Barney Frank, Water Volleyball Player — and More May 21, 2026May 20, 2026 Sixty years ago, my college roommates and I had the great good fortune to be assigned to a dorm whose five resident tutors included a 25-year-old Bayonne-born cigar chomping grad student named Barney Frank. Although he was an order of magnitude smarter and more important, we had a lot in common (I, too, am a left-handed, Jewish, gay Democrat) and enjoyed a 60-year friendship. I thought yesterday’s New York Times obit was magnificent: Barney Frank, Gay Pioneer and Liberal Stalwart in Congress, Dies at 86 Subhead: Often voted the “brainiest,” “funniest” and “most eloquent” member of the House, he was also the first to come out voluntarily and helped normalize being openly gay in public office. Lead graph: Barney Frank, the brassy, lightning-quick former Massachusetts representative who for decades was the most prominent gay politician in the country and who was an author of the most significant overhaul of the nation’s financial regulations since the Great Depression, died on Tuesday at his home in Ogunquit, Maine. He was 86. I think you’ll enjoy reading it. It ends with reference to his forthcoming book, The Hard Path to Unity: Why We Must Reform the Left to Rescue Democracy. The book is — don’t hate me for saying this, Barney — a little dense in this age of short attention spans. And it doesn’t come out until September 15. But Jamie Kirchick’s piece in the current Atlantic — Barney Frank’s Second Coming-Out — solves both those problems. You’ll get the essence of the book in just a few minutes and without having to wait. In his final act, the liberal stalwart wants to save his party from ideologues. Every Democrat should read this piece — especially our wonderfully idealistic Democrats on the far left, to whom the book is largely addressed. Barney shared almost all their goals but realized that, all too often, “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” It’s that old Ralph Nader thing again. Ralph was SO much better than Gore (at least in his own mind and the minds of his voters) . . . yet by not settling for Gore, he got Bush ’43, the war in Iraq, giant tax cuts for the rich, an exploding deficit, and (among other things) a right-leaning Supreme Court that ultimately paved the way for Trump. If you read the Times and then the Atlantic, you’ll know Barney well. (If you’d like the full story in his own voice, listen to his autobiography. Or watch Compared to What: The Improbable Journey of Barney Frank, a 2014 documentary. Here’s the 2-minute trailer.) A few things I might add: > In the dining hall, everyone wanted to sit with Barney, especially the Government majors. Tables of 8 would regularly have 12 or 14 people crowded around, trays on laps, straining to hear, as one bright Harvard student after another tried to challenge Barney on whatever was in the news — and got destroyed, leaving the rest of us in tears of laughter. I was never brave (or informed) enough to try, but I loved watching . . . and came to notice that Barney looked at the same guys I did. So there was someone else among the 5,000 undergraduates and 10,000 grad students who was mis-wired like me — a regular guy attracted to regular guys! (There were more like 1,500 of us, but all of us too deep in the closet to reveal ourselves.) Barney didn’t figure me out, and I didn’t say anything to Barney until much later, after my book came out. (Not the investment guide.) > CUT TO: Barney visiting on Fire Island, where a bunch of us play water volleyball on sunny weekends. (“If you can stand in five feet of water and have a sense of humor, you’ll be a star.”) At first we figured that Barney, by then Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, would be our “Celebrity Ball Boy” but in fact he jumped in and turned out to be quite good. We called him “the Gavel.” > CUT TO: a week of his recovery spent back out at the beach after his quintuple by-pass. His father had died very young of a heart attack, and he seemed to be headed in the same direction. But damned if he didn’t power through to 86, accomplishing so much along the way. > CUT TO: a dinner with six or eight of us where I was making some pro-Democratic pitch, and maybe getting a little carried away in my enthusiasm — we were all just friends having fun and I was trying to make my friends laugh — when suddenly Barney slammed the table with his fist and said “No! Don’t oversell!” We were all a little startled. I had needlessly exaggerated something. But hey — I was just having fun, among like-minded friends — but NO! he slammed his hand again. “Don’t ever do that!” It’s a terrible mistake in arguing your case, he bellowed, to exaggerate and give the other side something on which to prove you wrong, calling into question everything else you said. Long before he finished berating me, I knew he was right: I hate when our side does that, as we occasionally do. > CUT TO: I am a groomsman in Barney’s wedding to Jim. Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry with Barney’s family, friends, and colleagues are on one side of the aisle; Jim’s surfing buddies on the other. The Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is presiding. And then dancing after the dinner — you can see great photos in the Times obit. And all I could think of was how far we had come from 1965, when no one dared even say he was gay . . . to this joyful wedding. Which I got to talk about a few weeks later in front of thousands of delegates and press at the Democratic National Convention. So much of this progress was because of Barney. I am so proud to have been his friend.