“There is a price to pay for rejecting the partial victories that are typically achieved through political activity.”Īnd yet the man won 16 elections to the House of Representatives, most of them not even close. The more voters he met, his aides’ logic went, the more of them he was likely to alienate. One former aide has spoken about how hard Frank’s staff worked to minimize his campaign schedule, in order to keep him away from as many voters as possible. He hated campaigning, as he acknowledges in this book, but the problem seems to have run even deeper. It is surprising, as I suggested above, to find oneself being moved by Frank, a man typically described in the press as “brusque” or “acerbic,” and less euphemistically known to be, well, rude. Now it is time to be good at life, and with Jim’s help, I think I can be. It took me far too long to achieve a happy, fulfilling domestic existence … Looking back, I think I was pretty good at my job. Today, I cite the emotional damage I inflicted on myself when I speak with younger LGBT people who ask my advice. Sixty years ago, when I began to think about how to maximize my participation in politics, I understood that it would require the repression of any private life. A book that begins with his description of the terror he felt at being “an involuntary member of one of America’s most despised groups” closes with an affecting little passage, a kind of auto-benediction, that marks how far both society and Frank have come: He opens by announcing his confusion when, at the age of 14 in 1954, he realized that “I was attracted to the other guys.” At several points he writes of the torment he felt as he also realized how much he hungered to live a political, and thus unusually public, life and what that meant: constant fear, certainly back when he was starting out, that in pursuing such a career, he risked an exposure that would finish him.Īnd finally, he writes with simple eloquence about finding true love late in life, at age 67, with Jim Ready, whom he married in 2012. Frank also used congressional letterhead in memos to court officials supervising Gobie’s probation on drug and sodomy charges.Since, in his usual way, Barney Frank gets right to the point in his new memoir, I will too: the most engaging-and indeed occasionally heartrending (not an adjective I ever thought I’d use in writing about Frank)-parts of this book are those in which he discusses his long struggles with his sexuality and relationships. Frank invoked the congressional privilege to fix parking tickets incurred by prostitute Stephen Gobie while he was driving the congressman’s car. The investigation involved the abuse of official privileges in relations involving Rep. This is the least punitive of the official sanctions that could have been recommended. The committee unanimously recommended that the full House reprimand Rep. The House Ethics Committee had announced the results of a ten-month investigation by a twelve member panel into the actions of Rep. T20:04:25-04:00 Ethics Committee Chairman, Representative Julian Dixon, D-California took questions from reporters regarding the recent report on allegations against Representative Barney Frank, D-Massachusetts.
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