the night that i win the emmy. >> being on the supreme court was an improbable dream. >> it's hard work and it's controversial. >> without information there is no freedom and it's journalists who provide that information. >> window rolls down and this guy says, hey, he goes until 11:00. [laughter]. >> congressman frank, nice to meet you. >> thank you. >> nice to see you and congratulations on the book. >> thanks. >> could you have imagined all those years ago in bayonne or in boston as you were in school and getting your start in politics that being a member of congress might make you more unpopular than being openly gay? hasn't the world changed? [laughter]. >> oh, absolutely. as i sat down to write the book i realized, as i said in my last years when people polled, i reassured my husband -- i did not do this polling myself -- but the poll results were that my marrying jim, as a member of congress -- still the only same-sex marriage from a member of congress, received much more public approval than my chairmanship of the financial services committee. [laughter]. >> right, they would much rather, yeah. >> and people said, well, did you think, even in 2005 when -- >> recently, relatively. >> ten years ago i would have thought it would have been very controversial for me to get married while i was still in congress. and here it turned out i was right. there was a great deal of controversy about my getting married. a lot of my colleagues were very angry that i didn't invite them. >> invite them to the wedding, yeah. [laughter]. >> you know, you have to draw the line somewhere. >> and in the world of today or of two years ago when you got out of congress, the fact is your spouse was accepted as a congressional spouse no different from any other congressional spouse. >> no, we made that rule. i treat -- you know, i read a couple of books through my career, which were manuals. and one was a biography of adam clayton powell. when adam clayton powell came to congress from harlem in 1943, he was only the third african-american in this century post reconstruction. >> right. >> the other two had been fairly docile people from chicago. so when he got to congress he was told as a black man that he could not use the house barber shop, the house swimming pool. the black maitre d' of the house restaurant told him he was not allowed to eat there. >> right. >> and powell said, the hell i'm not. and he did it. >> i came out voluntarily in 1987 and began dating. and i read powell's stuff so i said here's our rule. we are not going to do anything just to make a point, but we're not going to not do anything because somebody else wants to make a point. so from the beginning i insist on that. and jim's a natural. he's a guy that people like. so he became -- in fact, in some ways, again, more popular. he says at one point the senior republican on the committee i was dealing with -- and i sometimes get a little cranky -- >> really? hadn't seen that. >> -- at the end of the day. he ran into the senior republican on the committee i was chairman and he was told, oh, i figured you were in town today. and jim said, well how did you know that? he said, well barney was nice. >> he was in a good mood, right, exactly. how perfect. [laughter]. >> what changed in the last ten years, not just in congress, but in this country? we're now at a place where acceptance of gays and lesbians has got to be at a high point, right? >> if you had told me even two years ago that when the conservative republican governor in the conservative cultural state of indiana -- >> yeah. >> -- was going to get his head beat in -- >> right. >> -- because he wanted to allow people to discriminate against us on religious basis, i would have been unbelieving. >> yeah. >> well, it's the end of a long process -- though i think it worked. there are very few things in american history that have changed so drastically with the begin point. stonewall, 1969. >> right. >> and i filed the first gay rights bill in massachusetts in 1972. by the way, i was still then closeted. i made a decision early on when i went in the public life -- >> right. and you write about that quite extensively in here. >> i made two decisions. first of all, i would be a coward. i would not be honest about being gay. secondly, i would not be a hypocrite. i would not withhold my support from efforts to treat gay people fairly. >> right. >> i have only contempt for gay men. nobody has had to come out. >> right. >> but to be a gay person or a lesbian, except the lesbians didn't do that. it was only the gay guys. >> in fact, you seem more contemptuous -- i don't mean to digress. you seem more contemptuous in this book of hypocrisy than you do of just straight ahead homophobia. >> oh, absolutely, yeah. because it's an undermining of democracy. if you are making rules for other people that you then don't follow yourself you have undermined the fundamental core principle of democracy. that goes back to john locke's treatise on civil government, which was a manual for the founding fathers. what happened was i was late doing it. we told the world who we were. i think the reason we have made this progress was it's easy to be prejudice against a stereotype with no reality. and essentially what happened was over time we told people who we were. >> right. >> and our reality ultimately undermined the prejudice. and you saw this, for example, in the defense of marriage act. by the time that came along there were people who don't like gay people or lesbians, but in america it wasn't considered right to just come out and say i hate those people, i want them to be unhappy. >> right. >> originally there was support for that in america. the puritan movement, which h.l. mencken defined as the haunting fear that someone somewhere might be having a good time. [laughter]. >> that was puritanism. and, but, what happened was they didn't come right now and say we don't like one of them so two of them is disgusting. instead they said, if they are allowed to marry it will have negative social consequences. >> right. >> and that was the beginning of our winning. because once massachusetts, thanks to a great supreme court decision in our state, allowed same-sex marriage and none of the negative consequences came forward. >> right. the apocalypse did not come. >> so that's basically what happened was they made all these accusations about us. we told people who we really were. and then every time we came forward with an issue, we allowed gay and lesbian people to serve openly in the military. most people in the military have forgotten that. go back and i wish one of the things people would do, when people make these predictions that there's going to be gloom and doom, hold them to them. wait and see what happens -- >> right. and remind them what they said. >> exactly. >> because you talk a lot about the repeal of don't ask don't tell. the clinton years is essentially a study, and everybody working this out in realtime. >> absolutely. >> you talk a lot about that in this book and the reality is that's barely 20 years ago that we're talking about and yet the world has completely changed to the point that we forgot there was a time. >> no question. bill clinton, to his credit, tried to get rid of the ban on gays serving in the military. >> right. >> and -- >> the security clearance question. >> yeah, well, clinton tried to do that and he was foiled by a combination of bob dole and sam nunn. >> sam nunn, right, yeah. >> politics at the time. but also, as i say in the book, part of the problem was this, and i've spent a lot of my time arguing the substance with my conservative opponents, but arguing procedure with my liberal allies. because there has been this tendency for people on the left to engage in expressive politics. let's demonstrate, let's march, let's rally. >> right. >> none of which does you any good. >> right. >> it's mostly talking to each other. as i said, one of my frustrations has been over the time when the right gets mad they vote. when the left gets mad they march. voting beats marching. >> voting ends up being -- >> that's why the tea party, to my regret, had much more impact on public policy than the occupy movement. >> well, the old cliche elections have consequences -- >> that's absolutely right. >> it's a cliche because it's true. >> that's a good point. most cliches are true. the problem with the cliche is not that it's not true, it's boring. >> it's boring. >> you have to be true to become a cliche. >> so i'm remembering an account you give in the book of a very large march or rally in 1993 when somebody got up and said, made a comment about wanting to have sex with hillary clinton. it was actually a -- >> it was a woman, of course. it was the lgbt. >> i would like to have sex with hillary clinton, and, in fact, it was said a little bit differently than i just said it. couldn't say it on public television. >> wouldn't it be great that there's now a first lady i'd like to bleep. >> to blank, right. and your point was that kind of conduct -- >> because you want to bleep her, not blank her. >> bleep her. bleep her. [laughter]. >> that's sort of a statement where you tell the story of a bunch of soldiers who were emulating kicks like the rockettes. >> yeah, these are gay men who have been kicked out of the military whom were trying to say, look, this is ridiculous. they will be soldiers like anybody else. and some organizer -- and the focus is let's play to each other's emotions. let's forget that we're trying to persuade others. so he had them lined up ready to do a kick routine like the rockettes. and i said no and people got very angry at me. >> but your point was use the time you have in the public eye to be successful at politics, not at theater. >> yeah. and some of my friends say, well, we got to be like the african-american movement. and they say that and they're right. we should be. they misunderstand it. martin luther king was a very clever, thoughtful strategist as well as a -- >> a tactician. >> -- great moral leader. >> right, yeah. >> and i contrast the march on washington in 1964 with its tight discipline. it's saying we're going to send this message to white america. with the self-indulgence of our march in '93, the best example is one of the great moral heroes of my time or of any time, john lewis. a man who literally risked his life -- >> yeah. >> -- for this principle. john said, he says in his own book, i have talked to him about it. he was asked to speak at the march on washington, this representative of young people. he had to submit something like five drafts of his speech to a. phillip randolph's agent, bayard rustin. and each time he was told, john, that's too radical. at one point he said in his speech, he remembered him telling this, the people demand. they said no, no. that's going to make people nervous, so make your pick. so the contrast between the two is what i was hoping to get. >> well, there's no question that one of the instant takeaways of this book is that you are as critical of your own side, in some respects, as you are of the other side. >> procedurally. >> procedurally. >> and the other point i want to make is this. one of the things i get really bothered by are my colleagues who beat their chest about how brave they are by standing up to their opponents. i tell the right wing this. i tell the right wing that. well, the fact is that, you know, if you're barely picking on people who are never going to be with you, that's very useful because it just builds up your campaign contributions. >> right. >> but ted kennedy and jesse helms probably raised $100 million each for the other. one would criticize and then the other one would send out that criticism and vice versa. >> right. >> the hardest thing in politics is to stand up to your friends and tell your friends that you disagree with them. >> right. >> in my case, as i said, it was almost always about -- it was always about procedure and not substance, but there's not enough of that. there's not enough telling the people close to you when you think they're wrong. >> right. so we have openly gay athletes now. >> yes. >> we have openly gay people in the service, as you say. we have, i believe, seven openly gay or lesbian or bisexual -- >> one senator and six representatives. >> -- members of congress. we have an openly bisexual governor of oregon. >> yep. >> and yet have the politics of this country adequately changed to your satisfaction? i'm guessing the answer is no. >> no, pretty much they have. but here's the deal. every one of the people you named is a democrat. >> right, there are no republicans serving in congress who are openly gay. >> you go back to 1976, which i remember, and jimmy carter and gerald ford were both beginning to be supportive of equal treatment for lesbian and gay people. and then -- and since then there have been three trend lines in american politics about lgbt issues. the country as a whole has been getting better at an increasingly good rate. the democrats have been getting better at an even faster rate and the republicans had been getting worse. until recently they were actually getting worse. now the republicans are in a situation which troubles them. it used to be the one that had the democrats in. that is, there was a split on lgbt issues between their political base, the people who vote in primaries, and the general electorate. >> right. >> and so they are moderating the ferocity of their attacks on us -- >> right. >> but you still predict now, not too much, the republican platform will be very critical of lgbt movement next time and there'll be no republican presidential candidate will be supportive. so the country, as a whole, is moving. what's changed in the last month was -- >> yeah. >> -- indiana and then arkansas. because a critical block has moved into this fight, and it's the business community. it's very good to win an issue -- >> right. >> -- because you have morality on your side. but it helps in america if the profit motive weighs in. [laughter]. >> and essentially what you now have is the business community saying to the bigots, will you please knock it off, you are interfering with our ability -- >> to make a buck. >> -- to ruin the economy and make money. and that, i believe -- >> at the end of the day that's going to trump everything else. >> well, you know, adlai stevenson. i recorded adlai stevenson in a remark that showed his humor and his political misjudgment sometimes. he gave a great speech and a woman said, oh, governor. your speech was marvelous. you'll have the votes of all the thinking people. he said i know, madame, but i need a majority. >> i need to win, right. yeah. [laughter]. >> and so that didn't help him win. but i'm glad to have the support of all the morally driven people. but, yeah, to win. >> right. >> and so you have the american businessmen and essentially what they're saying, and they're saying this, do not give us the right to discriminate. you are giving me something i didn't ask for. because if a business has the legal and moral obligation to serve everybody, no controversy. but if you say to them, okay, you can pick and choose, then once they start picking and choosing, somebody is going to be mad at them. either they'll be too kind to gay people or not kind enough. >> in either case they'll be boycotted. >> yeah, so the good of the properly understood and there's a great legal distinction. i don't like metaphors, generally. but between the shield and the sword, a shield is a legal concept that protects you from other people intruding on your life. >> right. >> so that i can wear a yarmulke if i want to. the native americans can smoke peyote. although as far as i'm concerned anybody who wants to smoke peyote ought to smoke it. [laughter]. >> but we said you cannot interfere with my religious freedom. the sword is when i take that concept and i interfere with you. >> right. >> and what happened was we originally saw the religious freedom acts as a shield against you being told you couldn't practice your religion, even if it didn't bother anybody else. and then it was converted into an active way for you to hurt other people. and it's going to get retracted back to that shield, and that's fine. >> yeah. on gay marriage, which is another half, or the other half of this issue we were visiting before we came out on stage today that in some respect there may be some republicans who are secretly hoping that the supreme court weighs in in favor of gay marriage so that sharp object is taken off the table. >> i mean, it's an absolute analogy in the business community. right now a republican has the choice of being for or against same-sex marriage. and if he or she is against it then you have problems in november. but if you're for it then you have problems with your base. if the supreme court says is it -- and i correct myself. if the supreme court says that it's a constitutional right maybe then they can keep it out of the platform because they can say, well, that's what the supreme court said. >> well, abortion is legal in this country last time i looked thanks to the supreme court. and yet i think there's probably anti-abortion language in the republican party platform too. >> well, that's true. that's a fair point and, in fact, people should understand abortion is now legal by about four and three quarters to four and a quarter of the supreme court. i mean, there were four who were for it, four who were against it. and justice kennedy is finding a lot of ways to go for restrictions. sandra day o'connor, who resigned from the supreme court, timing it so that george w. bush could replace her now appears to have resigners remorse because she's upset -- >> right. >> -- that some of the decisions she made, both in campaign finance and affirmative action, but also on abortion are being overturned. but she should have thought of that when she let him appoint these guys. >> come back to what i said earlier, elections have consequences. >> absolutely right. and of 2016, and i say this to, you know, all the people, there's no difference. 2016 is going to decide whether or not the federal government does anything about climate change. >> yeah. >> it will decide whether or not we preserve financial reform, which obviously i'm invested in. >> you have a certain amount of named -- you have naming rights on that. right. >> if the republicans win, they will repeal it. they all voted against it. and abortion will turn around. on the other hand, i believe if the democrats win and the president gets to appoint somebody, her appointee will be someone who will -- [laughter]. >> you mean elizabeth warren? [laughter]. >> no, people have asked me. i support elizabeth warren in her -- >> senate race. >> no, and i also support her in 2016, namely her very sensible declaration that she is not running for president. she is an enormous force for good. and the day she began to hint at running for president the media would then start picking apart everything she did and she would lose a lot of that credibility. and i know some of my friends on the left think, well why don't we have this really nice for president? and my answer is, well, were they out of the country during 2012 when the republicans did themselves a lot of damage by throwing pies at each other? >> but of course you know, congressman, that the opposite argument is being made by some democrats. that if secretary clinton gets a glide path to the nomination, nominal opposition at best, by the time she gets into the general election she'll somehow be -- this is what they say, out of practice. >> yeah. >> you know, that she's somehow going to be worse for not having had a primary fight. >> that's a very dumb argument. i got to say. [laughter]. >> i am distancing myself from dumb arguments. >> first of all, you know, historically the notion that people have had an easy path to the nomination lose the nomination, lose the election, simply isn't empirically true. has anybody checked and said, well, you know, this one had to fight for it, that one had to fight for it? somebody it didn't help was mitt romney the last time. george w. bush had a fairly easy path -- >> no, he had john mccain beat him in new hampshire, right? i mean -- >> yeah, but it was over fairly quickly. but the other point is this. i don't mean you, but there was a certain presumption for people who have never run for political office -- >> right. >> -- telling a woman who twice worked with her husband to run for president, twice was elected to the united states senate in new york, and then ran a very tough campaign for president that she doesn't know how to campaign or that she's going to forget it. well this is not something you forget easily. no, i don't think they know more than she. and the other point is this. yes, it would be nice if you had a debate purely on the merits -- >> right. >> -- that did not get angry. not in this country, not with this media. there is no way that you would have a primary without people getting negative. you can't control the people on your own side. >> right. >> the media likes to make things angry. >> well, we're fight promoters, not journalists. >> that's exactly right. >> i fully acknowledge that, yeah. >> and the fact also is that in the democratic side this time there was a fairly broad consensus. now there was some question on the foreign policy area. >> well, in fact, you're a liberal and unabashedly a liberal. there are people who think that she's not liberal enough. so people on your side -- >> but, no, here's the deal. >> financial reform. too close to wall street. >> yeah. she lives physically too close to wall street. from that standpoint -- >> this is a mamaroneck problem? what is that? >> well, she's a new york state senator and very few people totally go to war with their home state entity, but the point is that when barack obama signed a bill that included a weakening amendment on financial reform, hillary clinton tweeted that we should not, in any way, do that again and we should not erode it. the fact is that they say that but it's based on nothing. and it's true that she took contributions from the big financial people. by the way, so did barack obama in 2008. >> he did. >> now by 2012 they weren't giving it -- and they would give to me too. i was chairman of committee, they gritted their teeth and they hated it. i had one guy, i don't want to embarrass him, but he's the head of mutual fund in boston. so when they were trying to knock me off in 2010, they were mad over the financial reform bill. he gave me $10,000. then i saw that he gave my opponent $10,000. so i said to him, well, you know, you're head of a mutual fund, you're a financial expert. i'm going to be your financial adviser. instead of giving me $10,000 and him $10,000, don't give any of us anything. >> either one. >> you'll have the same effect and save $20,000. [laughter]. >> but i defy anyone to show me any issue on which hillary clinton was weak. it is true she supported a bankruptcy bill. >> right. >> i voted against it, so did a lot of other democrats. and, by the way, the main advocates of the bankruptcy bill, people forget this. j.p. morgan chase and goldman sachs didn't care about that. the bankruptcy bill was lobbied through by the community bankers and the credit unions, which is why it was so hard to defeat because they have a lot of clout. but if you look at the issues, well let me just quote paul krugman, who was the best liberal -- >> no one's idea of a conservative. >> and a great commentator. go back and read his columns in 2008 and he documented that she was the barack obama's left -- >> left. >> -- on domestic policy. i do have some questions about her on foreign policy. >> right. >> also president obama. i think the time has come. i like the president's initial notion to get out of iraq and afghanistan. he's getting pressure to go back in. there's nothing we can do there. the notion that we can, by military force, make coherent society -- >> yeah. >> -- for the people who are determined to hate each other. >> and you think her position on those issues is different than his? >> no, it's the same as his and i want them both to pull back. >> wasn't she also late to the party on gay marriage? >> in a way, obama was. >> yeah, he's not running again, last i looked. he's not running. >> no, but he's the one that they sort of hold up. she came to same-sex marriage -- no, actually she was before him as a new york senator. in fact, she came to same-sex marriage before her husband. >> right. >> and, by the way, on same-sex marriage, she voted against -- and here's the deal. when it came to voting on same-sex marriage, she was not in the senate when the vote came on the defense of marriage act. but after massachusetts had a constitutional amendment to allow marriage, george w. bush was urging, trying to get congress to adopt an amendment to the u.s. constitution that would not only have banned gay marriage going forward, but would have retroactively abolished the marriages that had happened in massachusetts, because you can do a constitutional amendment. and she voted against that. >> she was opposed to that. >> a majority of the senate, a majority of the house voted for it but they needed two-thirds. and s cstentlheit critical one, to allow it. because goes back to what i said before. i knew that once we got same-sex marriage anywhere, established a beachhead, we were going to win that argument because we had the reality done. but she was a consistent supporter to protect our right to do that. >> all right, so we have two minutes left. so she's the nominee. you're comfortable with that. who is likely to be the republican nominee and who would you like to see your party run against? >> oh, ted cruz. [laughter]. >> no question about that? [applause]. >> i don't think you took half a second to answer that. >> no, i mean, i think i'm a pretty virtuous guy but i probably have not lived a good enough life for nature to award me, or god or whatever, with ted cruz. >> with ted cruz. who do you think will be the nominee? >> well, i worry about scott walker, you know, the "new york times." and i was a little worried about the trivialization of journalism. the "new york times" had a front page story about scott walker's being allergic to dogs and would that be an issue. and i said, no, why don't you write an article about the fact that he's allergic to labor unions -- >> unions, right. >> -- and what they mean for working people. >> so walker could be dangerous. he doesn't have the negatives, i think, that jeb bush has. >> he's also run successfully in a blue state and survived a recall -- >> right, although he won that blue state twice in non-presidential years -- >> he did. >> -- which were very good republican years. but i'm hoping is, frankly one of the problems i write about this in the book is that we've had is with white working-class men who were falling away from the democrats, i think because they are frustrated economically. i would hope that having the meany union buster in america who's warred on people who work for a living and boasts about how he reduced the pay of janitors and now supported a right to work law which undercuts the teamsters and the construction workers. >> righ. >> that he would be -- we could get a better response from white working-class people than we've gotten in a while. >> so we're about to be out of time. you don't miss being in this old job of yours? >> oh, i'm very glad to have done it but i just wore out emotionally. >> it's done. >> i got to the point i realized -- the phone rang and i flinched. >> is that right? well, the book is great. it's a reminder of all that you did. i hope you enjoy your life post congress. thanks so much for coming by. congressman barney frank. [applause]. we'd love to have you join us in the studio. visit our web at klru.org/overheard to find invitations to interviews, q&as with our audience and guests, and an archive of past episodes. >> i never pretend to be religious. when i took the, what they call the oath of office every two years. i didn't take it as an oath. i said i affirm. so in the house of representatives all of us do it together so who knew what i was saying? >> funding for "overheard" with evan smith is provided in part by mfi foundation, improving the quality of life within our community. and from the texas board of legal specialization, board certified attorneys in your community, experienced, respected, and tested. also by hillco partners, a texas government affairs consultancy. and by the alice kleberg reynolds foundation. and viewers like you. thank you.