Barney Frank looks into his crystal ball

Kicking off the North East Regional Pride Conference (NERP) on Feb. 29, Congressman Barney Frank predicted sweeping advances for the LGBT community should Democrats take the White House and build on their congressional majorities in the 2008 elections.

"Here's where we are if the Democrats win the presidency, the House and a few more Senate seats: we will get a transgender-inclusive hate crimes bill through in the first couple months," said the openly gay Newton Democrat to applause from a crowd of about 40 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Boston.

"As soon as the Iraq War has been voted to end, we will get rid of the ban on gays in the military," Frank continued, to more applause. "I think we will have a good chance of getting same-sex recognition for federal employees ... and we will clearly have the votes for ENDA and the issue will be whether or not we get the votes to include people who are transgender. If we have a [Democratic] president, it's possible."

If they come true, Frank's predictions would be a dramatic departure from the current state of affairs on LGBT issues in the Democratically-controlled Congress. To wit: A trans-inclusive hate crimes bill died in Congress last December, after it was stripped out of defense authorization legislation in the Senate; bills to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," and provide domestic partnership benefits for federal employees in same-sex relationships have seen zero action in Congress and the removal of gender identity and expression from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, better known as ENDA, has provoked endless controversy in the LGBT community. The gay-only ENDA passed the House last November but is currently awaiting action in the Senate.

Frank said that whether a trans-inclusive ENDA, which would ban anti-LGBT workplace discrimination, gets passed "depends on what kind of lobbying gets done." Frank, who has come under heavy criticism for brokering the compromise on ENDA, restated his belief that transgender advocates underestimated the resistance among House members to including transgender people in the bill, when it was taken up in the House. Noting the long road to gay and lesbian equality since the Stonewall Riots of 1969, he theorized that the transgender issue makes many lawmakers nervous, as the idea of gay and lesbian people once did. "But we clearly have the votes for an ENDA and we may yet get them on [a transgender-inclusive version]."

Frank also predicted that should Democrats take complete control of Washington in 2008, there would be no negative measures enacted against the LGBT community.

Frank's comments came during a question and answer session after he delivered remarks at the opening plenary of NERP, which brought Pride organizers from across the country and Canada to the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Boston Feb. 28-March 2. The 20th annual conference was hosted this year by the Boston Pride Committee.

Diego Sanchez, the co-chair of the Mass. Transgender Political Coalition, asked Frank to talk more about his support for House Bill 1722, a state-level transgender civil rights bill that will have a hearing on Beacon Hill on March 4. He expressed his support for the bill and noted that he will submit written testimony in its favor at the hearing. He also pointed to the fact that Massachusetts has yet to provide explicit protections to transgender people to underscore the difficulty of achieving such protections at the federal level. "I was disappointed," he said the failure of a trans-inclusive ENDA, "but I have to tell you, if we can't do it in Massachusetts what makes you think it's easier in Congress? When did the Congress of the United States become better on these issues than the state of Massachusetts?"

In his prepared remarks, Frank credited the visibility that annual Pride festivities give to LGBT people for much of the progress of the LGBT rights movement since Stonewall. "Without question the single biggest reason that we have made substantial progress is the willingness of people to be out, to be honest about who we are," he said. "I realized that when we started this after Stonewall. People really - including well-intended people - had no real understanding of what it was like to be gay, lesbian, bisexual and feel discrimination because we never told anybody. People can't really sympathize with people they don't know exist."

He began his address with his characteristic quick wit. When his cell phone rang moments after he stepped to the microphone, he pulled it out of his pocket took a look at who was calling and quipped, "Yeah, it's not Rudy Giuliani's wife."

Giuliani, a former Republican presidential candidate, inexplicably answered a phone call from his wife in the middle of his speech to the National Rifle Association last September.