Barney Frank is a Politico columnist and a former Democratic representative from Massachusetts.

In 1986, I was as ready to leave the closet as I would ever be—but how would I do so? Though I was a third term Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, I had lived too long with the burden of “the gay thing” to treat coming out as a political matter alone. For many years, I was ashamed of myself for hiding my membership in a universally despised group. I’d been afraid of exposure, and angry at myself for my self-denial. I’d felt shame as I watched younger gay men and lesbians confront the bigots openly with a courage that I lacked. After all those years, lying to people was much easier emotionally than finally admitting my lie.

The circumstances of my disclosure were complicated by another factor: I talk too much. Specifically, I shared my decision with more friends and allies than was prudent, and word was starting to get around. This led to an unusual interaction with several members of the media. They remained committed to the “rule” that prominent people should not be outed unless they had been enmeshed in a gay-related scandal, but they were understandably eager to break the story. So various journalists asked me from time to time if they could do so. I consistently said no—I didn’t deny I was gay but invoked their own nondisclosure principle.


This arrangement was tested in mid-1986 when a book was published that implicitly, but unmistakably, told the truth about me. The author was Robert Bauman, who’d been a stridently right-wing Republican member of the House in the 1970s. His primary concern was outlawing abortion, but he had followed the conservative movement’s anti-gay line as well. In 1980, before I arrived in the House, he was charged with soliciting sex from an underage male prostitute. His denial of his homosexuality was universally—and accurately—disbelieved, and he was defeated for reelection that year.

In his memoir describing his own gay life, he cited my attendance at a gay pride rally in the company of a friend whom he inaccurately assumed was a romantic attachment. No one reading it could miss the clear import: I was a gay man who enjoyed a media silence that he had been denied.

I was scared. I was ready to come out, but not at his hands, not in that way, and not at that time. This led to two important conversations in the early summer of 1986. The first was with Speaker Tip O’Neill, my fellow Democratic congressman from Massachusetts. As a great admirer of his leadership, I felt obligated to let him know that following the 1983 revelation of Rep. Gerry Studds’ relationship with a male House page, for which Studds was censured by the House, there might be another sex-related controversy in our party that he’d have to handle.

I approached him on the floor of the House, as we were watching a majority vote doom our effort to curtail President Ronald Reagan’s aid to the Nicaraguan contras. I knew this was an inauspicious moment, but I couldn’t stand the suspense of not knowing what his reaction would be. “Tip,” I said, “Bob Bauman has just written a book that says I’m gay.”

“Aw, Barney,” he consoled me, “don’t pay any attention. People are always spreading shit about us.”

“But, Tip,” I said, “the problem is that it’s true.”

He looked stricken, though he immediately made clear it was not my sexuality that troubled him but the negative impact its disclosure would have on my career. “I’m sorry to hear it,” he said. “I thought you might become the first Jewish speaker.”

As upset as I was at the prospect of a premature outing, the fact that a man I respected so much had said such a flattering thing made me feel better.

Meanwhile, O’Neill set about warning his press secretary, Chris Matthews. “Chris,” he said, “we might have an issue to deal with. I think Barney Frank is going to come out of the room.”

With his unerring ability to translate O’Neill’s malapropisms, Matthews quickly made the necessary metaphoric adjustment.

When news of Bauman’s book broke, the Boston Globe’s Bob Healy called and asked if he could come to D.C. to talk with me. As the man in charge of political coverage at the Globe, he faced a dilemma. He did not want to break the no-outing rule, especially as it applied to a politician in good standing with the Globe. But he could not allow his newspaper—by far the dominant source of news in New England—to be scooped on a national story in its own backyard. Healy hoped I would give the Globe the story, but Bauman’s book was not getting much attention, and I told him I was still not ready. When I was, I assured him I would give the Globe an exclusive—that is, I would let them publish the news first. And I promised that if any other media outlet got hold of the matter, I would call him right away.

House Speaker Tip O'Neill and Frank at a 1982 fundraiser for Frank's reelection campaign. | AP Photo

Throughout 1986 and 1987, I continued to speak with friends and colleagues about my impending declaration. The reaction in the LGBT community was unrestrained happiness. This itself was a sign of improvement. When I had asked gay rights activist Steve Endean to take me to a gay bar in 1980, during Congress’s lame-duck session, he was chastised by a senior gay political leader for threatening my cover, thereby endangering an important LGBT political asset. By 1986, the movement’s leaders unanimously believed my coming out would do little, if any, harm to me and a great deal of good for the cause.

Many of my straight political allies and supporters, by contrast, tried to talk me out of it. They said I was a valuable ally on a wide range of other issues—helping the poor, fighting racism, reducing military spending. Their fear was that my influence would diminish. Not surprisingly, perhaps, they signally failed to understand the anguish of life in the closet. “Of course we have no problem with your sexuality,” many said, “but why can’t you keep on the way you’ve been—leading your private life as you want to but without the political baggage of coming out?”

By the spring of 1987, I was ready, but still apprehensive. What followed was a peculiar pas de deux with the Globe. As I had promised, I called the editors and told them that the time had come to go public. They happily replied that they would be glad to receive my statement and interview me about it. I then explained that I did not intend to announce anything, but that I would answer honestly if a reporter asked if I was gay.

I’d thought more carefully about this process than about any other decision I’d ever made. It seemed to me the best way to contain any political damage was to minimize the entire subject. I would do everything I could to downplay the significance of the revelation, and subsequently to insist that my sexuality was “no big deal.” Executing this strategy obviously precluded my initiating the discussion. If being gay was no big deal, people would reasonably ask why I announced it. Politicians are not in the habit of issuing public statements about subjects that they prefer to be ignored.

This was a problem for the Globe. Asking if I were gay—even with my permission—would break the no-outing rule and require them to explain why I was a one-time exception. But failing to ask would risk losing a big scoop. And so they asked.

The reporter they sent was Kay Longcope. She was a lesbian and I believe the only out reporter on the paper at the time. I had met her back in the 1970s when she’d been the partner of my fellow state rep Elaine Noble. Neither of us being big on ceremony, she came into my D.C. office, turned on her tape recorder, and asked me, “Are you gay?”

I gave the most carefully considered answer I could: “Yeah. So what?”

There was an immediate glitch. I had agreed to answer the question on a Friday for a story that would appear the following Monday. But the Globe’s beat reporter who covered the House, John Robinson, was infuriated that his paper had sent Longcope to do the interview. He insisted—successfully—that he should break the news under his byline on Saturday. Robinson had two reasons for being so proprietary: It was his journalistic territory, and he was himself a closeted gay man whom I had met at social functions in D.C. (Inappropriately, the Globe later assigned him to the “society” beat, where he often commented from his closet in a snarky way about other gay people.)

That Saturday was a day to remember. It was Memorial Day weekend, and there were two parades taking place in the most politically conservative part of my district—the adjacent communities of North Attleborough and Attleboro. ( Sic. I am not responsible for the peculiarities of Massachusetts’s official orthography.) I could not think of a worse way to spend my first day out of the closet than parading myself for hours through that particular area. It started badly when an older, conservative Democrat confronted me, complaining that I had lied to him when he’d asked if I was gay during my campaign. I did not remember the exchange, but given my state of mind that year, he was probably right. Fortunately, I soon received reassurance from an unexpected source: David Locke, the conservative Republican state senator from that district, approached me with a smile and asked me to march alongside him.

With Locke at my side, I began my normal parade routine, which I had learned from John Parker, the area’s previous representative. Noting my awkwardness reacting to crowds, Parker gave me great advice: “Just do what I do: Take three steps and wave to the right, then take three steps and wave to the left.” (I found this very helpful, even when it occasionally meant waving to trees and telephone poles along lightly attended parts of the route. Better to be nice to inanimate objects than to ignore live ones.)

Things went from good to better as the weekend progressed. That Saturday evening I had been invited to a Cirque du Soleil performance in Boston. The response when my presence was announced is best described in the language of the annotated transcripts that used to chronicle meetings of the old Soviet parliament: “prolonged stormy applause; all rose.” It was the only time in my experience that an entertainment-oriented crowd gave a politician a greater ovation than a genuine star. For the first time, I realized that coming out could have political advantages as well as liabilities.

That impression was strongly reinforced Sunday morning, when I joined tens of thousands of people at a rally on Boston Common marking the start of the AIDS Walk. One of the first speakers was Ray Flynn, then Boston’s Democratic mayor. He had come to political prominence as an antibusing leader, and was and still is one of the state’s leading opponents of legalized abortion, although unlike most of his allies in this fight, he was always strongly supportive of well-funded social and health services for children born to poor mothers. In a bit of well-delivered pretense, he claimed that when he’d heard a TV announcer say just before a break, “We will return with big news about Congressman Barney Frank,” he’d wondered which of my important achievements as a legislator would be described. He added that I was a great congressman who did so much to help people, and that this was still the most important thing to say about me.

When I was introduced, the outpouring of emotional support from the large crowd was tangible. I tried for a minute or so to respond without crying—unsuccessfully.

Frank faces the press in September 1989, one month into the sex scandal that nearly ended his career. | AP Photo

There was one slight discordant note. Michael Dukakis, in his third term as Massachusetts governor, greeted me warmly, but he made no reference in public or private to the news of the weekend. This was a reflection of his personality rather than of any opposition to our fight for legal equality. (He would later become a full supporter of legal equality.) One of his aides later told me that Dukakis’s silence at the rally was entirely intentional. When he’d been reminded that I had just come out, and that he should praise me for it, he’d said this was not the kind of thing he did and that I would understand. I did, to some extent, but I also wish he’d spoken up. With some embarrassment, I confess that his reticence led me to what I now acknowledge was an unbecomingly petty retaliation. When he called me in November 1988, a few days after he lost the presidential election to George H. W. Bush, I consciously omitted any reference to that event.

For the next few days in Massachusetts, and then when I returned to Washington, the responses continued to be overwhelmingly supportive. Two conversations in particular had a powerful emotional impact. Alan Simpson of Wyoming, the Republican senator who supported my efforts to remove the anti-gay immigration rule, called to apologize. “For what?” I asked him. “Well,” he said, “knowing myself and my telling outrageous jokes about everything, I figured I might have made one in your presence, and I respect you way too much to want you to think that’s how I feel.” He added that he admired my courage. I was deeply moved.

A day or two later, as I entered Roland’s, the fabled Capitol Hill late-night convenience store, Warren Rudman, the Republican senator from New Hampshire, was just leaving. Deliberately waiting at the door until I was in the back of the store, and then speaking loudly so that everyone could hear him, Rudman said, “Barney, my friend, I’m proud of you.”

On the House floor, my Democratic colleagues literally embraced me. In so doing, they conveyed their willingness to protect me from any harm—political or other—that might threaten.

Media response was also largely favorable. The right-wing Washington Times, owned by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, enthusiastically added gay bashing to its regular denunciations of me—in which I took considerable pride—but they were a minor exception.

Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times published a piece on Wednesday, June 3, that gave me the chance to explain my decision, and contained generally favorable reactions from others. But there was a small fly in the very soothing ointment. The headline across the top of the page read “Public Man, Private Life: Why a Congressman Told of His Homosexuality.” And the article described my “homosexual acquaintances” and my support for “homosexual rights.” By then, “gay” was the adjective in general use. “Homosexual” was not explicitly derogatory, but it was the preferred term among those who wanted to maintain some semantic distance from our cause. In the phrasing of certain aptitude tests, you might say that “homosexual” was to “gay” as “Negro” was to “black.” It wasn’t exactly an insult, but it was a message to the minority in question that the majority would decide what to call us, rather than let us pick a name we liked.

In this case, the message was sent by the man who ran the paper, A. M. Rosenthal. (Incidentally, because the Times was sensitive about its Jewish appearance, reporters with identifiably Jewish first names for a long time used their initials—A. M. (Abe) Rosenthal, A. H. (Abe) Raskin, M. A. (Myron) Farber.) Rosenthal was famously uneasy at best about LGBT rights and insisted on using “homosexual” instead of “gay.” Coincidentally, Greenhouse’s story appeared a week before Rosenthal’s last day as editor, so I believe I am the last man in history to be described as “homosexual” in the New York Times as a matter of editorial policy.

As for my prospects for reelection in 1988, my advisers and I did some polling and decided that I would lose only a few points if I ran as an openly gay candidate. (We were right: I had won 74 percent of the vote in the presidential election year of 1984, and that fell to 70 percent in 1988.)

There was one more consequence of coming out. In the flood of mail I received—most of it welcoming and some very touching—I found a note from someone I did not know, Herb Moses. He told me he was an openly gay Jewish man who, given these traits, had the unlikely job of editing an economics journal for the Department of Agriculture. He suggested that we meet. I agreed, and we began a relationship in June that lasted 11 years. Now I was not just the first voluntarily out member of Congress; Herb and I were also the first openly gay congressional couple.

Of course, this meant the end to my short-lived “minimization” strategy. I was now accepted as a gay politician doing my public job. But would I also be accepted as a flesh-and-blood gay man involved in a physical relationship with another guy? Herb was a Washington veteran and he knew dating me would involve some inconvenience, but I could hardly expect him to accept being described as “no big deal” in my life.

My rule was simple: Wherever congressional spouses were invited, so was Herb. I did not have to argue the matter with my colleagues in the House. Herb was authorized to wear the same pin that was given to other spouses as a form of identification inside the Capitol.

We did exercise some prudence. At the first White House Christmas Ball we attended in 1987, we wanted to join the other couples who were dancing, but we were too timid. So I asked my two San Francisco colleagues, Reps. Barbara Boxer and Nancy Pelosi, to start us off. Nancy and Herb and Barbara and I gyrated for a couple of minutes, and then they discreetly—and very graciously—walked away, leaving Herb and me to dance facing each other.

***

With my private life in good shape, and my reelection assured, I was able to put all my energies into legislating.

In 1986, the Democrats won solid majorities in both houses. Under the active leadership of Texas Rep. Jim Wright, who’d just succeeded O’Neill as speaker, and with the concurrence of the newly Democratic Senate, we adopted legislation advancing our goals in trade policy, welfare, civil rights and arms control. I began to hope that the nation’s shift to the right was closely linked to Reagan’s political popularity and that the antigovernment tide had been significantly slowed, if not reversed.

But then came the 1988 presidential election. The competent, uncharismatic George Bush defeated Michael Dukakis, and he did so by demonizing liberals and making his famous pledge, “Read my lips, no new taxes.” (The phrase has always bothered me because it is illogical—you tell people to read your lips when they cannot hear you, and this does not apply when you are speaking to them through a microphone.) The pledge’s effectiveness demonstrated that public aversion to expanding government was alive and well.

When Congress reconvened in 1989, Democrats retained majorities in both Houses, but Bush’s decisive victory over “the liberal” significantly strengthened the hand of those who argued for a move toward the center in intraparty debates. That same year, Speaker Jim Wright felt compelled to resign when he faced the threat of an Ethics Committee rebuke over subsidized sales of a small book he had put together. It was an early triumph for Newt Gingrich’s campaign to substitute all-out partisan warfare for any notion of bipartisan cooperation.

President Clinton talks with Frank after speaking to Congressional democrats in October 2000. | Getty

Tom Foley of Washington was the House majority leader and thus in line to succeed Wright as speaker. As the likelihood of Wright’s resignation became clear, rumors spread that Foley was gay. Disgracefully, some of these rumors came from senior Democrats who supported Foley’s rivals for the job. When I confronted two of them, Pennsylvania Rep. John Murtha and Illinois Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, they vehemently denied it. I had no proof of their role, but none was necessary. In a pattern I’d first encountered with Boston police supervisors, the denial of guilt was followed by an end to the offending practice.

Foley dealt indirectly with the matter by very conspicuously noting the presence of his wife in the gallery when he was sworn in as speaker. Even so, the story did not die. It was taken seriously enough that one very respected journalist was tasked to verify a physical characteristic of Foley’s penis that had supposedly been reported to the police by a male sex partner. She indignantly refused, on both ethical and practical grounds.

Neither Foley’s anatomy nor any other evidence provided substantiation of the rumor, but that did not deter the Republican National Committee from a demagogic effort to exploit it. The RNC put out a leaflet titled “Tom Foley: Out of the Liberal Closet,” documenting the similarity between his voting record and that of someone they claimed was a randomly chosen liberal—me. It was a tactic typical of Lee Atwater, the master of political viciousness, who then chaired the committee.

I realized that calling a formal press conference in response to Atwater’s attack on Foley would be dignifying it more than it deserved. Instead, I simply said my piece to the assembled reporters in the Speaker’s Lobby, addressing a few at first but gaining, as I knew I would, a larger audience as I spoke. My message was, in a word that is perhaps ironic in this context, straightforward. Obviously, I said, I did not consider being gay a defect in any way, shape, or form, but precisely for that reason I was very angry that the Republicans were treating it as if it were. Although I had no reason to believe that Foley was gay, I continued, I knew that there were closeted Republicans in the House. If the official voice of the national Republican Party continued to use the imputation of homosexuality as a political weapon, I would identify those members of the party who chose to benefit from this tactic while concealing their own sexual orientation. I would out them if I had to. It was big news.

A few days later, when Herb and I returned home from a late dinner, the light on our message machine was blinking. Heather Foley had called and asked me to call back, no matter what time I got in. When I did, her husband told me that while attending an event that day, he’d been contacted by the White House switchboard and connected to Atwater, who had apologized for the leaflet. He’d unconvincingly denied any prior knowledge and promised it would be repudiated and never repeated. He then asked Foley if he knew how I was likely to respond to this information. Without Foley explicitly asking me, I immediately volunteered that I would consider the matter closed and would have nothing further to say about the sexuality of my colleagues.

I was happy and relieved. Rarely had—or have—I taken a gamble that ended better. I had successfully articulated what became known as “the Frank rule” in discussions of sexual privacy: The right to privacy does not include the right to hypocrisy. But to this day I do not know what I would have done if the matter had escalated. I don’t know whether or not I would have carried out my threat.

Atwater’s final act was an effort to appease the gods of political combat with a sacrifice—a hapless RNC employee, Mark Goodin, was fired for having allegedly acted on his own. The higher-ups’ denial of responsibility was widely disbelieved.

My satisfaction with my handiwork was enhanced when Wes Pruden, editor of the Washington Times, mocked the Republicans for backing down, especially, as he said with his usual finesse, to “a Democrat in lavender drawers.” Unfortunately, my satisfaction soon turned to unbearable shame. In August 1989, Pruden got his revenge by exposing my two-year relationship with a male prostitute, Steven Gobie.

***

One of my primary reasons for leaving the closet was my recognition that I’d been responding irresponsibly to its frustrations. My liaison with Gobie was Exhibit A. It began with pay for sex and evolved in my mind—but not his—into an ongoing nonsexual relationship. I knew this was inappropriate, but I lacked the emotional strength to bring the relationship to an end. It was only after I left the closet that I came at least partially to my senses and broke off relations with him. He reacted angrily and eventually took the story to The Washington Times.

The revelation of Gobie’s role in my life devastated me. I was deeply ashamed and overcome by feelings of guilt. I deplored the damage I had done to the cause of LGBT equality; to Herb, who had known none of it when we began our relationship in 1987; to my family; and to my staff, as I knew that when a political figure messes up badly, those who work for him are automatically assigned much of the blame.

Given these objectives, I knew I had to tell not just the truth, but the whole truth, and do so immediately. After all, there was no way I could deny Gobie’s most demeaning—and wholly false—accusations without acknowledging those parts of his story that were true.

After an intensive, lengthy investigation, in which Gobie and I both testified under oath, the panel found two specific grounds for rebuking me. One, I had used my congressional privileges to cancel parking tickets that I thought Gobie had received while using my car to do errands for me, though in fact he’d been using it for his personal purposes. Two, in a memo I had written years before to an attorney discussing Gobie’s probation status, I had lied about how I had met him.

When the committee proposed “reprimand”—the least serious punishment available, the House supported it, despite a vigorous effort by Newt Gingrich, newly installed as Republican whip from Georgia, to toughen the penalty. In the end, I benefited from a widespread view in both parties that Gingrich’s effort to politicize the process was inappropriate.

I even managed to win reelection in 1989 with 66 percent of the vote—my smallest total between 1982 and my tough reelection fight in 2010—and was able to return to the House with my political standing nearly intact. That standing was enhanced when Leon Panetta, the Democratic congressman from California, invited me to join the House Budget Committee that he chaired. Membership on that committee is a mark of leadership confidence, and I accepted gratefully.

On Panetta’s committee, I was able to work hard on a cause that remained of the utmost importance: maximizing spending on AIDS. It also allowed me to launch a surprise attack on what would become a critical target—the military’s gay ban.

***

It had long been the military’s policy to exclude gays and lesbians from service. In 1989, my friend and sole openly gay colleague, Gerry Studds, received a leaked internal Defense Department report that was critical of the ban, and he released it. I stayed out of the public discussion at first, fearing that my foolish behavior would make me a liability. But after my comfortable reelection and appointment to the Budget Committee, I felt sufficiently rehabilitated to join in.

My opportunity came when Dick Cheney, then President George H.W. Bush’s defense secretary, appeared before the Budget Committee in 1991. As a very junior member of the committee, I would be one of the last to speak. By the time I could ask Cheney a question, all of the most pertinent defense-spending matters would have been covered. So I decided to ask him about the military ban.

At that time, the Eisenhower executive order decreeing LGBT people too untrustworthy for a security clearance was still in effect, and its animus obviously lent support to our exclusion from the armed services. I knew that Cheney would have great difficulty invoking that order to defend the military’s policy. He had appointed as assistant secretary of defense for public affairs—the Pentagon’s chief press officer—his former congressional aide and fellow Wyoming resident, Pete Williams.

Williams was ideal for the job. He was good at it, and he had Cheney’s complete confidence. But there was one problem—he was gay. Williams has since come out and is a respected NBC correspondent, but he was then a closeted gay man who in the course of his job was privy to the most sensitive national security information.

I knew that he was gay. Cheney knew that I knew. And in a phrase that I am glad I am writing, because only Danny Kaye could have spoken it, I knew that Cheney knew that I knew. This gave me the chance to ask one of the two most effective questions I ever asked in forty years of trying to trap witnesses. (For the second, read about Clinton’s impeachment.) “Is it the contention of the Defense Department that because somebody is a homosexual, he or she is inherently a security risk?”

Cheney responded by saying, “I think there have been times in the past when [the policy] has been generated on the notion that somehow there was a security risk involved, although I must say I think that is a bit of an old chestnut.” Of course, if Cheney had said yes, he would have had to explain why he had put a putative security risk in such a sensitive position. Such a glaring violation of government policy would have stripped Williams of the cover of the press’s no-outing rule.

In fairness to Cheney—a phrase I have rarely felt motivated to use—the fact that he had put Williams in that job reflected his own lack of anti-LGBT prejudice. This became clear in his very significant answer. He could have simply responded that the military ban was based on other considerations. But he did not. I was more than satisfied with the exchange. In five words, Cheney had weakened one of the government’s two most damaging homophobic policies, and explicitly repudiated the other.

Our momentum was slowed a few days later when Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified. I had taken Cheney by surprise with my question, but Powell was prepared. I asked him if we were unfit for military service in some other way. No, he said, it had nothing to do with our ability or character.

He then went on to make the argument that would prop up bigotry for the next 20 years: Allowing us to join the military openly would seriously undermine morale. Our presence in living quarters or on training grounds or even on battlefields would be so disruptively abhorrent to the heterosexual majority that their prejudices had to take precedence over any claim we could make for fairness..

At first, I was actually encouraged by Powell’s words. There was nothing intrinsic to gay people that rendered us unfit for service.

But even though it seemed to me that the two highest Defense Department officials had just rebutted the only even arguably rational point against us, my work ending the gay ban was just beginning.

***

In 1991, I met Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, who was seeking support for the presidency. I urged Clinton to join us on the military ban issue, telling him, in one of my greatest political miscalculations, that I thought the country was ready for a presidential order lifting the policy. Lulled perhaps by my confidence, and eager to win my support and that of other LGBT voters, Clinton said he agreed with me on both the merits of the issue and the politics.

Clinton’s support for lifting the ban was only one reason that I endorsed him for the nomination and campaigned actively on his behalf. At the time, many on the left believed that he was “too moderate.” But I had decided by then that I needed to be more pragmatic in my approach to intraparty contests. After I’d made the egregious error of opposing Dukakis in 1978, and after I’d urged Ted Kennedy to run against Jimmy Carter in the mistaken belief that my unhappiness with Carter’s moderate stance was widely shared among Democrats and the wider electorate, I consciously adopted the strategic approach I would follow for the rest of my career: to always support the most electable liberal candidates, with an edge in close cases going to electability.

My assignment in the Clinton campaign was to persuade other liberals to support him. In the course of this, I spent a good deal of time making the case to the LGBT community. Consequently, after he won, I was doubly motivated to press the president to take action. I wanted to show my community that I hadn’t misled them and I wanted our cause to advance. The two items highest on our list were appointing openly gay and lesbian officials and allowing us to serve in the armed forces.

Many of us worked on the first item, submitting names to the transition team. Clinton delivered, hiring gay staff members, and the first openly gay or lesbian presidential appointee, Roberta Achtenberg, who became assistant secretary of HUD. (An openly gay man, Frank Lilly, had been appointed during the Reagan administration to a part-time, non-Senate-confirmable, purely advisory commission.) She was confirmed over the unsurprisingly vile opposition of North Carolina Republican Sen. Jesse Helms, whose reason for voting no was that “she’s a damned lesbian.”

But it soon became clear that repealing the military ban would encounter serious opposition. The first major setback came again from Colin Powell. No one was in a better position to thwart us. He was not only the highly respected chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he was also the most influential and prestigious African-American ever to serve in the executive branch.

That, combined with the vehement opposition of Republican Senate leader Bob Dole and Sen. Sam Nunn, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, made the measure politically impossible. In the end, we lost.

At President Clinton’s urging, the military did then grudgingly agree to the face-saving proposal that came to be known as Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Under the new proposal, LGBT service members would face dismissal if they were discovered in any activity that exposed their sexual orientation or gender identity, even if it had no connection to their military duties. Any expression of their true selves, anytime, anywhere, anyplace, could have harsh consequences.

To my disappointment, Clinton put the policy forward as if it were an advance. The harm was not only rhetorical. The fact that the president, who’d been our champion, was calling this discriminatory measure a good thing would make our efforts to get rid of it harder. And so we needed to counteract the impression his words created. Working in close agreement with LGBT leaders, I pushed for votes in both the House and Senate that would at least allow sympathetic members to register that the fight was not over. My Massachusetts colleague Rep. Marty Meehan introduced our amendment in the House, and Barbara Boxer, by then a California senator, did so in the Senate. We lost in both houses, but at least we received Democratic majorities. This allowed us to keep alive the argument that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was being adopted in opposition to our desires and legitimate needs.

Though it made no sense to say so at the time, DADT was not entirely meretricious on paper. Had it been properly applied, it could have been of some benefit to some service members. As the policy was articulated, service members who took great pains to conceal their sexual orientation should have been protected. But to their great discredit, many commanders interpreted our political defeat as a mandate to root out gay, lesbian and bisexual members. Some were expelled after others read their private mail or looked into their computers. Others were victimized by former lovers who decided to inform on them. In none of these cases could it be said they had “told” their status. Sadly, Clinton allowed these witch hunts, as they were accurately called, to go forward unhindered.

Even so, despite Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’s deleterious impact, I did not regard Clinton as an enemy who held out false promise but as a friend who had tried to help us and failed.

I knew that Clinton was genuinely opposed to anti-LGBT bias and wanted very much to diminish its impact. The magnitude of our defeat on the military ban—which I believe he understood, despite his claim that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was a partial victory—greatly increased his incentive in this regard.

On August 2, 1995, Clinton issued an executive order revoking the ban on security clearances. It was a historic moment.

Clinton also delivered what I requested on two other important matters. At his urging, Attorney General Janet Reno promulgated a rule adding people who’d been persecuted for their sexual orientation or gender identity to the list of those eligible for refugee status. And lastly, Clinton and his director of the Office of Personnel Management sent a letter to every federal agency emphasizing that under existing law, hiring was to be on the basis of merit, and that this excluded any discrimination based on other factors, including sexual orientation and gender identity.

To my enduring frustration, Clinton has received little credit for these steps. For me, at least, he honored the principle of compensation impressively.

***

There is a postscript to the fight over Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell that I promised Clinton I’d keep secret. But I now feel free to reveal it because Clinton himself brought it up in a conversation with Taylor Branch that would be published with Clinton’s consent in Branch’s book The Clinton Tapes. Branch, whose work on Martin Luther King Jr. is brilliant journalism that I wish every activist would read, is a strong admirer of Sam Nunn and apparently asked Clinton why he had not appointed Nunn to a major national security post in his second term. Nunn had in fact hoped to become secretary of state. Clinton replied that it was my fault, referring to a memo I had sent him.

I am delighted to plead guilty as charged. After the 1996 election, one of Clinton’s top aides called to warn me that the president was on the verge of making Nunn secretary of state. I started to complain, and the response I got was, “Don’t complain to me. I agree with you, but I haven’t been able to stop it and that’s why I am calling you.”

I immediately composed a memo to Clinton in which I said that Nunn had a consistent record of homophobia. He had fired two men from his staff because they were “security risks” back at a time when the anti-gay order was still in effect. He had vigorously led the fight against allowing us to serve in the military, and in 1996 when Ted Kennedy cleverly forced a vote on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act in the Senate, Nunn was one of only five Democrats to vote against us.

Open In New Window The article was excerpted from Frank, by Barney Frank, published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2015 by Barney Frank.

In other words, I wrote to Clinton, Nunn has been one of the most effective and dedicated opponents of fair treatment for LGBT people. I have defended you, I went on, against those who have unfairly, in my judgment, accused you of selling us out on the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell issue. But if you appoint this man, who has done so much to harm us, to the most prestigious position you have to give, you will do more to validate those criticisms than I could do to rebut them. I passionately told Clinton that he should not do this to those of us who had been his strongest supporters.

I must acknowledge that I got some personal satisfaction from apparently frustrating Nunn’s aspiration to be secretary of state. But I also thought that something crucial was at stake: Being a leading opponent of fair treatment for LGBT people should be considered a disqualification for high honor within the Democratic Party. No comparable opponent of fair treatment for African-Americans, women or any other group would have been considered for such a post. I am proud that I helped establish the principle that we should receive equal consideration.