SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Barney Frank, the former long-serving congressman from Massachusetts, has died at the age of 86 of congestive heart failure. Frank is being remembered as a fierce advocate for liberal causes, including gay rights. WBUR's Anthony Brooks has this remembrance.
ANTHONY BROOKS, BYLINE: Barney Frank had a long career in Massachusetts politics. He worked for Boston Mayor Kevin White, then as a state legislator before serving in Congress, where he represented a suburban Boston district for more than 30 years beginning in 1981. He was the first member of Congress to come out voluntarily as gay and became a champion of gay rights.
ARLINE ISAACSON: Barney was an icon, literally a hero for the LGBT community.
BROOKS: Arline Isaacson is a longtime Massachusetts-based gay rights activist. She says, while some members of Congress had been outed against their will, the fact that Frank came out on his own in 1987, in the AIDS era, made a huge impact on the fight for gay rights.
ISAACSON: What Barney did was heroic. And it literally was the first time that many people recognized, realized that they knew and liked someone who was gay.
BROOKS: Frank was known for his sharp wit. He famously criticized the Moral Majority, a Christian right group, for opposing abortion rights while also opposing child nutrition programs. He said, from their perspective, life begins at conception and ends at birth. And he could be just as tough on his critics, as he was back in 2009 at a town hall meeting outside of Boston. When a constituent challenged him for supporting the Affordable Care Act, referring to it as a Nazi policy, Frank, who was born into a Jewish family from New Jersey, hit back.
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BARNEY FRANK: When you ask me that question, I am going to revert to my ethnic heritage and answer your question with a question. On what planet do you spend most of your time?
(LAUGHTER)
BROOKS: He told the constituent that talking to her was like debating a piano. Erin O'Brien, a professor of political science at UMass Boston, says Frank was an accomplished and skilled politician. But she'll remember him most of all for his humor.
ERIN O'BRIEN: With all the vitriol and negative partisanship and just general ugliness in American politics, the fact that Barney Frank could be so good-humored and make people laugh, you can't say that about many members of Congress right now.
BROOKS: Frank was a Harvard-educated lawyer who became an advocate for numerous liberal causes. And after the global financial crisis of 2008, he coauthored the Dodd-Frank Act to overhaul banking regulations. Right up to his final days, Frank had a lot to say. Just two weeks before he died, I visited him in his home in Maine to talk about his last message to his fellow Democrats.
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FRANK: It is essential for the values that have driven me into politics to defeat right-wing populism.
BROOKS: Frank was physically frail at the time but still intellectually sharp. He said the left should focus on economic inequality and pivot away from fringe cultural issues that lack broad support. He said these include open border immigration policies and calls to defund the police. Some Democrats have criticized Frank for this.
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FRANK: I'm not telling people I don't want them to advocate those things. I filed a bill to legalize marijuana in 1972. My problem is that, instead of treating some of these reforms as issues which are currently unpopular for which you have to build support, they instantly make them litmus tests for everybody and therefore make it harder for us to win.
BROOKS: In his advocacy for gay rights, Frank understood the limits of what was possible at the time. For example, back in the early 1990s when gay rights advocates wanted to push for same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, Isaacson says Frank told them it was too soon, that the broader public wasn't ready.
ISAACSON: He was right. It took many years to get there. And we weren't there during that conversation, for sure. He was brilliant and thoughtful and invaluable to the LGBTQ community and to the progressive world at large. And his legacy will live on for decades to come.
BROOKS: He died at his home in Ogunquit, Maine, Tuesday night. He was holding the hand of his husband, Jim Ready, who said Barney Frank died peacefully.
For NPR News, I'm Anthony Brooks.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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