Former US congressman Barney Frank who famously took on Wall Street and was one of the first known openly gay representatives died on Tuesday night, US media reports. He was 86.
Frank, a Democrat who represented southern Massachusetts in the House of Representatives for over three decades, had been in hospice care at his home in Maine since April.
He will be remembered as a trailblaser for LGBT rights, as the first member of Congress in a same-sex marriage, and for helping to overhaul financial regulations after the 2008 financial crisis.
“He was, above all else, a wonderful brother. I was lucky to be his sister,” Frank’s sister Doris Breay told NBC Boston.
“He certainly left a mark, and he was a leader on civil rights, on gay rights, on leading other marginalized communities, and then he helped the country get through the 2008 financial crisis, which was the most significant recession, depression, almost since 1930,” Segel said.
Frank served from 1981 to 2013.
He was a major architect of the Dodd-Frank Act, which created new regulatory bodies and tightened restrictions on banks in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession.
The Dodd-Frank Act, named for Frank and fellow Democrat Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, was a historic overhaul of banking regulations in response to the subprime mortgage crisis that helped trigger the 2008 Great Recession.
In 2010, then-President Barack Obama signed the legislation into law, which Donald Trump partly preserved while also loosening some of the restrictions – the “biggest rollback of bank rules” that decade, Time Magazine said – in 2018.
On Capitol Hill, Frank was a vocal supporter of ending the “don’t ask, don’t tell policy” that kept gay and lesbian US military servicemembers from serving openly.
He also fought for – ultimately failed – legislation, which would have banned workplace discrimination against LGBT workers.
“Prejudice is based on ignorance,” Frank told The Boston Globe in 2011, as he prepared for retirement.
“And the best way to counterbalance it is with a living example, with reality,”
Over the last month while in hospice, Frank did a number of interviews with US media, commenting on his life’s work, the current political mood and the travails of the left.
“I’m filled with disgust at the current state, but optimism that it’s going to get better,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper earlier this month.
