Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (15 page)

Together, Endean, Bradley, and I discussed the remarkable fact that three gay men were formulating Democratic Party policy on an LGBT issue. And in truth, our pride in that accomplishment was only slightly diminished by our ultimate failure. We drafted language that did not eliminate the McDonald ban outright but would substantially diminish its practical effect. Even so, we lost by a vote of 151 to 245, with 116 Democrats and 35 Republicans supporting us and 102 Democrats and 143 Republicans opposed.

During the debate, I received an important preview of coming distractions when I solicited my colleague John Burton of San Francisco to vote with us on the amendment. “I can’t support it,” he told me. “It’s got anti-gay language. Gays in my district don’t want me doing that.” I explained that our measure in fact substantially lessened the McDonald amendment’s anti-LGBT impact, but to no avail. Burton plausibly responded that this legislative complexity could not be explained to his constituents in a way that would defuse their anger that he had voted for something that was still anti-gay.

This was the beginning of my recognition that as the LGBT movement grew to include millions of us, and as some of its leading organizations came to question conventional political methods, controversy about strategy and tactics would greatly complicate our work. While there was some overlap in our positions, the debate between those—like me—who were convinced that we would win our rights mostly through conventional political tactics and those who scorned “the system” and (mistakenly) invoked the civil rights movement as a model for relying mostly on direct action would go on, often angrily, for decades.

*

That year, we lost another battle. In 1981, the District of Columbia City Council voted to repeal its law criminalizing sodomy. Under the system that then prevailed, a change in the district’s criminal law could be vetoed by a resolution of either house of Congress. In contrast to my earlier experience in Massachusetts, this time there was no need for me to take the leading role. The Democratic chairman of the House Committee on the District of Columbia was Ron Dellums, an African American from Berkeley, California. He is one of the most eloquent people ever to serve in the House, and also one of the strongest opponents of discrimination in our history. As committee chair, he had multiple reasons for passionately opposing the effort to maintain criminal penalties. Like the other African American members, he resented Congress’s close supervision over the largely black population in D.C. His predecessors in his job had been racist Southerners. He also objected when his colleagues refused to show his committee the customary types of deference—a sensitivity that was hardly unjustified. When he and Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder were appointed to the Armed Services Committee, the chairman, Edward H
é
bert of Louisiana, provided only one additional chair for the two new members on the committee rostrum. Determined not to appear ruffled, Dellums and Schroeder shared the seat. When Dellums recounted this story years later at a retirement party, by which time he was himself chair of the Armed Services Committee, I noted that this was the only time in my association with these two outstanding members that either of them had ever done anything half-assed.

In opposing the rollback of D.C.’s initiative, Dellums was angered most of all by the homophobia behind it, and his speech on the issue was the most powerful attack on anti-LGBT bias yet delivered in the U.S. Congress. Although we lost the vote, 119 to 281, the experience encouraged me in one way and instructed me in another. The encouragement came from the vote total. Sodomy repeal had received only 7 percent of the votes in liberal Massachusetts in 1973, but 30 percent in the U.S. House in 1981. This was a real improvement. My lobbying efforts instructed me. Most of the colleagues I approached—admittedly, I concentrated on liberal and moderate members—volunteered that they agreed with me on the merits but saw no reason to take a political risk on a purely symbolic matter that had no impact on real life.

To most policy makers, I realized, anti-LGBT prejudice was an abstraction. Even though increasing numbers of them were coming to disagree with it, the millions of real live human beings who experienced its damaging effects were hidden from them. If we were prepared to accept second-class status, and pay the psychological price extracted by a life of denial, the closet could have its benefits. But for a movement determined to defeat prejudice, anonymity was toxic.

A few years later, after I had come out, I experienced a vivid example of anonymity’s costs. C-SPAN covered a speech I’d given to a gay-sponsored meeting at Georgetown Law School. The next day, a congressman who strongly opposed discrimination asked me why so few students had attended. There was actually a pretty good crowd, I told him, and asked why he thought the opposite. “Well,” he said, “I watched it on TV and the camera stayed on you and didn’t show the audience, so I figured they were sparing you the embarrassment of showing an empty hall.” The actual explanation, which he appreciated my sharing with him, was that law students did not want to be seen at an LGBT event because of the negative impact it would have on their job seeking.

Our collective secrecy brought with it another harm: It perpetuated the stereotypical views that we were either lisping, mincing males or brutish, stomping females, which hindered our efforts for equality. Of course, I very much wished that apparently feminine characteristics in a man or masculine traits in a woman had no effect on how others judged them. But that wasn’t the world we lived in, and the prevailing images were not helpful. The cause of LGBT equality did not require our most visible brothers and sisters to hide, but it did require the rest of us to reveal ourselves. The broader society needed to know that we were a fully representative cross section of that society, not incidentally including its daughters, sons, sisters, brothers, parents, aunts, uncles, teachers, students, customers, doctors, teammates, friends—and congressmen.

When I arrived in D.C. after the 1980 election, I decided to adopt a hybrid status. I would be out privately to other LGBT people but not publicly to my colleagues, the voters, or other heterosexuals—beyond the handful I had already told. Personal needs drove the first stance, political prudence the second.

At the start of my career, I had adopted a self-description that is often applied to presumably closeted political figures: “He is so wrapped up in his job that he doesn’t need a private life.” I have yet to meet anyone whom those words could justly describe. The strain of living in the closet takes a heavy toll on your personality. And it is hard to keep the anger that should be directed at your own self-denial from spilling over into dealings with others. When I think of the politicians I deem likely to be taking this approach, a disproportionate number share my reuptation for being too quick to give and take offense.

So I resolved to start a new life in D.C. I would be open about my sexuality with other LGBT people, secure in the knowledge that they would keep my secret as I dated, socialized, and, as with Endean and Bradley, strategized. Publicly, while I had stopped dating women, I allowed the presumption of heterosexuality to apply. I followed the ethical principle that has guided me in other aspects of my public activity: I tell the truth, and nothing but the truth, but unless under oath, I feel no obligation to volunteer the whole truth if it is inconvenient.

I persuaded myself that this bifurcation of my life was working. With the exceptions of the sodomy and Legal Services issues, I was able to concentrate my energies on the central question confronting Congress: How far could the Republicans and their Southern Democratic allies drive the public’s increasing unhappiness with government?

Most of us still believed that antigovernment feeling was more a cyclical trend than a secular one. With Reagan in office, the economy was still suffering, and though we didn’t want the suffering to continue, we nonetheless stood to gain from it. We were also confident that the majority of the American people still agreed that the programs we were defending were important to maintaining the quality of our national life. This perception was reinforced by the fact that Reagan’s tax cuts passed by larger margins than his spending cuts. Embracing the strategy of Boston state representative John Melia, several dozen Democrats voted both to preserve programs and to cut the revenues needed to pay for them.

As a freshman, I had no significant role in formulating these decisions. I did join the liberal Democratic Study Group, which sought to pressure the leadership into a sharper response to the right, and I was part of several delegations that met with O’Neill on the subject. It was in these meetings that my appreciation of the Speaker’s judgment deepened. More often than not, I agreed with his explanation of why he would not adopt our approach.

I soon came to feel more useful in a different role: as a leader in our rhetorical counterattack against the right. “Counterattack” is very much the operative word here. While the Democrats had a nominal forty-five-seat majority in the House, the conservative coalition usually had the actual advantage, and this, combined with Reagan’s skill and popularity, and Republican control of the Senate, gave them the initiative. Our part in the debates on the floor, in committee, and in the media was largely reactive—debunking their arguments and documenting the social harm their policies would inflict.

I was happy to learn that I had an aptitude for this work—I am at my best in debate as a counterpuncher, due to a combination of my strongest and weakest rhetorical traits. The weakness, which I have noted, is my laziness, born of a very low boredom threshold. If I am assigned the task of preparing opening remarks expounding a point of view, I am easily distracted. But I respond well to the stimulus of opposing arguments, so much so that even when I am the sole speaker at an event, I prefer to debate my absent antagonists. I am also lucky to have a very good memory. This is extremely helpful in debate because over time, most politicians will use a line of reasoning that is useful for their current objective but contradicts their tack on a previous issue.

My sense of humor, which I am glad to have, and which I cannot think of anything I did to earn, was also a great polemical weapon. The force of an argument is greatly magnified when it can be phrased as a quip, especially a snarky one that is easily remembered. When Reagan paired his opposition to abortion with a budget cut for funds for pregnant women and poor children, I jibed that he “apparently believes that from the standpoint of the federal government, life begins at conception and ends at birth.” This line had an impact—a leader of the antiabortion drive in the House even cited it in support of better funding for mothers and children.

By the end of 1981, I should have been satisfied with my political career. I believed that the conservative effort to roll back our domestic achievements would go no further. And I was happy that I had found a useful role in the legislative process and a reasonable way to live as a partially closeted public figure. But there was a problem—the growing likelihood that I would be a one-term congressman.

*

It was payback time in Massachusetts. In the national reapportionment following the 1980 census, Massachusetts lost one seat in the U.S. House; its delegation would shrink from twelve members to eleven. That delegation consisted of ten Democrats and two Republicans. Ordinarily, by the rules of American politics, this would have meant the loss of one of the Republicans, given that the state’s Democratic leaders controlled the redistricting. But Massachusetts was not then an ordinary state, and I was not an ordinary congressman. Two of the three decision makers—Governor King and Senate president Bulger—were no more committed to my political welfare than I had been to theirs. The third, Speaker McGee, had tolerated me in the Statehouse but did not have to think hard about siding with his two governing partners over me. The big three were respectful of Tip O’Neill’s aspirations to fortify his Democratic majority in the House, but in Massachusetts, avenging past wrongs in state politics has a long tradition and easily took precedence over advancing a national Democratic agenda—especially when all three of these men shared little of O’Neill’s liberal ideology. (I had by then assimilated enough of the state’s political culture to put a high value on getting even. When an amendment to the redistricting plan that was favorable to me failed in the Massachusetts House, I kept a copy of the roll call in my top desk drawer for several years. I took any subsequent opportunity to retard the careers of those who voted against me, and to help those who had been my allies.)

The result was a new congressional map that divided my district into five pieces. My only slim reason for hope was that one of those segments contained both of my strongest bases of support: Newton and Brookline. Unfortunately, that segment now belonged to a district that had been represented since 1967 by Margaret Heckler, a Republican who was one of the longest-serving women in the House. Seventy percent of the new configuration came from her existing district; 24 percent was from mine; and 6 percent from a third. She was one of the most liberal Republicans in Congress and enjoyed the support of unions, community action groups, and elderly organizations because of her commitment to their issues.

And so I decided not to run for reelection. I told myself that I had only one more year to be in Congress no matter what I did, so it would be better to concentrate all my energies on being a great member—“They’ll miss me when I’m gone,” I consoled myself. Why be diverted from legislating by a futile, time-consuming, ego-deflating, and no doubt unpleasant campaign?

The decision did not stand for long. When I asked Jim Segel how people would react if I bowed out, he calmly replied that most of them would think I was “a fucking asshole. You came into the district and won a seat that a lot of people who lived there thought should have been theirs,” he pointed out, “and if you give it up now without a fight, they will be even angrier, and your supporters will feel betrayed.” Joe DeNucci, a state legislator, former contender for the world middleweight title, and future state auditor, told me to stop whining about how unfair the world was and fight for what I wanted. “Most people never get to be a congressman,” he said, “so why are they going to be sorry for you because you only got to do it once?”