How a pathbreaking gay legislator earned his nickname

Eric Orner had just graduated from college and was drawing cartoons for Boston’s alt weeklies when he met Massachusetts congressional representative Barney Frank at a 1990 fundraiser for a community center that provided AIDS treatment. Frank was famous for his gruff demeanor, perennially wrinkled suits and status as one of the first out gay members of Congress. But he’d also taken note of Orner’s work.

“He liked the cartoon I’d done that week, lambasting the city’s cardinal for his terrible policies on AIDS,” Orner told me in a recent interview. “And he also assumed that a kid who was drawing cartoons wasn’t making a living. He said to me, ‘If you ever need something else to do, give my office a call.’”

Orner went on to make a name for himself with “The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green,” a nationally syndicated comic strip that detailed a young gay man’s search for a love at a time when queer stories were virtually invisible in pop culture. At times when art didn’t pay the bills, he took Frank up on his offer, working on and off on the representative’s staff for 20 years. That “bifurcated life,” as Orner described it, positioned him well for his most recent project: a graphic novel about his former boss.

Titled “Smahtguy” for the appellation Frank earned in the trenches of Boston’s political machine, the novel spans the representative’s entire life and career. Frank was born into a working-class Jewish family in Bayonne, New Jersey. As a student at Harvard, he tuned into politics through the anti-war and civil rights movements. Later, he became a representative in Massachusetts and then the U.S. House of Representatives, earning a reputation for his coalition-building skills and no-nonsense approach to legislative tachlis. He came out as gay in 1987, a time when doing so was considered politically disastrous, and weathered a scandal that erupted when an old flame claimed to have run an escort service out of his apartment. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, he sponsored the Dodd-Frank act, which rewrote regulation of the nation’s financial services.

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