Barney Frank, the liberal Democrat who spearheaded one of the most significant pieces of financial reform legislation since the Great Depression, died Tuesday night after a battle with congestive heart failure. He was 86 years old.
“He was, above all else, a wonderful brother,” Frank’s sister, Doris Breay, told NBC10 Boston Wednesday morning in confirming her sibling’s passing. “I was lucky to be his sister.”
The former Massachusetts congressman had spent his last months in hospice care at his home in Ogunquit, Maine, the hometown of his husband, Jim Ready.
Born in 1940 in Bayonne, NJ, Frank championed a wide variety of causes during his 32-year career — including abortion rights, the environment, LGBTQ issues and economic reforms.
Following the 2007-2008 financial crisis, Frank teamed up with then-Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) to craft the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, often known as just Dodd-Frank, which aimed to wrest power from financial institutions and protect American consumers.
Among the act’s major reforms was the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), establishing the Financial Stability Oversight Council to track systemic risks in the financial system and eliminating taxpayer-funded bailouts of failing big banks via the Orderly Liquidation Authority.
Dodd-Frank also enshrined the Volcker Rule, which prevented Wall Street banks from engaging in risky or speculative investments with depositor funds and boosted oversight of large financial institutions by the Federal Reserve.
The act was signed into law by former President Barack Obama in 2010.
Frank, the first openly gay member of Congress after publicly coming out in 1987, was a vocal advocate for LGBTQ rights, including supporting the repeal of the Clinton-era “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy regarding homosexuals in the military and the passage of the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act.
“I just couldn’t live anymore with the frustrations and emotional choking of trying to hide my private life—I couldn’t have a satisfactory private life. Everybody has emotional and physical needs that have to be expressed,” he told Time magazine about his decision to come out of the closet.
Although the 16-term former congressman described colleagues’ reactions as “surprisingly wonderful,” he conceded some of the most staunch gay rights advocates in Congress actually discouraged him from living out in the open.
“They were afraid that if I came out, my influence would be diminished in every area but in gay rights. And I couldn’t say that wasn’t true. I told them I hoped it wouldn’t be true.”
In 2012, Frank married Ready, his longtime partner, in a ceremony officiated by then Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, becoming the first sitting member of Congress to enter into a same-sex marriage.
His tenure in office was not without controversy.
In 1985, while still closeted, Frank formed a relationship with male prostitute Steve Gobie, for whom he provided housing and jobs as an aide, housekeeper and driver. The relationship soured in 1987 after Frank learned Gobie was still engaging in sex work.
After the Washington Times reported on their entanglement in 1989, a House Ethics Committee investigation found Frank used his influence to clear 33 parking tickets racked up by Gobie, and wrote a misleading memo attempting to shorten his lover’s probationary period for sex and drug offenses.
The House reprimaded Frank by a 408-18 vote in 1990.
He told Time that “in an odd way that helped me explain to people why I’d come out,” citing the Gobie affair as an example of his inability to have “good, healthy relationships” while in the closet.
Frank was known for his sharp wit, debating skill and wry sense of humor, once quipping in a 1996 interview, “I’m a left-handed gay Jew. I’ve never felt, automatically, a member of any majority.”
President Trump was no fan of Frank’s, and once ridiculed him on X over his appearance while delivering an address from the House floor in 2011 clad in a blue crew-neck shirt with a jacket draped over his shoulders.
“Barney Frank looked disgusting — nipples protruding — in his blue shirt before Congress. Very very disrespectful,” Trump wrote in a post that resurfaced in 2019 when his daughter, Ivanka, experienced a similar “wardrobe malfunction” while addressing the UN in a similarly colored top
Weeks before his death, Frank expressed an acceptance of his fate in an interview with Politico, saying: “At 86, I’ve made it longer than I thought. At some point, my heart’s just going to give out, and it’s reaching that stage. So I’m taking it easy at home and dealing with it by relaxing.”
His book, “The Hard Path to Unity: Why We Must Reform the Left to Rescue Democracy,” set to be released Sept. 15, offered an at-times scathing indictment of the progressive left, whom Frank argued erred in turning away from economic issues and shifting their focus to unpopular positions on crime, immigration and sexual identity.
“We succeeded in bringing the mainstream of the left into a concern with inequality. But we also enabled people who wanted to use that as a platform for a wide range of social and cultural changes, some of which the public isn’t ready for,” he said, specifically calling out “male-to-female transsexuals playing sports designated for women” in an April interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.
Frank is survived by Ready and three siblings, brother David and sisters Doris Breay and Ann Lewis.