On the Getting of Frank

Bizarre Guevara-like imagery accompanies fawning film

One is hard-pressed to think of a better defender of Bill Clinton during the 1998 impeachment proceedings than Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.)  Whether in his countless TV interviews or his dogged defense of the President on the House Judiciary Committee, Frank flexed his formidable intellect and talent before the American people.

Of course, Frank was also ideally suited to run interference because he, like Clinton, had previously been involved in a sex scandal of his own making, which nearly resulted in the end of his political career.

And thus unfolds the tale upon which rookie director Bart Everly hangs his 2003 film "Let's Get Frank," a documentary that is now airing on Logo.

Everly uses the 1998 committee hearings that ultimately resulted in articles of impeachment against Clinton as a dramatic device to frame his portrait of Frank.  But it is a portrait that both supporters and detractors of the congressman will probably find lacking in many ways.

Little is told biographically about Frank, the first openly gay member of Congress, and we aren't given much sense of how he became one of the House's leading liberal lights.  Indeed, one would be forgiven for thinking that his career began with that aforementioned scandal.  And it is on this count that Everly also falls down, because what is probably the defining moment in Frank's political career is dealt with obliquely, at best.

Viewers might have only the vaguest recollection of the imbroglio that first emerged in 1989.  Frank had hired male prostitute Steve Gobie in 1985, the beginning of a relationship that continued to grow, according to the Boston Globe:

Over the next two years, while Frank was trying to decide whether to come out, he and Gobie carried on a clandestine affair, during which time Frank hired Gobie as a driver despite knowing Gobie was on probation for drug possession and for possession of child pornography. Frank used his House privileges to fix Gobie's parking tickets. He wrote a memo trying to clear Gobie from probation that was disingenuous at best and an outright deception at worst. Gobie repaid Frank by running a prostitution service out of Frank's Capitol Hill apartment. When Frank discovered this, he fired Gobie and ended their relationship. Then, in 1989, just two years after Frank's announcement that he was gay, Gobie told his story to the conservative Washington Times.

The media, and the House Ethics Committee, apparently took Frank at his word that he didn't know about the seedy business operating out of his own home, despite his admission to the vast array of other entanglements with Gobie.  Frank's behavior was doubly offensive in light of his high-handed moralism about his House colleagues who were caught up in the Abscam scandal.

Frank was ultimately reprimanded but kept his job.  (Massachusetts seems to have a magic sheen of Teflon that renders its members of Congress impervious to sex scandal-related job loss.  Remember Gerry Studds?  Or Ted Kennedy?)

So how does Everly deal with this seminal (ahem) event in Frank's life?  He allows his protagonist to glibly dismiss the whole hoo-hah as something in the "private sphere" that "grew out of being in the closet."

Ex-squeeze me?  Now, I might not have the ethics of a congressman.  (There's a rimshot to be had there somewhere.)  And like most gay men, I also went through my own period of denial and discovery.  But never once did I use it all as an elaborate excuse to hire a hooker, put him on my payroll, fix his parking tickets and then take a crap on the truth.

Like any good liberal, Frank now spins a fantastic yarn about his supposed victimhood, rewriting history about what he described in a 2003 interview as a solitary mistake:

"I’m not a forgiving man. I stay angry. I have no respect for ... this guy Gobie, who lied to me. ... This guy Gobie decides he’s going to become famous by attacking me. Well, he couldn’t out me, because I’d been out for more than two years. So he decides not just to talk about me having paid him for sex, which was true, but to talk about a lot of other things that weren’t true.

"Now I had this dilemma. Almost everything he said wasn’t true. But there was one core of truth there -- I had paid him for sex. And the only way I could convincingly deny the things that were false was to admit the one thing that was true."

So I guess it depends on what your definition of "one" is.  At any rate, it soon becomes apparent that Everly's film is more paean than portrait.

Everly also gives Frank free rein to lambaste the Republicans in Congress who pushed the Defense of Marriage Act.  There is not a single word of disapprobation for Bill Clinton, the Democratic president who signed it, or for the 118 House Democrats who also voted for it.

Later we are are treated to Frank on camera effusively praising that great supporter of gay rights, Bill Clinton, for signing an executive order regarding gays in government service.  (Hmm, come to think of it, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" also went unmentioned.)

But at least Everly does us all a service by giving us glimpses of Frank's true political stripes.  At a memorial service for Matthew Shepard, Frank said:

"The right wing has been much too successful in interfering with what we have a great need for: programs that protect the younger Matthew Shepards from the violence that ultimately took his life, and from the viciousness and hatred that perverted those people (his murderers) to the point where they dehumanized themselves and him.”

Here we see the gerbils hard at work in the spinning wheels of the liberal mind: There is nothing ailing an individual or society that can’t be cured by a government “program.”  Perhaps when the next murder occurs, we could just sentence the perp to a program, because Frank sure seems to think they're a panacea.

And lest we forget, despite Frank's seething disgust of all things conservative, it was the "right-wing" state of Wyoming that put Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson not in a "program," but in prison for the rest of their lives.  (Even if Frank had favored stronger justice, the two would have been ineligible for death in his beloved Bay State anyway.)

Look, anytime someone is murdered, it is a terrible thing.  But to impute a lack of proper "programs" to the vicious murder of a young man is a sure sign of an unbalanced mind.  (Whoops, there goes that towering intellect.)

Do you remember when "documentaries" were essentially indistinguishable from legitimate news?  Today they seem consigned to the cinematic equivalent of the op-ed page.  You'd easily find more balanced information on "The Daily Show."  But perhaps that is why Everly's movie made only $9,386 more than my movie did.

All that being said, I'll tease the clip by saying that the most disturbing moment of the film comes not from Frank, but in the form of former Rep. Bob Barr’s diatribe on “licking.”

[Watch video – 6:13, WMV format, high bandwidth]

[Watch video – 6:13, WMV format, low bandwidth]

Comments

[North Dallas Thirty]

I call it McGreevey's Law.....Democrats may commit whatever crime or ethical lapse they wish and blame their doing so on "the closet". Republicans like Jim West, though, should be prosecuted and punished to the full extent of the law.

Somehow, I always preferred the consistency of the closet NOT giving one a pass, regardless of political affiliation.....but oh well, I'm not enlightened enough.

[Gus]

"Hot bottom, well indowed to please."

[Don]

I remember that at one point when Frank was questioned about how he could have gotten involved with this guy he replied "I was suckered." Rush Limbaugh has used "My Boy Lolipop" as his Barney Frank update theme ever since.

[rob]

Great ,these high and mighty gay heroes

1. Barney and his hustler who ran a escort business out of Barney place in DC while Barny tried to fix his parking ticket problem.

2. Mathew - a gay crstal meth addict who made had a stupid hook up with two fellow crystal method addicts in a sleezy bar in Laramie.

yes , the gay community has so much to be proud of !

[Joe.My.God.]

If I lived in Massachusetts, I would vote for Barney Frank 100,000 times over any Republican.

And the above Rob, you're a scumbag.

And a poor speller.

[Malcontent]

JMG: You're a Democrat? I had no idea.

[Stephen]

Frank and Clinton involved in "sex scandals," and the whole Republican establishment, in its now obvious hypocrisy, goes ballistic. But when these same, sanctimonious, self-righteous Republicans come to governance, my goodness their malfeasance and incompetence does not count. Adding $5 trillion to the deficit, tax cuts in which 58% goes to the top 1% of taxpayers, spending $1.7 billion/wk for an unauthorized excursion into Iraq from Afghanistan in search and to do what? Never mind that the U.S. occupation of Iraq has brought the nationalists (which neo-cons call Islamofascists) out to fight the occupation of their country (didn't the States do something similar in 1776?). And let's not forget that those in governance think GLBT are persona non grata, not only disserving equal rights and due protection, but shouldn't be "taught" to use condoms in the War against AIDS (it might foster sexual activity). And what about a president who believes gawd has given him a mission to torture people and wiretap citizens, even though both actions are proscribed by law? Which brings me back to Frank and Clinton: Whatever their piccadillos, they didn't destroy a country by their actions. They may have shown poor judgment in the conduct of their personal lives, but at least they didn't undermine the Constitution, cause the U.S. to be shunned by the rest of the world, or commit attrocities in the inhumane actions against other people, nor invaded a sovereign nation based on lies and deceit. Frankly, I could not think of a BETTER contrast! A little sex on the side versus the destruction of republican civic governance. It's a no brainer.

[Jeff]

BRAVO, Steven!!!

[Jeff]

YIKES! that should have been:
BRAVO, Stephen!
(my bad.)

[Robbie]

Never mind that the U.S. occupation of Iraq has brought the nationalists (which neo-cons call Islamofascists) out to fight the occupation of their country (didn't the States do something similar in 1776?).

Now, now, Mr. Moore. Just because you lost Canada doesn't mean ill-informed Thursday morning cantankerousness is warranted.

*leaves a trail of cheetos to Toronto*

[Aatom]

Well, Stephen's tin-foil hat rant aside, I find this a remarkably boring issue. At least Frank has the balls to be open now, when so many of his colleagues are still hiring hookers of both genders and still manage to fly under the radar.

Trust me, this is how DC works. Frank is an anachronism for his, um...frankness, so to speak. If you have a problem with his politics, fine. But 'taking a crap on the truth?' because he got caught having a little fun with a callboy? Yes, the victomolgy whine sounds a little disingenuous, but what do you expect him to say about it? Just because there is an ideological double standard when it comes to which politicians are playing sausage games with rentboys doesn't mean Frank shouldn't capitalize on it when he needs to. That's politics, kids.

[North Dallas Thirty]

Over the next two years, while Frank was trying to decide whether to come out, he and Gobie carried on a clandestine affair, during which time Frank hired Gobie as a driver despite knowing Gobie was on probation for drug possession and for possession of child pornography. Frank used his House privileges to fix Gobie's parking tickets. He wrote a memo trying to clear Gobie from probation that was disingenuous at best and an outright deception at worst. Gobie repaid Frank by running a prostitution service out of Frank's Capitol Hill apartment.

Let's see....lying to probation, misuse of one's position to fix tickets, aiding and abetting criminal acts. Just like Clinton just, oh, perjured himself before a grand jury (which makes Al Gore's rants even more ironically entertaining).

If only these WERE just "sex scandals". Unfortunately, they, like McGreevey, committed CRIMES, deliberately using the power of their offices to cover them up. The reason their defenders try to spin these as "sex scandals" is because most people genuinely don't care about with whom you're fooling around, other than to gossip about it. But this is a matter of using that indifference as an excuse to ignore criminal acts.

[Aatom]

well, i read a great quote online recently: the real scandal isn't what's illegal, it's what is legal.

;)