Barney Frank, Gay Pioneer and Liberal Stalwart in Congress, Dies at 86

Politics|Barney Frank, Gay Pioneer and Liberal Stalwart in Congress, Dies at 86

Barney Frank, the brassy, lightning-quick former Massachusetts representative who for decades was the most prominent gay politician in the country and who was an author of the most significant overhaul of the nation’s financial regulations since the Great Depression, died on Tuesday at his home in Ogunquit, Maine. He was 86.

His friend James Segel confirmed the death. Mr. Frank said last month that he had entered hospice care with congestive heart failure.

Mr. Frank, a liberal Democrat who represented a diverse suburban Boston district for 32 years, starting in 1981, was the first gay member of the House to come out voluntarily; others had been outed in scandals. His public declaration of his sexual orientation in 1987 — spurred by a fear of being outed, by the death of a closeted colleague and by his own determination to show that homosexuality was nothing to be ashamed of — helped normalize being openly gay in public life.

“Prejudice is based on ignorance,” Mr. Frank told The Boston Globe in 2011, as he prepared to retire. “And the best way to counterbalance it is with a living example, with reality.”

A Harvard-trained lawyer, Mr. Frank bristled with intellectual firepower, acidic turns of phrase and a zest for verbal combat.

His shivs were often cloaked in wit. Referring to the Moral Majority, the conservative Christian organization that opposed abortion but also opposed child nutrition programs and day care, Mr. Frank said in 1981: “From their perspective, life begins at conception and ends at birth.” Of the flawed intelligence behind the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq that led to nearly a decade of combat, he said the problem “is not so much the intelligence as the stupidity.”