Barney Frank: One of the first openly gay US congressmen dies aged 86

BBC

Former US congressman Barney Frank who famously took on Wall Street and made himself one of the first known openly gay representatives died on Tuesday night, US media reports. He was 86.

Frank, who represented southern Massachusetts in the House of Representatives for over three decades, had been living in hospice care at his home in Maine since April.

He will be remembered as a trailblaser for LGBT rights, as the first member of Congress to enter into a same-sex marriage, and for helping to overhaul financial regulations after the 2008 financial crisis.

“He was, above all else, a wonderful brother. I was lucky to be his sister,” Frank’s sister Doris Breay told NBC Boston.

“He notified everybody that he was in hospice, so it was just a matter of time. He was certainly at peace with himself,” Jim Segel, Frank’s former campaign manager, told Axios.

“He certainly left a mark, and he was a leader on on civil rights, on gay rights, on leading other marginalized communities, and then he helped the country get through the 2008 financial crisis, which was the most significant recession, depression, almost since 1930,” Segel said.

He was a major architect of the Dodd-Frank Act, named partly after him, which created new regulatory bodies and tightened restrictions on banks in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession.

The Dodd-Frank Act, named for Frank and Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), was a historic overhaul of banking regulations in response to the subprime mortgage crisis that helped trigger the 2008 Great Recession.

On Capitol Hill, he was a vocal supporter of ending the “don’t ask, don’t tell policy” that kept gay and lesbian US military servicemembers from serving openly.

He also fought for legislation which ultimately failed that would have banned workplace discrimination against LGBT workers.

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