Rep. Barney Frank Marries Longtime Partner
Rep. Barney Frank (D–Massachusetts), the first openly gay member of Congress, married his longtime partner on this day. Frank came out as gay on May 30, 1987.
Frank served as a member of the House of Representatives from 1981 to 2013.
In the 1960s he was a civil rights activists, and participated in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer (June 23, 1964). One of his major legislative accomplishments in the House was the 2010 Dadd-Frank law, which tightened regulation of the major financial institutions following the onset of the great recession in 2008.
On June 26, 2015, in Obergefell v. Hudson, the Supreme Court declared that same-sex marriage was constitutional in the entire United States under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Read Barney Frank’s memoirs: Barney Frank, Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (2015)
See photographs of the couple: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5UuyBporK0
Read: Stuart Weisberg, Barney Frank: The Story of America’s Only Left-handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman (2009)
Find and watch the documentary film: Let’s Get Frank (2003)
View the list of all the LGBT members of Congress from the beginning here
Learn more: Barney Frank, Speaking Frankly: What’s Wrong with the Democrats and How to Fix It (1992)
Read about the landmark 2015 Supreme Court case: Debbie Cenziper and Jim Obergefell, Love Wins: The Lovers and Lawyers Who Fought the Landmark Case for Marriage Equality (2016)