It's quite a long article but I really enjoyed reading it. :)
He’s not a small-talk kind of guy. There’s not even a hello or a handshake when I walk in. There is no acknowledgment of any kind. He’s at his desk, shuffling through papers, doesn’t even look up. I stand there a while, foolishly, then take a seat in front of his desk. Still nothing. He takes a call, hangs up. Doesn’t look up once to make eye contact. I wait.
Barney Frank has been plugging away in Congress for more than a quarter century now, fighting the good fight through “too many” Republican administrations. He was the first congressman to come out of the closet (voluntarily), in 1987, and two years later was publicly humiliated by a sex scandal (remember that live-in hustler?) that nearly ruined him. These days he’s chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and he’s dealing, every day, with an epidemic of foreclosures and simmering rage over executive compensation and regulation-averse senators. So his brusqueness is well earned. We meet with him just before the credit-card reform bill he sponsored became law—consumer protection is one of the many causes he’s fought for for years—to talk about his agenda, his relationship with Barack Obama, Arlen Specter’s defection, and his much (much) younger boyfriend. But first he needs to look up from his desk.
*****
Take your time.
[Takes another call.] Let me get back to you. I’ll call you back.[Hangs up. Takes another call, this time from his secretary.]Who is Mr. Mueller? Okay, yeah. I’m just too busy to get involved in that. [Hangs up. A few more seconds pass, some rearranging of paper, and then, finally, he looks up.] Okay, please go ahead.
So I guess you have a lot going on right now.
Yeah.
I was just asking one of your staffers what was on the agenda for you this week—
A very big week. We will be voting on a bill to reform the granting of subprime mortgages, where there’s been a major Democrat and Republican fight. Um, it’s really the single biggest cause of the financial crisis: mortgages going to people who shouldn’t have them. We’ve been trying to stop that.
Stop it or undo it?
Undoing it and stopping it are two separate things. The easier thing to do conceptually is to stop it from going forward and having it happen again. As to trying to diminish the number of foreclosures, there are programs to do that, but that’s tougher, because once people have made contracts, you can’t just change it. We are trying to get the bankruptcy law changed. That would be the biggest single thing. But the Senate has not yet gone along with that. Ironically, the Republicans, some of them, have said, “Oh, you Democrats, you made us give them to poor people, and that’s what caused the trouble.” The answer is no, we have been trying to put some rules in place to stop this, and we tried when we were the minority. Didn’t work. When we got into the majority in 2007, we passed a bill to stop it, but it got bogged in the Senate. It was a partisan thing. So now we’re trying again this year. And with a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate, we think we can get it done.
When you look at this mess, how do you see it ending?
I think…As a national economic crisis, I think by the end of this year it winds down. A lot of people are still gonna be hurt, people who’ve lost their homes and lost value. And how it ends is, housing prices go down; people begin to buy the houses which have now become so cheap—and the interest rates are so low—that it starts to go back up again that way.
But what about people who are selling too cheap and losing all their money?
Well, I said some people are gonna get hurt. I just said that. The number one thing that has to be done is to try to reduce the foreclosures. That’s the single biggest thing.
Did you read Paul Krugman today?
Not yet.
He was writing about how the pay on Wall Street is back up, the bonuses are back up. How is that happening?
Well, it’s about the free-enterprise system, and that’s the way America has always worked. In 2006, I tried to deal with that, and the Republicans said no. We passed a bill on it in 2007; it didn’t pass in the Senate. But that’s free enterprise. People are gonna make as much money as they can unless there’s a rule that says they can’t.
Except that—as Krugman pointed out today, which was interesting—it’s one thing when it’s free enterprise, but it’s quite another when—
No, you’re asking me to justify it. I’m not justifying it.
No, I’m not—
Please. I have to have one rule: If you want me to explain something, and if you’re gonna assume that when I explain it I support it, then I can’t explain it to you.
Oh no, I don’t at all.
Well, your question—
I’m just angry about it, I guess…
The rules are, you can pay as much as you want. Now we have put some restrictions on the compensation. We want to put some more on. Again, the House passed a bill that’s pending in the Senate to do this. Going forward, I want to pass legislation that will do two things. First of all, the shareholders get to vote on whether they like the pay package. It wouldn’t be binding, but I don’t think many companies would reject what the shareholders said if they thought it was too high. Secondly, we have to have rules—and this is the worst part of it: It’s not just that they make too much money, but the incentive structure is wrong. If you are one of these top people and you make a gamble with the company’s money and it pays off, you get extra money. But if you make a gamble with the company’s money and the company loses money, you don’t lose any money. Heads you win, tails you break even. Well, if I told you that if you took a risk and if it paid off, you would get money, but if it failed you wouldn’t lose anything, what would you do? Take another risk. So we’re gonna have to put rules in to stop that.
Do you feel optimistic about that, though?
Fifty-fifty.
What’s going to be the hardest fight?
I think getting…The hardest, most important thing is getting the authority in the federal government to say that nobody can take so much risk with so little capital to back it up that they become a threat to the whole system. So that no one can be in the position of Lehman Brothers or AIG, where they can’t meet their obligations and we have two bad choices: either we let them go bust and it has terrible consequences for everybody else, like Lehman Brothers, or we have to bail out their creditors.
How much does Bill Clinton deserve blame for—
Oh, very little. The bad loans, subprime loans, are the cause of this. [Pulls out a chart.] This is a chart as to what percentage of overall loans were subprime loans that went bad. Of the loans that went bad, what percentage were subprime loans? Look at that chart. Look when it starts to spike. [It starts to spike in 2003.] And here, this one too. [He pulls out another chart.]Loans in foreclosure by type. They’re all together, and then the subprimes—
Start to spike in 2003.
We gotta make our argument to the Republicans. Many of us wanted to build affordable rental housing for low-income people. They said, “Oh, rental housing is not good; it’s bad for people’s spirits. We want them to become homeowners.” So the Bush administration pushed hard to make people homeowners, and that was the result.
When you look back at decisions you made regarding banking and regulation, what would you do differently?
I would have pressed harder for regulation of hedge funds and other things. We tried. But the whole Senate was against us. And, uh, we did try hard on subprime. We got shut down. I guess regulating hedge funds, derivatives, I backed off too easy because of the opposition. I don’t think we would have succeeded, but we should have pushed harder.
You don’t think you could have succeeded?
No. Senate members overwhelmingly don’t regulate, as recently as two and a half years ago. I became the chairman of the committee in waiting in 2006, and overwhelmingly I was told by people, “Oh, you gotta deregulate, you gotta relax, you’re driving business overseas.” I wanted to regulate hedge funds. Make them register with the Securities and Exchange Commission. A lot of Democrats said, “Oh, don’t! Jeez, if you file that out and take a position, please don’t make me do that. You can’t win anyway.” So I dropped it. I should have pushed harder.
At the end of the day, how much treasury money do you think is going to be spent fixing, bailing out—
Not nearly as much as you may think. [pause] Much less than the 700 billion we put out. We’ll get most of that back.
That’s good news if that’s true.
Let’s put it this way: much, much, much, much less than the war in Iraq. See, it troubles me when people talk about all this deficit spending. The biggest single thing that added to the deficit was the war in Iraq, which I thought was a bad mistake as a war anyway. That cost us a trillion dollars.
What is your relationship with the president?
Oh, very good. Because I think he’s very smart and able, and I am in a position where we work closely. He’s got three major domestic objectives: health care, global warming, and financial regulation. And by my committee chairmanship, I’m in one of those. [Points to a picture on the wall of him, Obama, and another guy.]
Nice picture.
That’s my boyfriend on the end.
Oh, is that—his name is Jim?
Yeah.
He’s handsome.
Yeah.
A lot younger than you.
Thirty years.
Do you want to marry him?
I won’t talk about that in public.
Okay, fair enough. But I’m curious how you feel about where gay marriage is right now. Is it disappointing that you now have this young Democratic president, this young black Democratic president, who still won’t come out for—
Not really. Because he’s been so good on everything else. And, uh, I understand the political reality. I was not in favor of his coming out for same-sex marriage when he first got elected. But I would hope he would be by the time he runs for reelection.
You would hope he would be, but you weren’t in favor of him doing so in 2008?
I think it would have given the opposition help they didn’t need.
So do you think Obama doesn’t really feel that there shouldbe same-sex marriage? Or was it just a political—
I don’t know what’s in his heart of hearts. I do know that it was…The general view, which I shared, was that no one who wanted to get elected president could have been a supporter of same-sex marriage. On the other hand, things have moved very far since then, and I’m more optimistic about 2012 than I was about same-sex marriage.
When you look back, some of the things that have happened, like Larry Craig—what did you think when his arrest became public, given what he put you through? [Craig was one of the Republican house members who voted to censure Frank during his scandal in 1989, when a prostitute Frank had dated claimed he had run a sex-for-money business out of Frank’s house.]
Well, I’m just reminded of, uh, what a terrible thing it is to feel you have to hide your sexuality. I did myself for too many years.
Why did you decide to reveal it?
Because I was goin’ nuts not being out. Because I wasn’t able to have a satisfying personal life. In fact, I got involved with a hustler. Well, that was because I…When I came out, it was voluntary. I had no reason to think he was going to do anything, but I just couldn’t live a normal life. There is a view that gay and lesbian people have had historically—I hope they don’t still have it—that “I can’t be honest about my sexuality.” You realize, when we are honest about our sexuality, it’s called coming out; when straight people are honest about theirsexuality, it’s called talking. Because everybody talks about their sexuality all the time. But, um, there was this view that “Oh, well, I won’t have a great private life, but I’ll have a career that will make up for it.” In my experience, that just damagesyour career, because there are emotions and needs that you want to express in your private life, and if you can’t express them in your private life, they’ll poison your public life. So I did it just out of…I was aware it would be good politically for the gay and lesbian community. But the main reason was, I couldn’t live that way anymore. I was tired of not being able to meet guys or having to hide a relationship. I just wanted to end it.
Do you think you’d have survived your scandal today?
I don’t know. Dave Vitter seems to be surviving.
But has it gotten nastier out there?
It has. The media’s gotten more aggressive, and the partisanship has increased. One of the things that happened was Newt Gingrich came to town, and Newt explicitly and specifically said, Look, this is nonsense about we’re friends. We are enemies. He specifically said, It is a mistake to say that the Democrats are honorable people with whom we disagree. They are traitors. They are corrupt. They are immoral. And things clearly deteriorated, didn’t they?
Is there such a thing as bipartisanship? Can it work?
Oh, sure. It does a lot of times. You guys just don’t pay attention to it when it does. A lot of what we do is bipartisan. I think bipartisanship means you recognize the differences. You are together with the people with whom you agree, but you don’t let the legitimate differences poison your ability to work together when there are no differences. And by the way, look, it was the Bush administration—Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke—who came to the Democratic Congress last year and said, The economy is about to fall apart. We need you to help us.
Do you see any danger in one-party rule?
Nope. Not necessarily. And first of all, for the Republicans to claim that is totally hypocritical, since it didn’t bother them when it was them—No, I think there’s more danger in having nobody in charge and nobody to be held responsible. I don’t think the New Deal was a bad period in American history, and that was the Democrats in charge.
But when you put yourself back in 2002, when Republicans ruled the world, you didn’t think that was very healthy.
No, but it wasn’t healthy because I disagree with their policies. I never argued that there was something inherently wrong with people winning elections.
What’s your relationship like with Larry Summers?
Pretty good. I’ve known him for a long time.
Is it unfair that people call him arrogant?
No. It’s not unfair that people call me arrogant. We’re both arrogant.
Okay.
Look, arrogance is kind of a trait—I will say this about Larry and hope I’d say it about myself: There’s kind of a predisposition to be a little brusque with people. But I don’t think it has interfered with his ability to listen and be flexible. I don’t think it’s a dysfunctional trait.
When you look at him and Geithner, are they less beholden to Wall Street than the Bush guys were?
Oh, sure.
How?
Because they work for Obama. There’s no such thing as Summers and Geithner; there’s Obama. They are extensions of him. And he is much less—not beholden to Wall Street, philosophically in tune with them. George Bush was in tune with “Don’t regulate.” Barack Obama is not. It’s a big philosophical difference.
What’s Bush’s legacy going to be?
It’s a sad one. It’s a huge deficit and a devaluing of our ability to come together as a people and solve problems. And the financial crisis—this is their deregulation.
Where do you think the GOP is right now?
Floundering badly. I think what you have is, the dominant voice right now is a very conservative voice that doesn’t really have a significant following in the country as a whole. Dick Cheney is announcing that Rush Limbaugh is a much better Republican than Colin Powell. Well, that sounds like something the Democrats would want to say.
Let’s talk about Arlen Specter.
What about him?
I’m curious what you think about his decision.
Well, as a Democrat, I’m glad to have him. But as an elected official, I have to say I don’t think he did our profession any good. First of all, to announce that it was done purely so he could survive. Secondly, his performance since then has been very disappointing. In particular, what troubled me was when he was quoted as saying, “Well…” In terms of no Jewish Republicans, the answer should have been, Who cares? That’s not a relevant issue. But then, when he said, Oh, but I’m confident the courts in Minnesota will do justice to Norm Coleman, and then said, Oh, I forgot which side I’m on!—forget about forgetting which side he’s on. What that says is, his view of what the law should be depends on what party he’s in. This notion that your view of what’s an appropriate legal decision depends on your party is shocking for a guy who’s supposed to be this great lawyer.
What do you think it’s going to be like having him on your side?
Well, so far, look, it’ll mean he’ll vote with the Democrats more often. But there’s an erratic behavior pattern there that’s very troubling. I think at this point it’s entirely reasonable for some Democrats to think about challenging him.
How do you feel about what Nancy Pelosi knew, torture-wise, and when she knew it?
I sympathize with her for this reason: I’ve been in that position. You get briefed, you are told something in absolute confidence, and you can’t share it with anybody, and you’re not necessarily prepared to handle it. It’s really a way to shut you up. I was given that choice once. I was invited, when I was senior Democrat in the minority on the Financial Services Committee, to a briefing by two young guys from the Treasury Department. I got there—after divesting myself outside of my cell phone and my wallet and everything else—and they said, “We’re gonna show you something that’s gonna be in the newspaper in a couple weeks, and we want to tell you about it.” I said, “Why is it gonna be in the newspaper? Is this something you’re announcing?” “Oh no.” And it became clear to me, as we talked, it was something that had been leaked, and they were happy that it was being leaked, but they were gonna tell me about it beforehand. And I said, “Well, let me ask you this question. If I listen to you now and read what you want to show me, and it then appears in the newspapers, can I talk about it after it’s been in the newspaper?” They said no. I said good-bye. And so I think that’s what happened to Nancy. She was given information in a way that she literally couldn’t use, could not self-evaluate, because she was all by herself. In fact, she and I have talked about this, and some others. We have to change these rules about what you can do with briefing information.
There’s a new movie out called Outrage, about closeted politicians. Do you still adhere to Barney Frank’s Rule about outing?
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I wouldn’t do it myself, but I think people who are hypocrites…The way I put it is, there’s a right to privacy but not to hypocrisy. Sarah Brady—you know who she is?
Yeah, James Brady’s wife—
Suppose you found out that she owned an Uzi. Would you think that should be public?
Absolutely.
Same point. Or if a leading antiabortion person had a family member with an abortion. Or vice versa, or if a Democrat’s a tax evader. It’s hypocrisy.
Well, it sounds like the number one hypocrite in this movie is Charlie Crist.
I haven’t seen it, so I don’t know. I will say, without commenting on Crist, he has been much less antigay guy than a lot of others. So if it’s…You know, I differentiate between secrecy and hypocrisy. I think it becomes a problem when you’re a hypocrite and you’re a gay-basher.
When is it inappropriate to out someone?
If they’re not being antigay themselves. I think people have a right to privacy. But I don’t think you have a right to engage in an activity yourself and then try to make other people’s lives miserable for engaging in it. There’s no philosophical justification for that.
But you’ve seen hypocrisy among Democratic candidates that are closeted.
Not hypocrisy.
Closeted ones? There’s a few.
Hypocrisy means that they’re antigay. You’re confusing secrecy and hypocrisy. Sure there are closeted Democrats. There are closeted Republicans. What we’re outing is hypocrisy. I want to go after their hypocrisy, not their privacy.
But aren’t closeted Democrats in a sense being hypocritical to what the party stands for?
No. Look, the party doesn’t stand for everybody announcing his or her personal sexual orientation. The party stands for public policies that say you don’t discriminate.
But in an ideal world, it would be nice if everybody just came out.
Yes, but that doesn’t make you hypocritical. I’m a great believer in using words very specifically.
I see that. Do you ever feel, Gee, I hope one of these years I never have to talk about gay issues in an interview?
Yeah, but not because I mind talking about them. Someday they’re not gonna be issues anymore. But I would like to not have to talk about it, because I would like no 15-year-old to go through what I went through.
Did you ever, after what Dick Armey said about you [he called him “Barney Fag”]—did you ever talk to him or make up with him?
Yes, he tried to tell me it was a slip of the tongue, and I said nonsense.
Would that happen today?
No.
So what’s Jimmy like?
Oh, he’s wonderful. He’s open and fresh. He was never in politics.
And he surfs, right?
He surfs all year round. He surfs in Maine in a wet suit. And he’s, uh, you know, he’s very caring. It’s nice to have somebody worry about you that way.
Let’s talk about your coming out. At that time, in ’87—
It was scary. I thought it would have a much more negative effect than it did. But I really just did it because I couldn’t not do it.
How did you do it?
Interesting. By ’85, ’86, I was…See, I came to Washington in ’81. I’d been closeted all my life, from Massachusetts. I said, Okay, here’s the deal: I’m gonna be publicly closeted and privately active as a gay man. Like I said, you can’t live half gay and half closeted. So the insiders knew I was gay. But the rule then and now was—well, it’s slipping a little bit now—but the rule was, you don’t out somebody unless he or she was engaged in some scandal. Now, the problem there was, the only time people got to know who was gay was when we’d done something terrible. You know, they didn’t know from normal gay people who didn’t have troubles. Um, but so the press knew I was gay. So it then got to the point where I was thinking about coming out. Gerry Studds had already had to come out, although he was very courageous, because he acknowledged being gay, whereas everybody else who’d been caught claimed they were drunk. It’s incredible, these people who say when they’re drunk, they were able to do sexual things that they couldn’t do when they were sober. I don’t know people like that.
Like Mel Gibson.
Right, “I was driving drunk out of my mind!” But, um, the press by ’85 was saying to me, “We would like to write about you being gay.” It’s fascinating. Here was the rule: They couldn’t write about it unless I gave them permission. So they would say, “Can we write about your being gay?” And I would say no. Finally, in early ’87, I decided that I was ready for them to write about it. But I didn’t want to be the one to bring it up, because I wanted to say, “Oh, it’s not a big deal.” Well, as I’ve said since, if your sexuality is not a big deal, you have my sympathy. Who wants to have a sexuality that’s no big deal? But I figured I had to minimize it, downplay it. So I could acknowledge it, but I couldn’t make a big deal of it. And I couldn’t have a press conference to announce something that I was prepared to say was not a big deal. So—[Phone rings.] That’s Jimmy. [Picks it up.] Hey, I’m just talking about you…Yes, to GQ…And the interviewer thinks you’re handsome.
Very.
“Very,” she just said….“Very,” yes….[Cups phone.] He said, “Wow.” [Huge smile.] .…What? Yeah, she saw the picture of the three of us….The one on the couch of me, you, and the president….Yeah, the one up on the couch….Where are you?...All right. Well, lemme call you back, so I can finish my interview….When you’re home? I will, okay….All right, okay….[Hangs up.] He says thank you.
By Lisa DePaulo
LISA DEPAULO is a GQ correspondent.
