SMAHTGUY

A pleasing graphic life of the longtime Massachusetts congressional representative.

New Jersey–born Barney Frank (b. 1940) represented his Boston-area district for 16 terms in Congress, gaining renown for his financial savvy and, toward the end of his tenure, for co-sponsorship of what became known as the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. He was also the first openly gay member of Congress, though it took him some time to accept and publicly acknowledge his sexuality. As Orner, a former aide, writes in this lively graphic book, Frank, like so many of his generation, was inspired to enter politics by the example of John F. Kennedy, who gave them the “notion that they could build a better America.” He was already a “political polymath” as a Harvard undergraduate, with a special interest in human and civil rights. Frank was enlisted by the likes of Michael Dukakis and Kevin White, familiar names in Massachusetts politics, to help organize campaigns and public events, for which he had tremendous skill. Orner writes that all of this had the effect of drawing him away from the academia to which he seemed destined and pushing him instead into public life, starting as an aide to White, the mayor of Boston: “His political acumen, problem-solving skills, and outsider status (without a stake in all the Irishy clan infighting) meant he quickly became the mayor’s most relied-upon aide.” Orner sensitively depicts Frank’s coming out and, at the end of his career, decision to leave Congress and settle with his husband in quiet retirement. But the best part of his book is the unquiet agitation that made Frank, eloquent and stubborn, a bulldog of a fighter on the Hill, representing not just his district, but great masses of disenfranchised, marginalized people in the LGBTQ+, ethnic minority, and labor communities.

Fans of Frank will be delighted, and those who don’t realize the extent of his political legacy will learn much.