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Today’s theme is Home Life by Avocado Junkie, and we begin our episode with this clip, in which Barney Frank recalls coming out to Speaker of the House Tip O’ Neil in 1987.
Representative Barney Frank embraces then-Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren on November 1 2012, five days before she defeated Massachusetts incumbent Republican Scott Brown for Senate. Image credit: ElizabethforMA/Wikimedia Commons
In the News:
* On Tuesday, we learned that Representative Jen Kiggins, a Republican incumbent in a tough fight to keep her seat in VA-02, cosigned conservative talk show host Rich Herrerra’s observation that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries should “keep his cotton-picking hands off of Virginia.” They were discussing redistricting, and what it would take to unseat the entire Virginia Supreme Court after it nullified the successful redistricting referendum. After Democrats responded that the comment was a racist dog whistle, Kiggins backtracked. But other Republicans insisted that since whites had also picked cotton, the phrase was not racist, and the outrage performative.
* Conspiracy much? In a YouGov poll released yesterday by information watchdog NewsGuard, 25% of Americans believe that the attempted mass shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was staged. Respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 were more likely to believe this than older people: only 45% believed it was real, and 32% were not sure. The poll is roughly the same as one taken after the 2025 attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, PA. Fewer people believed that the 2024 shooter arrested at the Trump International Golf Club was fake—but a similar number were unsure. Should we blame Trump and MAGA Republicans for the fact that so many Americans in both parties have difficulty with reality?
* Yesterday, attorney and financier Kevin M. Warsh was confirmed by the Senate in a 54-45 vote as the next chair of the Federal Reserve Bank: Democrat John Fetterman crossed the aisle to vote yea. The Fed, under the leadership of outgoing chair Jerome Powell, has up until now maintained its independence from Donald Trump. Warsh has signaled that he wants the bank to be less active in the economy, and elevate the use of interest rates—rather than buying government debt—to backstop the economy. Warsh has challenges ahead, prominently a war in Iran that has pushed inflation to a 3-year high. Trump wants a rate cut, whereas the economy points to higher interest rates.
* The Food and Drug Administration has lost two top officials to resignation following the Trump administration lifting a ban on flavored vapes. A vehicle for nicotine, vapes were banned in 2020 on the theory that they were a gateway to smoking. The ban was controversial at the time: some critics said that banning flavored vapes eliminated a tool to help smokers quit.
Your hosts:
Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.
Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
On January 19, 1995, Republican Representative Dick Armey (TX-26) called Barney Frank “Barney Fag” in a radio interview: Armey later apologized, but claimed that he had simply mispronounced Frank’s name. Image credit: Joe Hoover/Wikimedia Commons
News focus:
* Last week, former Congressman Barney Frank (MA-04) made the news by announcing he was in hospice care for congestive heart failure, and by giving several interviews about the future of the Democratic party from the home he shares in Maine with his husband, Jim Ready.
* Frank, a legendary progressive politician and the first national lawmaker to voluntarily come out as gay, grew up in a working-class home in Bayonne, NJ, graduated from Harvard College in 1962, and participated in Mississippi Freedom Summer while in the Ph.D. program in government at Harvard.
* Leaving Harvard in 1968 to become Chief Assistant to Boston Mayor Kevin White. In 1972, Frank was elected to the state legislature, where he served for eight years. During that time, he completed a degree at Harvard Law and was admitted to the Massachusetts bar. Simultaneously, Elaine Noble ran successfully for the Massachusetts State Legislature as the first “avowed homosexual” in the nation to be elected to office. In 1980, a year when Republicans ran the table nationally, Frank toppled the Republican incumbent to take his seat in Congress, endorsed by Father Robert Drinan.
* In 1981, Frank was one of eleven House Democrats who filed a civil lawsuit to end the Reagan administration’s aid to the military junta in El Salvador: another member of that lawsuit was Barbara Mikulski (MD-03), a closeted lesbian.
* Frank was outspoken from the moment he arrived on the Hill. He made his reputation as a supporter of liberal policies: the separation of powers, financial regulation, consumer protection, and opposition to tax cuts intended to shrink federal spending on social programs. When New York Mayor Ed Koch urged Democrats to return to the center, Frank said: ‘’I don’t think we should plead guilty to a caricature.’‘
* Frank’s career almost ended in 1982 because of a gerrymander, retribution for bucking the Massachusetts Democratic machine, that put him in a race against moderate Republican Margaret “Pirouetting Peggy” Heckler. That win secured his seat until he retired in 2012.
* In 1987, Frank publicly came out as gay, ahead of a burgeoning scandal: a sex worker, friend and personal assistant living in his apartment was operating an escort service there. On LGBT civil rights issues, Frank was persistent, but famously incrementalist: he defended Clinton’s Don’t Ask, Don’t tell military policy, and urging activists to slow-walk demands for gay marriage.
* On January 19, 1995, Republican Representative Dick Armey (TX-26) called Frank “Barney Fag” in a weekly meeting with radio journalists, and had to apologize on the House Floor. Armey also apologized privately but blamed the media for repeating what he claimed was a mispronunciation of Frank’s name. Frank did not entirely accept the dishonest apology.
* In 1998, Frank defended President Bill Clinton vigorously during the Judiciary Committee hearings that led to impeachment proceedings in the House.
* In 2010, with Chris Dodd of Connecticut, Frank wrote a bill that overhauled the financial system that led to systemic financial collapse in 2008.
* As trans liberation moved to the forefront of LGBTQ politics in the 21st century Frank resisted folding them into lesbian and gay rights, a position he continues to hold today. In 2007, he stripped gender identity from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) so that it would pass the House. In the 2009 and 2011 versions of the bill, those provisions were restored; in 2013, it passed the Senate, but then failed in the House.
* Recently, Democratic Representative Sarah McBride (DE-01), the first trans member of Congress, has also argued that the trans rights movement does not have the broad support it needs to pass equality legislation.
What we want to go viral:
* Neil wants you to read Claire’s new piece, “Kill Canvas. Now” (Chronicle of Higher Education, May 14, 2026), an essay about higher education’s dangerous dependence on an edutech platform that serves the interests of neither faculty nor students.
* Claire is fascinated by Ava Kofman’s reporting on 64-year-old Chinese oligarch Guojun Xuan and his wife Silvia, who have arranged for the birth of more than two dozen children via surrogate motherhood in less than a decade. The first story, “The Babies Kept in a Mysterious Los Angeles Mansion” (February 9, 2026) tracks the history of this odd, and ultimately somewhat sinister, project and its intersections with a surrogacy industry in the United States that is almost unregulated. The follow-up, “The Fate of Twenty-One Los Angeles Siblings” (May 11, 2026) talks about the resulting legal case when the children under the Xuans care, as well as 6 other babies still in uteroin five other states, were taken into the custody of Child Protective Services.
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