Barney Frank, in Hospice, Has Advice for the Democrats

Barney Frank represented Massachusetts in Congress from 1981 to 2013 — one of the first openly gay members in American history, and the first to marry while in office. He died on May 19, 2026, at age 86.

Days before his passing, journalist Jenna Russell published a remarkable final interview. Frank shared his advice for how Democrats can advance healthcare reform — drawing on hard-won lessons from the gay rights movement.

Read the full article or the excerpt below.

Excerpt from The New York Times:

So what do you advise for advancing unpopular causes? Are there lessons to be drawn from the gay rights movement?

When we were fighting for gay rights — a fight I think we have essentially won — we knew that some issues were more popular than others. So we tended to start by trying to win the ones that were most popular. Gays in the military. Employment. We didn’t go after same-sex marriage, we didn’t make marriage a litmus test, until the very end.

I analogize that to male-to-female transgender sports. That is the most controversial part of the agenda — the equivalent of gay marriage — so put it at the end. If you go at it that way, you build support for it. But if you insist on the most controversial parts all at once, you make it harder.

What other tough issues could benefit from this approach?

I think it would be a better world, a better America, if somehow everybody had Medicare. But they don’t. And so something that I think would be very helpful, substantively and politically, is to reduce the age of Medicare to 60 from 65. A lot of families would benefit.

You could do it right away, and it would work, and it would build support for going even further. But the left does not support an increase in Medicare coverage. They want to do something more revolutionary.