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The Legacy of Barney Frank

A look back through The Nation’s coverage of Frank’s long and storied political career suggests the late congressman was always a man containing multitudes.

Former Massachusetts representative Barney Frank gestures during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington on January 13, 2010,

Former Massachusetts representative Barney Frank died this month at the age of 86. Most obituaries have emphasized Frank’s pioneering role as an openly gay politician first, and his legislative accomplishments second, among them the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform package, a valiant if imperfect effort to root out the abuses that had led to the financial crisis of 2008. Even from his hospice bed, Frank continued to dole out advice to Democrats. Mystified as to why his own preferred candidate for Senate in Maine, Governor Janet Mills, lost out to the insurgent outsider Graham Platner, Frank criticized the progressive left for combining a critique of economic inequality with an impolitic emphasis on “racial and cultural things.” A look back through The Nation’s coverage of Frank’s long and storied political career—admiring, at times sympathetic, but far from uncritical—suggests the late congressman was always a man containing multitudes; a brilliant, brash politician whose famous wit could be directed both at the left and the right.

In 1987, Frank called up a reporter from The Boston Globe and asked her to visit his office with no stated purpose. During the interview, Frank did something that at the time was still unthinkable: he told the reporter he was gay. (The cartoonist Eric Orner depicted the scene in his 2022 graphic biography of Frank, Smahtguy, excerpted in The Nation.)

“To anyone who’s been around Capitol Hill for more than a month,” the late journalist Nicholas von Hoffman wrote in The Nation at the time, “the news came as one of the year’s biggest unsurprises.”

Frank, von Hoffman observed, was “one of the smartest men in national politics.” He had seen how reports of an extramarital affair had doomed Democratic Senator Gary Hart’s bid for the party’s 1988 presidential nomination. Frank wanted to avoid something similar happening to him, so he got out in front of it before one of those news organizations von Hoffman called the “gonad-seeking practitioners of sex-snoop journalism” outed him. The rules had changed: Politicians’ private sex lives were now fair game. Frank wanted to control the narrative.

As Frank’s career continued, he became an occasional contributor to The Nation, starting with a letter to the editor in August 2000. The progressive left at the time was torn between supporters of Ralph Nader’s Green Party bid for the presidency and nose-holding voters for Al Gore. A Gore supporter, Frank took issue with a Nation article that quotes Nader dismissing the severe consequences that a George W. Bush presidency would have on social issues. Frank wrote that Nader had “never in his career paid any attention to the abortion or gay rights issues.”

Frank was early to spot some of the key contradictions and hypocrisies in American life that have come to structure the very reality we live in, and he........

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