Giving Flowers

 Years ago I met Barney Frank. It wasn’t great. It was 2015 and he was promoting a book. Initially I was going to introduce him so I read the book, studied up. Then I wasn’t introducing him, I was introducing Seattle’s first openly gay mayor who was then introducing Barney Frank. (This was a couple of years before Seattle’s first openly gay mayor shit the bed. Turns out he had a pretty sketchy idea of consent and a history of reprehensible and exploitative predations. Did not know any of that at the time. To me he just seemed… earnest.)

The Barney appearance was at the old Methodist church that the bookstore used to rent for big events. Seated just shy of a thousand people as I remember it. (They tore it down a few years ago with a plan to build a skyscraper with the church in the ground floor. Never happened. Still an empty lot.) We used a kind of lounge area as the green room for events. Local pooh-bahs and muckety mucks would rub elbows with the visiting celebrities and the common bookstore folk before the big show. I was introduced to the mayor and then the retired congressman. The mayor grinned and shook my hand and asked about my husband. I don’t remember telling him I had one, but I must have. It was not my first encounter with the type. I had the distinct impression that he would, weirdly, remember my name. Barney said hello. Both men struck me as being very smart, badly shaved, fundamentally shy, socially awkward, and not remotely sexually attractive.* I only mention this because I remember getting overwhelming “class treasurer” energy from both and thinking myself terribly clever at the time. Maybe it’s a shallow reading of the room, but they both only seemed fully themselves when directing conversation and or asking questions that allowed them to speak to something rather than with anyone in particular.

The mayor and various gay satellites buzzed around Barney. I lurked. It was the Year of Gay Marriage. Buzz, buzz, buzz. The mood was good. The mayor periodically included me in the conversation. It felt like a mayor-thing — less about me than servicing the constituency, as it were. At some point  — and I honestly don’t remember if it was me that used the word or somebody else — but somebody mentioned protests. And off went Rep. Frank.

I’ll summarize: protesters bad, legislators good. Put it another way: Representative Frank smote the rock with his bill and equality, freedom, and mercy flowed like a river upon the thirsty, noisy, useless, little queer bitches who never wanted to kiss Representative Frank. You’re welcome.

I won’t say I was entirely shocked. Of course I’d known who he was and all he had accomplished long before I read his book. He was an important figure in the history of this country, and for our community. Nevertheless I admit to being offended and alarmed by what he said and how he said it and by the sycophantic nodding with which his pronouncements were largely received. What the actual fuck?! I mean I was statistically the worst activist in the history of the movement; timid, lazy, disinclined to either committees or the real, hard work of community organizing. But I was, however marginally, present when the LGBTQIA+ community saved many lives and changed the world and that didn’t happen because Barney Frank was an scholar of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff and happened to be a cocksucker. 

Anybody else remember the ironically named Gary Studds? Our first openly gay congressman  — open that is after he got nailed for paying a seventeen year old page to let the congressman blow him. Not a bad congressman otherwise, also representing Massachusetts coincidentally. Barney hired a sex worker, moved him into his apartment, gave him an allowance, called him his “housekeeper,” and paid for the guy’s court mandated shrink. Didn’t end well. Don’t know how well he kept house, but he kept turning tricks. Scandal. Basically Barney outed himself before the tabloid jackals could. It was a different time. He did the best he could. He was brave.  

And he worked very hard for a very long time and he did much good. And he evidently spent the end of his life writing a yet to be released book in which he again blames trans people and progressives and the rest of us noisy buggers for not being better Democrats, for basically not being Barney. 

I’ll wait until we have the actual book but I feel pretty safe in saying one last time, fuck off, dear dead Barney.

*   *   *

I was reminded of the passing of Barney Frank today when we woke to find Senator Lindsey Graham had unexpectedly died. Here we’ve been waiting impatiently for news of the death of Senator Mitch McConnell and instead of that sexless husk of a pansy, Sister Lindsey Belle Oleander Graham has been gathered to the bosom of Abraham. My stars and garters. Heavens to Betsy. Saints alive.

The contrast here is pretty obvious. Whatever problem I might have had with Representative Frank, he was an out gay man working to advance the rights of (most) of us, hold capital responsible, reform the system, advance democracy and civilization, whereas Lindsey Graham was a coward, a sycophant, a war-monger, a shallow, selfish, loud-mouthed, reactionary twat. And he also was gay gay gay gay gay gay gay but never came out. He was in fact a type: the closeted cracker, married or unmarried, bearded or bachelor, Speaker of the House or Leader in the Senate, the pitiless Republican power bottom. 

Of all the scum that’s risen in the age of Trump, who would ever have predicted the amazing number of out gay Nazis? The promotion of lipless faggots like Scott Bessent is still shocking. And think, Lindsey Belle lived to see it and STILL couldn’t bring himself to admit he liked the fellas. The one absolutely consistent feature of Lindsey Belle’s otherwise flip-flopping, entirely opportunist politics was his unwavering commitment to the rejection of gay equality. Mustn’t slip. Never let them see you. Never be honest for so much as a second. Fuck those gays.

Gurl. Tragic bitch.

And so here we are again, being scolded for irreverence and speaking ill of the dead. Reverence is for sunsets and calculus and Hubble telescope photos, not politicians, living or dead. Shit, we spoke ill even of the ones we admired, and they weren’t always  altogether sweet about all of us either, now were they? Why on earth should we ever do otherwise? Truth matters, even in politics, even in the age of Trumpf. The truth is that there is no such thing as a saintly senator. The dead are no better dead than they were when they lived. Politicians are imperfect. History is a mother. 

I was not altogether a fan of the late Barney Frank. I hated Lindsey Graham. I am glad one of them is dead. Guess which. (You know us gays, just can’t keep a secret to save our souls.)

*Speaking as a gay man so convinced of my own lack of sexual allure that when said (very handsome) husband expressed interest I pretty much moved into his apartment before he could reconsider. That was 1984. Still not budged. Addressed changed, us not so much.