Remembering Barney Frank

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of maximumfun.org and is distributed by NPR.

**Jesse Thorn** (0:21)
It's Bullseye, I'm Jesse Thorn. Earlier this year, Barney Frank died. He was 86 Frank served in Congress for 32 years, representing Massachusetts' 4th District. Between 2007 and 2011, he chaired the House Financial Services Committee. If you remember your recent history, well, you would be hard pressed to find a more consequential time to be overseeing finance policy in the United States. Of the hundreds of pieces of policy Barney Frank drafted, proposed and voted on, his signature might be the Dodd-Frank Act, which regulated financial institutions in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Barney Frank was a policy wonk. He was also a great public speaker, genuinely funny. He's certainly the funniest politician that I've known in my time.
Definitely, if you loved him, a sort of lovable grump. He was also a trailblazer. He was the first member of Congress to voluntarily come out as gay.
In 2015, we took Bullseye on the road. We did a live show in Boston, specifically in Cambridge, and Barney Frank was kind enough to join me on the stage. He just recently retired from Congress and he'd written a book, Frank, A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same Sex Marriage.
He showed up backstage by himself in a frumpy suit, sat down, looked at me, said, Oh, I'm in the right place, right? What am I going on? And then took out a book and read it frowning until he came on the stage and was amazing. Let's listen back to my conversation with the late Barney Frank. All right, sir.

**Barney Frank** (2:03)
Well, thank you.

**Jesse Thorn** (2:04)
I actually, I do not know if congressman is an honorific like president, like it lasts forever. Like, are you, is no longer a member of congress? Are you still congressman, Frank?

**Barney Frank** (2:16)
Some people like to keep it. I think titles should die with the office. I think people do too much titling and there's too much deference. I am, I am still officially and will forever be honorable. Yeah.
Nothing I can do, but no, I'm not a great fan of titles outlasting the job.

**Jesse Thorn** (2:39)
So, I mean, I'm sure you did like 10, you've done like 10 million sort of newsy interviews about the book and I'm not really a real reporter or anything. So, we'll talk relatively little about policy, but...

**Barney Frank** (2:55)
It's like the Republican presidential debate.

**Jesse Thorn** (3:01)
I guess something that I wondered was like, I think there was a point in my life, you know, when you're like six years old, you think, oh, it would be great to be like president. You know what I mean? It's like firemen.
And then I think maybe when I was like 14 years old, I thought about what's involved in being president and thought, wow, that sounds horrible. That sounds like a nightmare. And I think you could probably say the same thing of congressperson. Like, on the one hand, you get to be honorable for the rest of your life. But it's a son of a gun of a job. And I wonder if it was a job that you always wanted, or there was a time when you decided, like, this is worth it.

**Barney Frank** (3:39)
Well, actually, I was interested in politics when I... I remember when I was 14, first being very interested. There was the murder of a black kid from Mississippi named Emmett Till, who's Yaki my age, 14 in 1954 Brutally murdered because he looked at a white woman the wrong way visiting in Mississippi. And I remember being outraged that the sheriff was in on it, the federal government wasn't going to do anything. So early on, I thought, yeah, I would like to be in politics.
But there was one requirement that I was sure at that time was a requirement that I knew I could not meet, and that was to be not gay.
It did not seem to me at 14 I realized I was gay when I was 13 And it just seemed to me when I was 14, this is 1954, the notion that we would one day be repudiating homophobia, whether gay people, lesbians, would we be treated like anybody else. The notion that we could fight this, you might as well have told me that my mission in life was to repeal the law of gravity. It was just this big fat fact that sat on top of me. So I began to think about maybe doing stuff politically, but not being an elected official. That didn't come until much later.