Barney Frank speaks.

In the April 11 issue, in his listing of "Gay Sex and Political Scandals," Don Romesburg, understandably, perpetuates a myth that arose out of my involvement with a hustler in the late 1980s. Because I had come out voluntarily about 2 1/2 years before he decided to talk about our affair, [the hustler] couldn't achieve his goal of making money while destroying my career simply by outing me. So he added some lurid--and wholly untrue embellishments. One of those was that he had been running a female prostitution ring from my apartment.

The House Ethics Committee spent a year thoroughly looking into this. In the end, they concluded that I had irresponsibly allowed him to use the congressional parking privilege to escape paying parking tickets, when he was in fact on personal business and not doing official work for me. The committee specifically disbelieved that he had used my apartment to run a prostitution ring and dismissed that accusation.

BARNEY FRANK Washington, D.C.