Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (9 page)

In my version, McGovern plays the pope, and the poster asks, “
WHO’S THAT GUY WITH BARNEY FRANK
?” We hung the poster in every place we could where students would see it. It was a great success. Apparently few if any of those who saw the poster had heard the joke before, so my own Goldberg variation not only drew attention to my candidacy—and McGovern’s endorsement of it—it also gained us a reputation for wit. The first printing became a collector’s item and disappeared into dorm rooms; we had to reprint the poster several times.

The text on the poster noted my support for the legalization of marijuana, gay rights, strong environmental laws, and the cause of the United Farm Workers—Cesar Chavez was another of my endorsers, following the city’s decision to boycott nonunion grapes in its purchases for jails and hospitals. My stands on these issues won the approval of
The Phoenix
and
The Real Paper
, two widely read underground newspapers that had recently appeared in the Boston area. I also benefited from the civility of my opponent, Virgil Aiello. He was a moderate Republican, of the sort that sadly has disappeared almost entirely even in Massachusetts. He didn’t join in supporting my social agenda, but neither did he fight it with demagogy.

I won by a greater margin than I had hoped for at the campaign’s outset, when I doubted that I could win at all. But I gladly acknowledged the good luck that was involved. Even though I trailed George McGovern in my district, I still won my race. This led me to state publicly that I was one of the very few Democrats in America to have ridden in on George McGovern’s coattails.

A few days after the election, I saw McGovern at a function at the Institute of Politics. On the chance that meeting me had not been the most memorable event of his previous year, I reintroduced myself and thanked him for helping me win my race. He did not seem happy, and I realized that he thought I was being sarcastic, so I reassured him that I was serious. A day or two later, I received a call from Bob Shrum, an old political friend who had been a senior McGovern staffer. “Did you meet George the other night?” he asked me. When I told him that I had, he responded, “George told some of us that he had finally met a Democrat who told him that his presidential race had been helpful. We figured it must have been you.” I was glad not to be one of the many sheriffs, county commissioners, state legislators, and others who blamed him for ending their careers. Forty years later, I had the wonderful opportunity to thank McGovern again for helping launch my electoral life. At a celebration of his great life’s work, I stood with him alongside my “Who’s that guy?” poster.

*

After an intense but brief rush of postelection euphoria, I set about becoming a legislator. In Massachusetts, legislators must file proposed bills for the coming year in the first week of December. When that week passed, it was clear that no one else was going to sponsor the gay rights bills I’d supported. And so, even before I took office, I knew that I was not a sponsor of the package, but
the
sponsor. Once again I was the survivor of a process of elimination, but this time it did not seem an unmixed blessing.

What would I do if I was asked “the question”? I came up with a plan. With mild indignation, I would reject the view that a legislator’s support for the right to do something automatically meant that he or she indulged in the activity in question. I was a white man who strongly supported ending racial bias. I was a male advocate of a woman’s right to choose. I did not smoke marijuana, but I defended the right of others to do so without criminal penalty.

I realized this was hardly a bulletproof defense. After all, if I was asked whether I did in fact smoke marijuana, I was ready to answer honestly—that I had tried it once, but wasn’t very good at it and didn’t repeat the effort. (I had to stop giving that truthful answer when Bill Clinton ruined the “I didn’t inhale” defense for all time. I discovered the edible form much later.) And no one was going to ask me if I was a closeted woman or an African American.

Contrary to my apprehensions, no one asked me the question. Even more surprisingly, there did not appear to be any public comment on the fact that an unmarried thirty-two-year-old man was the state’s most ardent advocate of gay rights. I was sure that there was some private discussion of what this said about me. Even so, it was seemingly unacceptable to raise what would still have been an accusation. The prevailing attitude, I believe—certainly in respectable circles in the Northeast—was that homosexuality was an unfortunate condition. Those of us who suffered from it deserved some sympathy, but not blame.

The most obvious question was why the press was also silent. As I came to understand it, journalists regarded homosexuality as a serious handicap for a public official but not as a trait they would be justified in bringing to light. For the next several decades—until very recently—this was a rare and probably unique example of the media putting personal privacy over newsworthiness. Ironically, while this approach protected individual gay or lesbian public figures, it worked to the disadvantage of our cause. Since the media’s respect for sexual privacy ended when someone was entangled in a scandal, the list of known gay, lesbian, or bisexual public figures was composed disproportionately of people in that category. This did not improve our reputation.

In January 1973, I filed my first package of legislation, which included my bill repealing the state’s sodomy law. When that bill later came to the floor, the reaction was unprecedented. Members of the Massachusetts House cast their votes by pushing Yes or No buttons on their desks, and these votes are tallied on two scoreboards in the front of the chamber. When the roll call on the sodomy bill was held, by a prearrangement of which I was unaware, almost everybody voted yes. To the great surprise of spectators, the board lit up solidly green. And then, amid raucous laughter on the floor, 90 percent of the members promptly switched to red. The bill lost overwhelmingly, by a vote of 208 to 16. Much to my chagrin—which I tried to hide but probably didn’t—the legislators regarded my first bill as a joke.

That laughter dissipated two days later. Rachelle Patterson, a political columnist for
The Boston Globe
, wrote a searing column angrily rebuking my colleagues for mocking a serious effort to help victims of prejudice. Her words resonated profoundly. The day her essay appeared, several representatives apologized to me, and there was never a repetition of the prank. In fact, I was somewhat relieved by the experience. I had gotten more votes than I had expected. And that my colleagues responded somewhat humorously rather than angrily was a good sign—they were playing a joke on someone they regarded as a colleague rather than an outsider.

Early in my first term, I spoke out on gay rights for the first time. The occasion was a public hearing on my bill to ban discrimination in private employment on grounds of sexual orientation. (This was no sign of any support for it. Unlike many legislatures, including Congress, Massachusetts’s rules require a hearing on every bill filed.) As I rose to speak, I thought I might be asked to explain my particular interest in the bill. When no one asked, I assumed—correctly—that I would have a few more years to decide how I’d answer.

As it turned out, I was asked only one question in the hearing, and it too gave me relief. My fellow freshman Royal Bolling, Jr., was one of five African Americans newly present in the House that year, giving the state’s black community significant representation for the first time. “Representative,” he began, “I’ve been dealing with job discrimination based on prejudice for a long time”—at this point I braced mentally for his objection to any effort to link the two causes—“and I agree with you that it’s just as wrong here as it is in my case, so I support your bill.”

At the time, many black leaders, especially among the clergy, rejected any linkage between our causes. They believed that homosexuality was immoral or they worried that gay civil rights harmed their own cause by raising the specter of guilt by association with less popular victims. Bolling’s words flatly repudiated those objections. His statement affected me greatly because revulsion at racism was one of the initial reasons I wanted to serve in government, and I still regarded combating it as my single highest priority. After Stonewall, I hoped that I could add gay rights to my agenda at no cost to my work in the racial fight, but I was prepared to put race first if I had to choose. The warm personal and political support I got from Bolling and from my other black colleagues—especially Representatives Doris Bunte and Mel King—gave me the best gift I could receive: one less moral dilemma in a career that already had too many.

3

BEACON HILL

I did not have to sit in the Massachusetts legislature very long before I realized that the most important divide was not between Republicans and Democrats but between loyal followers of the House leadership and the dissidents. If I was going to be both principled and effective, I would need to have good relations with both sides.

The Speaker in Massachusetts was extremely powerful. Most Democrats voted with him almost all the time, and there was a significant number of Republican members willing to give him the votes he needed in return for political favors. He selected all the committee chairs. He also doled out membership on committees, good office space, and legislative staff.

I realized early on that I could go my own way on policy matters as long as I refrained from impugning the motives of the leaders and from joining in frontal assaults on their prerogatives. My role as a “leadership liberal” reprised the deal I had made with White and, more implicitly, with my constituents. I would use whatever talents for governance I had to be useful to them on nuts-and-bolts matters—and in so doing I would also maximize my ability to achieve my ideological objectives.

This was easier than it might have been due to the personality of the Speaker, David Bartley. He was more liberal than his predecessor or his successor, and politically more flexible. He was young—having become Speaker four years before, at age thirty-four—and had the time and inclination for a post-Speakership career. This gave him the incentive to govern the House with a lighter touch and to seek accommodation with the liberals—especially those who had, as I did, good media relations. And because his ego was secure, he did not equate dissent with personal attack—as long as it wasn’t phrased that way.

Happily for my relationship with Bartley, I was immediately useful to him. Boston’s public transportation system—the fabled MTA on which Charlie made the second most famous ride in our history—was in crisis. Its deficit—the large amount it still owed after fares were collected—was funded almost entirely by the communities in the region, whose only revenue source was the property tax. Federal money was available for buying equipment but not for running it. There was a broad consensus among serious students that unless the state, with its broader revenue streams, assumed half the cost, the system could not continue to operate on the scale needed to sustain the metropolitan region’s economy. But funding the MTA with state money required a two-thirds vote in each house, and for many legislators around the state, taxing their constituents to pay for the city’s subways was politically toxic. Bartley appointed me to the Transportation Committee, where I helped bypass the committee’s chairman and get the necessary legislation through the panel.

The help I gave Bartley with the MTA allowed me to challenge him on a matter of deep principle. For many years, ethnicity had defined Massachusetts’s political geography, especially in greater Boston. A plurality of the area’s State Senate seats belonged to the Irish. There were two seats dominated by Italians, two suburban seats where Jews had the advantage, at least one seat where it helped enormously to be Polish, and another where the Portuguese usually won. By 1972, there were more than enough African American voters to form a majority-black district, but they were parceled out into adjoining districts so as not to jeopardize any predominantly white district.

The deeply rooted tradition was that each legislative chamber did its own redistricting and then concurred unquestioningly in the other’s. Race was no longer an issue for us in the House. But when the Senate produced a plan that maintained that body’s racial purity, the five black House members objected. They won the support of Republican governor Frank Sargent, who promised to veto any all-white plan the Senate passed. His vow was the necessary condition for blocking the Senate’s plan. But it was not sufficient. The Democrats had more than enough seats to override Sargent’s veto.

That is where we came in. Building on my work for Mayor White, I had formed close personal and political relationships with the two leading black legislators, King and Bunte. When we learned of Sargent’s inclination to veto the Senate plan, we met with other liberals who had demonstrated a willingness to defy the leadership in the past and we were able to secure the votes to uphold Sargent’s veto.

The main beneficiary of the status quo was Senator William “Billy” Bulger, who was working his way up the leadership ladder and soon would become the longest-serving and most powerful Senate leader in the state’s history. His South Boston–based district had a large share of black voters—an ideal balance for him and others seeking to maintain Irish dominance of the seat. There were too few blacks for an African American to win a primary—the only election that mattered—but enough to threaten a South Boston candidate if the Irish vote was split by multiple candidacies. Bulger was thus able to play the race card to discourage competition from his base, guaranteeing him easy, continuous reelection. He was—not surprisingly—furious with us for threatening the comfortable alignment of his Senate seat.

His anger was only increased by the fact that the city was on the verge of a racial crisis prompted by court-ordered efforts to desegregate the schools. South Boston was Louise Day Hicks’s political base, and the neighborhood vehemently—and soon violently—opposed the busing of students across district lines. Even worse, the assault on this bastion of Irish ethnic and cultural pride was being waged on behalf of the city’s black population with the eager participation of suburban liberals—whom the people of South Boston accused, with some justification, of being biased against them.