was famously uneasy at best about LGBT rights and insisted on using “homosexual” instead of “gay.” Coincidentally, Greenhouse’s story appeared a week before Rosenthal’s last day as editor, so I believe I am the last man in history to be described as “homosexual” in
The New York Times
as a matter of editorial policy.

The overwhelmingly positive reaction I was getting from my colleagues, the media, and the general public was good news politically. Even so, my advisers and I knew it was unwise to rely solely on my past success when it came to evaluating my prospects for reelection in 1988. So we polled. Our reading was that I would lose only a few points if I ran as an openly gay candidate. (We were right: I had won 74 percent of the vote in the presidential election year of 1984, and that fell to 70 percent in 1988.)

To my dismay—because I didn’t want to know the answer—my pollster Tom Kiley also insisted on asking respondents if they were disappointed to learn that I was gay. The good news was that a majority were not, but the breakdown by gender—cross-tabs in polling language—deflated my ego. Men were on the whole unhappy to hear the news; women by contrast overwhelmingly said that they could not have cared less. From the standpoint of my hopes for a better social life, this was not encouraging. I did search the comments appended to the polling data to see if some men had expressed particular enthusiasm, or if a few women had expressed any disappointment at my unavailability. They had not.

The polling data had one more interesting element. Only 22 percent of voters said that my sexuality made them less likely to vote for me—but twice that number said they expected that it would make others less likely to vote for me. This result reminded me of the reaction LGBT people often received when they came out to family members. “Thank you for telling me,” they were assured. “I don’t know why you were ever worried that those of us who care for you would have any problem with you telling us who you are. Of course I still love you, and will always love you—but don’t tell your father.” Based on the frequency with which I had heard some variant of this story, I was coming to a tentative conclusion: The average American was not homophobic but still feared that he or she was supposed to be.

There was one more consequence of coming out. In the flood of mail I received—most of it welcoming and some very touching—I found a note from someone I did not know, Herb Moses. He told me he was an openly gay Jewish man who, given these traits, had the unlikely job of editing an economics journal for the Department of Agriculture. He suggested that we meet. I agreed, and we began a relationship in June that lasted eleven years. Now I was not just the first voluntarily out member of Congress; Herb and I were also the first openly gay congressional couple.

Of course, this meant the end to my short-lived “minimization” strategy. I was now accepted as a gay politician doing my public job. But would I also be accepted as a flesh-and-blood gay man involved in a physical relationship with another guy? Herb was a Washington veteran and he knew dating me would involve some inconvenience, but I could hardly expect him to accept being described as “no big deal” in my life.

For the first time in my career, I read a book not for intellectual stimulation or information but as a manual on how to perform a tricky job. It was Charles Hamilton’s
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma
, which traced the life of the Harlem congressman.

Powell was only the fourth African American to serve in Congress in the twentieth century. (The other three represented the same heavily black district in Chicago.) I was shocked to learn from Hamilton’s excellent work that when Powell arrived in D.C. in 1945, he was told he could not swim in the House pool, eat in the Members’ Dining Room—in this case by the black headwaiter—or get his hair cut in the House barbershop. The three Chicagoans had apparently acquiesced in these exclusions, probably due to the racist national mood at the time and the docility they’d learned serving as cogs in Chicago’s political machines.

Powell refused to accept this. After World War II, black resistance to segregation was gaining strength—the cause was enhanced by the gap between FDR’s proclamation of “the four freedoms” and the denial of real freedom to part of our population, and by the need to use all of our available manpower in the war effort. But Powell’s struggle also had a personal dimension. His insistence on being treated respectfully also extended to his wife, the jazz singer Hazel Scott. When she was not allowed to perform in a hall owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution, and Bess Truman subsequently attended one of the organization’s functions, Powell criticized the first lady. He received in return a sharp rebuke from Harry Truman, who, in this case, unfortunately let his family loyalty outweigh his commitment to principle. I drew a clear lesson from Powell’s experience. Herb and I would not do anything only to make a point, but neither would we stand for any second-class treatment just so some homophobe could make his or her point.

My rule was simple: Wherever congressional spouses were invited, so was Herb. I did not have to argue the matter with Tom Foley, who had just become Speaker. He was fully supportive of equality and authorized Herb to wear the same pin that was given to other spouses as a form of identification inside the Capitol.

We did exercise some prudence. At the first White House Christmas Ball we attended in 1987, we wanted to join the other couples who were dancing, but we were too timid. So I asked my two San Francisco colleagues, Barbara Boxer and Nancy Pelosi, to start us off. Nancy and Herb and Barbara and I gyrated for a couple of minutes, and then they discreetly—and very graciously—walked away, leaving Herb and me to dance facing each other.

*

With my private life in good shape, and my reelection assured, I was able to put all my energies into legislating. Until then, I hadn’t realized the full effect on my personality of living in the closet, but several of my colleagues enlightened me. Simply put, I was now nicer.

Legislating is a personal business. In the executive branch, there is a hierarchy with the president at the top. The judiciary is similarly hierarchical, with even more strictly defined responsibilities. Legislating is very different—not just from other branches of government but also from almost any other organized human endeavor.

There is no true hierarchy in either the House or Senate. Each body is composed of individual—and usually individualistic—members. The Speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader have the most influence, but neither of them can order any of his or her colleagues to do anything. To add to the free-for-all, all members are able to vote on all issues.

All of this puts a high premium on certain gifts. A legislator must have persuasive powers and also a great tolerance for messiness and uncertainty—for bargaining with a large number of players simultaneously, in a process where all issues are on the table. Personality is a secondary factor, but still a critical one. It generally works in one direction: Not even the most popular member can charm colleagues into voting his or her way, but the obnoxious and unpleasant pay a price—sometimes in lost votes, more often by being excluded from the informal conversations that typically determine outcomes.

When I retired, I said that one of the benefits of no longer running for office was that I would no longer have to try to be nice to people I didn’t like. Some people said they were surprised by the remark, since they’d never associated me with the practice. My quick response was that I had said only that I had
tried.
In any case, I concede that even in my new friendlier out-of-the-closet disposition, I remained less patient than almost everyone else.

This was a conscious choice. One of the most useful concepts I had learned from the study of economics was the notion of “opportunity cost”: In this case, the price of politely tolerating conversational repetition was having less time to deal with pressing matters. I also benefited from reading the memoir of Sherman Adams, Eisenhower’s very effective chief of staff. Every day he took part in more than a hundred phone conversations; he coped with the overwhelming time pressures by omitting to say hello and goodbye. I make a sharp distinction between speaking unpleasantly to people, for which I sometimes apologize, and telling them that they have said enough, for which I do not.

Whether or not I was easier to work with, I was happier. And so I was able to turn my full emotional attention to legislative matters, with satisfying results. In January 1987, I became chair of the Administrative Law Subcommittee. It was something of a grab bag, with no jurisdiction over the most contentious judiciary matters. But it did handle an issue I cared a great deal about: the outrageous decision by Franklin Roosevelt to force tens of thousands of Japanese Americans out of their homes in 1942 and imprison them in internment camps. (He was urged to commit this blatant violation of civil liberties by, among others, California attorney general Earl Warren, and he did it over the objection of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Go figure!) I had learned of this serious blot on America’s record in a course on constitutional law, when I read the Supreme Court decision in
Korematsu v. United States
that upheld the constitutionality of Roosevelt’s action. I decided then that if I ever had a chance to help atone for this, I would do so. Membership in the U.S. House obviously provided that chance—and chairing my new subcommittee an even better one.

Of course, there was no way to undo the terrible historical fact of the relocation. But I soon learned that the Japanese American community had been working on a bill to accomplish the next best thing: The government would officially apologize and provide some compensation to those who had been mistreated. The two Japanese American House members, Californians Norm Mineta and Bob Matsui, who had themselves been interned as children, introduced legislation calling for the apology and payment. I immediately became a cosponsor, working closely with Glenn Roberts, Mineta’s key staff aide. Coincidentally, Roberts’s brother was the journalist Steve Roberts, my old friend from Bayonne and now the husband of Cokie Roberts. This web of prior relationships allowed us to navigate a tricky parliamentary situation with complete mutual trust.

The situation was tricky because of an aspect of legislative life that is not widely understood. For liberals or Democrats to flout the views of conservatives or Republicans generally carries little political risk—people who are already going to vote against you can do it only once. Politicians who claim credit for standing up to their enemies deserve skepticism. As I’ve said, the usual result for them is increased fund-raising opportunities.

The true test of a politician’s willingness to take risks for principle is when his or her usual supporters are on the other side of an issue. Standing up to your enemies is fun and often rewarding; standing up to your friends is stressful and often costly, and consequently very rare. When a member’s supporters are divided, indecisiveness is the frequent response. Having to choose between ardent groups of constituents is an elected official’s worst nightmare.

Mineta and Matsui were frustrated and puzzled by the Judiciary Committee’s reluctance to act on the Redress bill, as it came to be named. That committee was dominated by liberals who were strongly committed to protecting minorities from mistreatment—but this effort to address one of the most flagrant cases of mistreatment in this country’s history was going nowhere.