Our man on Capitol Hill: Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank may not need to fight for reelection, but he's still got a major battle in front of him.

Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank is up for reelection this year, but his seat is so safe, he barely needs to campaign. That doesn't mean Frank will be coasting this fall. The openly gay Democratic lawmaker could face a much bigger battle starting in September if the U.S. House of Representatives takes up debate on its version of the antigay Federal Marriage Amendment. While Frank believes that this EMA, like the Senate version, won't pass, that doesn't mean the fight won't get ugly.

Frank has spent the past few months testifying in front of his fellow legislators against the amendment, which defines marriage as a union between one man and one woman. The 64 year-old parliamentarian has sparred brilliantly with his conservative colleagues, persuasively presenting the case that they should stay out of his--and every other American's--bedroom. Pointing to the now-settled dust in Vermont, Frank says he believes that in the near future most Americans won't care about same-sex marriage.

"It was very encouraging that it did so badly," Frank says of the amendment's defeat in the Senate. "This has clearly failed. The public is not demanding such an amendment be passed." Regarding the antigay legislation's future in the House, he says, "If it comes up, it will cause a lot of commotion. But it will fail." With a nod to the national election, he presses the point further: "I hope [the] Log Cabin [Republicans] will follow through and this will lead them not to support Bush." Leaders of Log Cabin, a gay group, pledged to back away from the president after he made the FMA a White House priority. "It will help [Bush] stimulate his right-wing base," says Frank. "But will gay Republicans and gay-supporting Republicans pull away from him? I think that's important, not just in itself, because that will show [Bush] that gay bashing doesn't work."

You'd think Frank would be exhausted after months of this conversation. But he is far from tired of making the case for gay marriage rights. In fact, when the famously articulate and curmudgeonly congressman sits down with The Advocate in his sprawling office on Capitol Hill, he quickly launches into a defense of his record on the issue.

In February, as CNN played an endless loop of cheering same-sex couples getting hitched at San Francisco City Hall, Frank earned himself a heap of criticism by declaring he was "sorry to see the San Francisco thing go forward," because Massachusetts was about to approve legal marriage. "I was against pretend marriage," he says, calling it "political hoopla with no gain. We had [Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney] at the time basically threatening not to follow the law. Our response was, 'What are you, George Wallace? You can't do that. You can't have civil disobedience.' It totally undercut our argument to have Newsom also talking about not following the law. You can't say, well, look, it's OK to not follow the law when we agree. Or you can say that, but then you lose the right to argue that you have got to follow the law."

It's a typical Frank response. His pragmatism is sometimes mistaken for caution. But Frank has survived more battles during two decades on the national stage than most people see in a life time, publicly coming out when it was considered career suicide and for years being among very few out representatives voicing support for gay equality. He doesn't think twice about ripping into lawmakers who support antigay legislation. And be has .said that if the Democrats fail to win the House this fall and Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry is elected, he will make a run for the senate with the aim of becoming that body's first openly gay member.

At this time Frank is loath to make any predictions. He has put all major changes in his life on hold as he quietly copes with the murder of his niece following a domestic dispute. Susan Lewis, 41, the daughter of Ann Lewis--Frank's sister and a former Clinton aide--was found strangled in her home in early April. Her husband was changed with her murder. Frank has asked reporters to give the family space and time to grieve. For now he continues to legislate as the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee and to crusade tirelessly for same-sex marriage.

His life was not always such a mix of the personal and the political. Frank grew up in a working-class Jewish family in Bayonne, N.J., and received undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard University. He quickly became a star in the Massachusetts statehouse and, later, in Congress. His rise during the 1970s and 1980s paralleled the increased national visibility of the gay rights movement. He was known for his progressive politics but remained closeted. Rumors about his sexuality bubbled up in the 1980s, and in 1987, at age 47, he became the first, national politician to come out of his own accord as a gay man. Tip O'Neill, then speaker of the House, told Frank that he'd lost the chance to become the first Jewish speaker of the House.

It would turn out to be remarkable that he kept his seat at all.

In 1989 a man named Stephen Gobie came forward and told the world that Barney Frank had not only paid him for sex but also let him run a prostitution. ring from his Capitol Hill apartment. Frank acknowledged that he had had a relationship with the hustler but denied he knew about the prostitution ring. He called for a House investigation into his actions and was cleared the following year of any wrongdoing. "The Gobie year was a painful time for him," says his close friend Hilary Rosen, former chair of the Recording Industry Association of America and current board member for the gay group Human Rights Campaign. "He never ran away from it. I think those were the years that I actually came to have the most affection for him, because a lot of other guys would have slunk away, tail between their legs, and he didn't. He fought for himself, and frankly, I think he fought for all of us. But he knew it was important to stay them and be respected."

For a few years after his public humiliation, Frank stayed under the radar. But when the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, he found himself in a uniquely impervious potation in Washington: He had already survived his sex scandal. He found he could speak his mind. Just after Barbara Walters sat down with Lewinsky, Frank told Paper magazine that response to the Clinton impeachment hearings "confirmed that the public is a lot more sophisticated about sexual behavior than we thought. They have an appropriately nuanced view; they have an understanding that when we're talking about consensual sexual behavior, you cannot take a particular rigid code and apply it." He might have been talking about the progression of the American public on gay issues as well.

Bart Everly, a New York filmmaker who'd arrived in Washington to film the hearings, ended up focusing on Frank. The result is a documentary called Let's Get Frank, which premiered at New York City's Film Forum in July. "I started to see the corollary between Clinton and Barney and their stories and why the Republicans were so adamant to use their sexual proclivities against them," says Everly, who found himself filming Frank's transition back into the spotlight.

"I think he regained his power," adds Everly. "He had had his wings clipped; he was a congressman, but he was in the shadows a little bit because of his scandal. This allowed trim to come out. He went from being [known as] the gay congressman from Massachusetts to being [known as] one of the smartest congressmen."

During the hearings, Frank began to date Colombian-born World Bank staffer Sergio Pombo, whom he met through friends after the two had eyed each other at the gym. Though he has joked that the hearings conspired to end his social life, he and Pombo are still going strong five years later and can be spotted at Washington events from the White House to Dupont Circle.

Frank is the first to acknowledge that there are still battles to be won in the fight for equality. As proof he cites the antigay Federal Marriage amendment and the decision by Scott Bloch--in the U.S. Office of Special Counsel of the White House--to reverse a Clinton-era expansion of fights for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered federal workers.

"All of a sudden the Bush administration was rolling back one of the big things Clinton did," he says. "And everyone was going after Bloch. We were beating up Bloch. But Bloch is an appointee with a term.... What we did, what the Democratic leadership did, was to say, "]?his is not Bloch; this is Bush.' We were able to force the current President Bush to maintain nondiscrimination on federal employment, which the first President Bush refused to do. Because GLBT people have moved the country, basically by being out."

While Frank is quick to criticize the current administration, he is equally tough on gay activists. "I spent a lot of my time consistently saying we would do better with fewer marches and rallies," he says, unimpressed by those who might be rankled by such comments. "Part of what I've been trying to do is think like the NRA or the AARP. Politics is not fun; it's serious."

But even Frank is impressed by the country's attitudinal shift toward favoring equality for gay men and lesbians. He attributes the change to more people coming out. "I think by being honest at about who we are--coming out to friends, relatives, teammates, customers, students, teacher a--we have helped America understand a major fact: Most Americans were not homophobic but thought they were supposed to be, and as they saw other people responding, they said, 'Oh, yeah, it's OK. I don't have to be prejudiced.'"

Frank's own activism is adamantly evident in his very out, very unapologetic presence on the Hill. "He has been an extraordinary model for straight people--many of whom are homophobic--by just being a great legislator," says Robert Raben, who spent most of the 1990s working for Frank before becoming assistant attorney general in the Clinton administration. "The ability to see someone who is first and foremost an incredible parliamentarian, lawyer, statistician, who is also gay, has [delivered] from my vantage point by far the most powerful impact we could ask of a person."

Wildman has written for The New Republic, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Washington Post.