Ann Wroe
speaker
865 appearances
15 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 21 Aug
Ann Wroe’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 15 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 6.
Appearances
Barney Frank never really knew what it was to be in the majority.
voice-verified
For a start he was left handed and that accounted perhaps for the horrible mess he seemed to drop on himself whenever he went out to lunch somewhere.
voice-verified
Also he was Jewish and that was not a very useful fact for making a career when he was growing up in Bayonne, New Jersey, heavily Catholic city, also quite full of the mafia.
voice-verified
A third way in which he was in a distinct minority was that he was someone who really believed in government.
voice-verified
He had always thought that government was essential for helping everyone who was on society's losing side, and he'd felt that ever since he was a boy, when he'd been really startled by the racist lynchings in the South.
voice-verified
He was gay, but not many people knew that as he was coming up through the political system, and he hoped no one would have to know about that.
voice-verified
Because to be gay meant that you couldn't marry, that you couldn't join the army, that maybe you couldn't do the job you wanted to do.
voice-verified
And when he went to Washington, part of the reason why he suddenly decided that the Fourth District of Massachusetts would be just right was that it would give him a chance to have a very full and thriving gay social life down in DC, well out of the way of the eyes of his constituents.
voice-verified
It thoroughly frustrated him that in fact in the matter of being gay, his whole life was ruled by this central dishonesty, as he called it.
voice-verified
So in 1987, for it took him all that time to get round to it, he suddenly set up an agreement with the Boston Globe that one of their journalists would come and point a microphone at him and ask him straight out, are you gay?
voice-verified
And he said, yeah, so what?
voice-verified
The reaction was not at all what he expected.
voice-verified
Barney Frank had always wanted to completely control the way in which this news came out, but it seemed that he had done and that his careful staging of the whole thing just led people to sympathize with him and embrace him.
voice-verified
He found his straight colleagues, Republicans even, were actually embracing him.
voice-verified
He found activists were cheering him.
voice-verified
Him and even his constituents seemed not to mind, because his polling numbers in the 4th District of Massachusetts fell by only four points after his declaration.
voice-verified
And they fell by only four points more when later on it came out that he had done favors for a male prostitute called Stephen Goby, that he'd helped get him off parking tickets.
voice-verified
He could focus quite openly on all the gay rights issues that he wanted to help with, for example, allowing gays to serve in the armed services.
voice-verified
There was a rather feeble halfway measure called Don't Ask, Don't Tell, which Bill Clinton had brought in, and Barney Frank managed to persuade President Obama that this was no good and he must declare.
voice-verified
that gays were no longer security risks in the armed services.
voice-verified
Showing 781–800 of 865 · page 40 of 44
← Previous
Next →