Eric Orner, the acclaimed cartoonist of the country’s earliest and longest-running gay comic strip, The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Greene, presents his debut graphic novel–a dazzling, irreverent biography of the iconic and iconoclastic Barney Frank, the first gay and out congressman and front-line defender of civil rights.
What are the odds that a disheveled, zaftig, closeted kid with the thickest of Jersey accents might wind up
running Boston on behalf of a storied Irish Catholic political machine, drafting the nation’s first gay rights laws, reforming Wall Street after the Great Recession, and finding love, after a lifetime assuming that he couldn’t and wouldn’t?
In Smahtguy: The Life and Times of Barney Frank, America’s first out member of Congress and gay and civil rights crusader for an era is confirmed as a hero of our age. But more than a biography of an indispensable LGBTQ pioneer, this funny, beautifully rendered, warts-and-all graphic account reveals the down-and-dirty inner workings of Boston and DC politics.
As Frank’s longtime staff counsel and press secretary, Eric Orner lends his first-hand perspective to this extraordinary work of history, paying tribute to the mighty striving of committed liberals to defend ordinary Americans from an assault on their shared society.
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