Barney Frank, the sharp-tongued Massachusetts Democrat who served 32 years in the US House of Representatives and helped rewrite Wall Street rules after the financial crisis, died Tuesday evening at his home in Ogunquit, Maine. He was 86.
Family and friends will gather at Faneuil Hall at 10 a.m. on Monday, June 8 for a memorial celebration, details of which were confirmed Thursday by Frank’s longtime friend Jim Segel.
Frank’s death closes the life of one of the most recognizable figures in Massachusetts politics, a lawmaker elected 16 times to represent the state’s 4th congressional district and later remembered for a string of firsts that changed the public conversation in Washington. In 1987, he became the first member of Congress to publicly come out as gay voluntarily, a step that made him a national figure far beyond his district.
His legislative mark was just as durable. Frank coauthored the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, a law that reshaped oversight of the financial system after the crisis that shook the country. He had also served earlier as a state representative, giving him a career in public office that stretched across decades and across levels of government.
Frank had been in hospice care with congestive heart failure when he died. Even then, he kept talking to reporters from several media outlets, sounding more like a man still arguing his case than one withdrawing from public life. In a May 3 Boston Globe interview, he said, “I hope people, obviously, act on what I’ve said,” and added that “the ideal of it is that people will be saying after the ’28 election that my advice helped the Democrats win.”
That is the final measure of Frank’s political life: he did not leave office quietly, and he did not spend his last days retreating from the fight. He died in Maine, but his last public words were aimed at the next presidential election and the party he spent a lifetime trying to shape.
