American Democratic congressman from the Fourth District of Massachusetts from 1981 to 2013, before that a member of the Massachusetts legislature. Born in Bayonne, New Jersey; Jewish, left-handed and, eventually, openly gay. He died on May 19th 2026, aged 86.
Frank had been part of an underground national gay-rights movement for years and had pushed a gay-rights bill through the Massachusetts Senate before his colleagues there knew his secret. He came out publicly to the Boston Globe in 1987: asked "Are you gay?", he replied, "Yeah. So what?"—becoming the first openly gay man to come out voluntarily in Congress. His vote share fell by just four points in the next election, and four more after a 1989 scandal involving a male sex worker named Stephen Gobie whom he had paid for sex in his closet years; Congress reprimanded him.
He spearheaded the drive to let gays serve in the American armed forces and to ban workplace discrimination. He had relationships with Herb Moses for 11 years and married Jim Ready, with whom he spent 14 years.
As head of the House Financial Services Committee after the 2007-09 financial crisis, Frank teamed with Senator Christopher Dodd to write the 2010 Dodd-Frank banking-reform act. It reined in risky bank lending and provided consumer protections that eventually returned $21bn for forced foreclosures. Critics called the law over-complicated; subsequent Congresses modified parts of it. Frank had been a long-running advocate for rental housing for the poor, and rejected the charge that he had inflated the sub-prime bubble by describing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as "fundamentally sound": he had never said all Americans should have mortgages, only "a right to a roof over their heads".
After leaving Congress in 2013 he lived in Ogunquit, Maine.
The first myth of management is that it exists. The second myth of management is that success equals skill.