🏳️🌈TODAY’S PRIDE HERO🏳️🌈
Barney Frank (born 1940)
I won’t claim to be an expert on @BarneyFrank. And I know some of his decisions haven’t always been liked by some in the LGBT community. But Frank, who served in Congress for more than 3 decades, is a personal hero.
Frank publicly came out as gay in 1987, the first member of Congress to do so voluntarily. I was a HS senior then, a closeted, messed up teen living in Kansas. And here on the news, a powerful Massachusetts Congressman was telling the world he was gay...
No one was out then. Well, besides Boy George. I thought gay men acted like Jack Tripper on Three’s Company. I honestly didn’t know a gay man could be a smart, funny, powerful & out politician. For all Frank’s accomplishments, his legacy, to me, is how he normalized being gay...
Frank wasn’t only out... he used his position, his influence, his privilege to advance LGBT equality, whether it was to increase AIDS spending, or to fight the military ban. He also was a huge champion for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA)...
It never passed, of course, but Frank kept introducing ENDA again & again, gaining more support each time. Some versions of the bill Frank supported didn’t protect transgender people, but he saw equality as sometimes incremental. Others saw the trans exclusion as morally wrong...
When I think how champions like Obama and Clinton have only recently “evolved” on LGBT equality, I understand Frank’s hope to get an imperfect bill passed & build from there. Others disagree. (If you think I’m giving Frank a pass on trans exclusion, share your comments.)...
If I had the chance, I’d thank Frank for his lifetime of service, his dedication to civil rights, his courage to come out in the Reagan era. He broke the LGBT ceiling. A ceiling that needs to be shattered.
Each day in June #LGBTVoices will share their Pride heroes.
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