Barney Frank

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.5 • 934 Ratings

🗓️ 14 April 2020

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On the "complicated" side of "evil and complicated" that makes up our show's motto, we present the story of the gravely-voiced Congressman who blazed trails for gay political involvement at the highest levels of power in Washington, only to spend the latter part of his career selling out the left to finance capital and excluding trans people from fights for non-discrimination legislation. Whip-smart, funny, and always ready with a biting comeback, Barney Frank came to embody the transformation of the Democratic Party away from the working class and towards a suburban party preoccupied with shallow diversity rather than true racial and economic justice. ----more---- SOURCES: Aloisi, James. “Louise Day Hicks: ‘You Know Where I Stand.’” CommonWealth Magazine, October 16, 2013. https://commonwealthmagazine.org/politics/012-louise-day-hicks-you-know-where-i-stand/. Battenfeld, Joe. “Barney Frank Resurfaces, to the Dismay of Bernie Sanders.” Boston Herald, January 29, 2020. https://www.bostonherald.com/2020/01/28/barney-frank-resurfaces-to-the-dismay-of-bernie-sanders/. Chotiner, Isaac. “Barney Frank Is Not Impressed By Bernie Sanders.” Slate Magazine, March 30, 2016. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/03/barney-frank-is-not-impressed-by-bernie-sanders.html. Cottle, Michelle. “Bailout.” The New Republic, December 3, 2008. https://newrepublic.com/article/62857/bailout. Dayen, David. Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud. New York, NY: The New Press, 2016. ———. “Bank Deregulation 2.0 Is Here.” The American Prospect, July 18, 2018. https://prospect.org/api/content/eaadfd42-4d07-5e1f-b580-4b75f1860cc4/. ———. “Dismantling Dodd-Frank -- And More.” The American Prospect, February 6, 2017. https://prospect.org/api/content/da53d9a4-10ff-57f6-97d0-a09f91c8cbd4/. Dedman, Bill. “TV Movie Led to Prostitute’s Disclosures.” The Washington Post, August 27, 1989. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/longterm/tours/scandal/gobie2.htm. Frank, Barney. “My Life as a Gay Congressman.” Politico Magazone. Accessed April 13, 2020. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/barney-frank-life-as-gay-congressman-116027.html. Geismer, Lily. Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Henwood, Doug. “Radio Commentary, July 15, 2010.” LBO News from Doug Henwood (blog), July 16, 2010. https://lbo-news.com/2010/07/16/radio-commentary-july-15-2010/. Molloy, Parker. “What Barney Frank Still Gets Wrong on ENDA.” The Advocate, October 1, 2014. http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2014/10/01/op-ed-what-barney-frank-still-gets-wrong-enda. Schleier, Curt. “Barney Frank on Being Barney, Not Bernie.” Times of Israel. Accessed April 13, 2020. http://www.timesofisrael.com/barney-frank-on-being-barney-not-bernie/. Sirota, David. “A ‘Grand Bargain’...For K Street.” HuffPost (blog), December 8, 2006. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/a-grand-bargainfor-k-stre_b_35853. ———. “Four Reasons to Oppose the Bush-Obama Request for Another $350 Billion Bailout.” Common Dreams. Accessed April 13, 2020. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2009/01/13/four-reasons-oppose-bush-obama-request-another-350-billion-bailout. Toobin, Jeffrey. “Barney’s Great Adventure.” The New Yorker, January 5, 2009. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/01/12/barneys-great-adventure. Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to series three episode four of bad gays, a podcast all about evil and complicated queer people in history.
0:22.9	My name's Hugh Lemmy. I'm a writer and author. And I'm Ben Miller, a writer, researcher,
0:27.2	and member of the board of the Shula's Museum in Berlin. And last week we talked about the
0:32.4	Georgian ne'er-do-well, Lord Castlereh. Who are we talking about this week, Ben?
0:37.8	Well, today's episode covers someone who has been a public figure in my life for as long as I can remember,
0:43.7	and he definitely falls on the complicated side of evil and complicated for me.
0:49.1	And this is also somebody who at one point was really one of my heroes.
0:54.1	We're talking about the longtime congressman
0:57.6	Barney Frank. So I was always a kind of politically involved and interested kid. And growing
1:04.4	up in the liberal suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts, the left wing of possibility was the Democratic
1:09.9	Party.
1:11.6	These specific Massachusetts suburbs, as the historian Lily Geismer has recently argued,
1:16.6	belong at the center of the history of the transformation of the Democratic Party,
1:20.6	away from its roots in labor union halls towards white-collar professionals.
1:24.6	The suburbs along the high-tech corridor of Route 128 rose to
1:28.7	wield extraordinary political power in Massachusetts. Geissmer's recent history, entitled
1:33.8	Don't Blame Us, focuses on school desegregation. In the city of Boston, school desegregation was one of
1:41.1	the most divisive and intuperative political fights of the 20th century.
1:45.3	After Brown v. Board of Education mandated integrated schools nationwide in 1954, school districts
1:51.7	across the United States did everything in their power to prevent actual school integration.
1:57.1	In the Boston area, the call for desegregation and its implementation led to a series of protests and race riots that brought national attention.
2:05.6	In 1972, the NAACP filed a class action lawsuit against the Boston School Committee, Morgan v. Hennigan, alleging racial segregation in the Boston public schools.
	...

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