Books
Graphic novel ‘Smahtguy’ offers timely bio of Barney Frank
Cartoonist Eric Orner makes policy suspenseful
When he was in high school, gay cartoonist Eric Orner, who makes his graphic novel debut with “Smahtguy: The Life and Times of Barney Frank,” didn’t like the food in the school cafeteria. “The principal was always talking about how good we had it,” Orner told the Blade in a recent interview.
“But the food was deep fried – inedible,” Orner added, “even for us [teens].”
To protest the food, Orner called it out with humor in the comic strip he drew for the school newspaper. “Having this platform to express yourself subversively and sarcastically to authority,” Orner said, “gave me a buzz.”
Like a hound born to hunt, Orner has always loved to draw. A proclivity for subverting the powers that be with humor has been etched in his veins from birth.
“Drawing is what I love to do,” said Orner, who is in his 50s, “It’s been that way since I was a kid.”
If there’s a problem, Orner will sit for an hour and draw. “I’ve been most brave – most outspoken when I’m drawing.”
Orner’s drawing and respect for outspokenness are in splendid form in his graphic novel “Smahtguy,” a biography of queer icon Barney Frank.
As the House (at this writing), repeatedly fails to elect a Speaker, nothing could be more timely than “Smahtguy.”
Frank, who came out as gay in the Boston Globe in 1987, was a Democratic member of the House of Representatives from Massachusetts from 1981 to 2013.
When you hear “bio of a queer and political icon,” you might well think: boring, musty, wonky tome. But you needn’t worry. “Smahtguy” is a page-turner about Frank, a politician who disliked politics, but loved policy. Orner, in this bio, does the nearly impossible: he makes policy suspenseful. Orner makes you want to know how Frank used wonkiness in issues from housing to banking to help people.
Equally important, Orner makes you see and care about Frank’s personal life – from his background and family, to his coming out to his periods of loneliness to his marriage to Jim, his longtime partner.
“Publishers Weekly,” in a starred review, called “Smahtguy,” “an astute, richly detailed profile” of Frank.
Orner jokes that he has “dual citizenship.” He has roots in two cities – Chicago and Boston.
He was born and grew up in Chicago. “My Dad’s family is in Chicago,” Orner said, “My Mom’s family is in Massachusetts.”
Orner, who lives now in New York and spends time with his partner in upstate New York, is acclaimed for his groundbreaking comic strip “The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green.”
The strip, first published in 1989, ran in 100 papers (gay press and about 25 alternative weeklies). “The Blade was the second paper to run it,” Orner said.
“The work of the gay press was so important to who we became as a people,” Orner said, “I’m Jewish. The Yiddish press was so important to Jewish people at the turn of the last century.”
In 1989, before “Queer as Folk,” “Modern Family,” let alone “Fire Island” or “Bros,” there was nothing like it. Except Alison Bechdel’s trailblazing comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For,” which ran from 1983 to 2008.
Back then, you didn’t see drawings and stories about queer people in comic strips. Especially, narratives of LGBTQ people dating, being out, dealing with break-ups, coping with AIDS, working – living ordinary lives.
Ethan was a good, but not a fabulous, guy. He wasn’t a hunky athlete or movie star. Break-ups more than picture-perfect romances were his lot. You saw yourself when you read “The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green,” which was made into a movie of the same name in 2005.
Orner didn’t come out early in his life. “I knew early,” he said, “but the Midwest is a little more conservative.”
There was the Stonewall Uprising. But that wasn’t part of the culture at his high school. “My high school was so conformist,” Orner said, “it could have been the 1950s.”
After high school, Orner moved to Boston where he went to college and law school. “I’ve lived in Boston, New York, D.C., and Los Angeles,” he said, “but I’ve never lived as an adult gay person in Chicago.”
Orner’s father, now deceased, was a straight guy who revered Hugh Hefner and Sean Connery. “One of the most important cultural icons,” Orner said, “when my Dad was in his prime in the 1960s, was Playboy.”
At first, Orner’s father just couldn’t conceive of the fact that he had a gay son. “But, my Dad was a contrarian,” Orner said, “weirdly, he was the sort of person who likes to upset the apple cart.”
If there was a rule that could be broken, he’d want to break it, Orner added.
“My Dad could not get his head around my being gay,” Orner said, “until my first Ethan Green book [a collection of his Ethan Green comic strips] came out.”
One day, one of Orner’s father’s law partners saw a copy of the Ethan Green book at a bookstore at O’Hare Airport. “The straight-laced partner had a meltdown in my father’s office,” Orner said, “over how terrible it was to see my Dad’s name on the book.”
Once Orner’s nonconformist Dad saw his partner’s pearl-clutching, Orner said, “he got his head around [his son’s being gay].”
Orner’s mother was very political. Politics runs in his family, Orner said.
“The minute I came out, unbeknown to me,” Orner said, “my Mom had joined PFLAG.”
Orner has great affection for Boston. He lived there for 25 years. He’d see the Orson Welles Cinema between Harvard and Central Square as he walked toward Bay Street. The first drawing Orner sold was to the “The Phoenix,” a (now defunct) Boston alternative weekly.
He loved cartooning. But, “like most artists, I needed a day job,” Orner said.
Orner and Barney Frank crossed paths at a cocktail party. At that time, Cardinal Bernard Law (since disgraced because of his involvement in the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal) was the Archbishop of Boston.
“I was making wiseass shit about the Cardinal,” Orner said, “Barney said it was a funny cartoon – to call him if I needed a job.”
Orner took Frank up on his offer. For 20 years, on and off, he worked for Frank as staff counsel and press secretary for the House Financial Services Committee.
In between stints working for Frank, Orner worked for Disney. “Disney taught me to draw fast,” he said, “and to capture the essence of something – like a gesture – quickly.”
Frank was your classic tough boss, Orner said. “Barney was interested in policy,” he said, “he wanted government to be professional.”
Orner admires Frank, but “sometimes he makes mistakes,” he said.
“Smahtguy” isn’t an authorized biography. After working on it for three years, Orner packaged it up and sent it to Frank. “Barney had only a few, 19, I think, minor corrections,” Orner said.
One was over a drawing of a daily racing form in Frank’s mother’s purse. “Barney said I had to change that,” Orner said, “because his aunts gambled, but his Mom never gambled.”
Orner strived to convey Frank’s greatness – his political achievement and personality – warts and all. “I very much didn’t want to do hagiography,” he said.
With the news as terrible as it often is now, Orner’s art is more needed than ever.
“I never feel things are so fraught or horrible that I don’t want to draw about them,” Orner said in an email to the Blade.
“And, a lot of my work over the past 10 years has been about Israel and Palestine,” he added.
In comics, creators are able to tap into the full range of human emotions, Orner said.
“Watching the House Freedom caucus somehow convert a single clown car into an epic interstate pile up,” Orner said, “is for this longtime Capitol Hill staffer pretty funny.”
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Books
New book examines fashionista Audrey Smaltz’s fabulous life
‘Every Inch a Lady’ reveals finding true love with another woman
‘Every Inch a Lady’
By Audrey Smaltz with Alina Mitchell
c.2026, Amistad
$27.99/256 pages
Snaps, zippers, buttons, ties.
Toss that garment on, pull it up, wrap it around, you know what you like and how to wear it. The color is perfect for your skin tone, the fabric enhances your form. Yep, you always look your best and, as in the new book “Every Inch a Lady” by Audrey Smaltz (with Alina Mitchell), that best is fabulous.
”Born, bred, toasted, buttered, jellied, and honeyed in Harlem” in 1937, Audrey Smaltz was a force to be reckoned with almost from the time she could walk. Her parents imbued confidence in her, they nurtured her creativity and sent her to charm school, but they never allowed her to create a stir.
“That,” says Smaltz, “is not what ladies did.”
By the time she was a teenager, Smaltz was modeling for New York City designers. Shortly thereafter, she started working for a married man with whom she had an affair, and whom she loved very much. She broke up with him, attended college, worked a series of jobs that taught her about fashion and jobs that didn’t seem to fit her. An ill-fated marriage took her to Chicago where she ultimately landed a position that sent her to work in Ebony magazine’s New York office.
Working at Ebony was a career-changer, in a way. Smaltz was able to travel the world and learn more about fashion, but she didn’t exactly get along with her boss.
Finally, seizing an opportunity, Smaltz decided to launch her own company, Audrey Smaltz, Inc., a “fashion production business,” but she couldn’t get any designers to take a chance on her. Undaunted, she reorganized, re-branded, hit the streets, and knocked on doors until she finally found one client, which led to many others.
Through it all, her personal life was a whirlwind. She dated “more men than you can shake a book at,” settling down occasionally, briefly. Fashion had always been her first love, but she accidentally found real love, “the love of a woman,” at a leadership course.
There’s an old saying that writers need to add lots of “color” into their stories. Read a little of “Every Inch a Lady,” and you’ll notice immediately that author Audrey Smaltz (with Alina Mitchell) quite literally takes that to heart by mentioning nearly every color of the spectrum here. Hmm.
That oddity aside, Smaltz is a wonderfully lively storyteller, speaking with the energy of a woman much younger to the heart of anyone who loves fashion. That glee extends to collectors of vintage clothing, who will be delighted to read about the industry long ago and the way things worked then. Smaltz says she experienced racism, which is not unusual for pre-Civil Rights America, but doors were surprisingly closed for other reasons that will astound anyone who’s savvy about the fashion industry, even today.
There’s quite a bit of name-dropping in this book but most of it belongs in the anecdotes, so you likely won’t mind. If you’re a fashionista, too, find “Every Inch a Lady,” and snap it up.
The Blade may receive commissions from qualifying purchases made via this post.
Books
New book examines Trump cuts to LGBTQ healthcare
‘Aftershocks’ details impact of policy shifts on HIV response, broader public health
As LGBTQ and HIV advocates continue to grapple with the Trump administration’s attacks on healthcare, a new book offers a timely look at what happens when public health systems — and the democratic institutions that sustain them — are pushed to their limits.
The book, “Aftershocks: Trump 2.0, Public Health, and Our Better Angels,” was written by Dr. José M. Zuniga, president/CEO of Fast-Track Health. Zuniga is a globally recognized public health leader with more than three decades of experience advancing responses to HIV, communicable and non-communicable diseases, and the health impacts of climate change. He is also editor-in-chief of the Journal of Fast-Track Health.
The book covers the first year of the second Trump administration. It chronicles the impact of federal policy shifts and budget cuts on the HIV response and public health more broadly, including for LGBTQ communities. Drawing from policy analysis, frontline insight, and lived experience, the author reveal how decades of hard-won progress became vulnerable through Project 2025 and DOGE, but also a paralysis in the HIV and public health communities following the outcome of the 2024 elections.
“In other words, we were caught flat-footed when our opposition had a detailed plan to create chaos and disruption,” Zuniga says. “Thus, the book also offers Horizons 2028 as an antidote to Project 2025 as a starting point for a wide-ranging conversation about how we will build back better given the baseline pre-Trump 2.0 was already imperfect.”
Below is an excerpt from the book.
What Could Not Be Left Unsaid
Let me begin with a simple truth: I did not set out to write this book. Like many in the public health community, I set out daily to do the work of scaling prevention, expanding access to care, strengthening health systems, and ensuring that dignity, equity, and justice are operational realities. Writing, for me, has always been in service of action: policy briefs to shape decisions, editorials to provoke accountability, reports to document progress or failure, and books to synthesize experience into insight that can guide public health action. But Aftershocks is something different; it is not merely an analysis. Instead, it is a record of rupture, of response, and of what it means to continue when the ground beneath your work begins to shift.
This book was written because something changed, and that change came into sharp relief during the beginning days of the second Trump administration, including the erosion of norms, the weaponization of rhetoric, and the recalibration of governance itself. The change was not limited to policy reversals or budget cuts, though there were many. Moreover, it was not confined to rhetoric, though language played a central role. The change was structural and moral: a redefinition of how power understood its obligations to people, to evidence, and to truth itself. And for those of us working in public health, the effects were immediate and personal. We experienced a purposeful disruption of the public health ecosystem and a direct repudiation of the “health for all” principle that guides our work….
Writing this book was, unexpectedly, an act of catharsis. Not because it resolved anything, but because it created space to process what would otherwise have been overwhelming… Amid what many in the public health community experienced as both individual and collective trauma, documenting itself was stabilizing, allowing reflection without detachment and critique without disengagement. But catharsis alone is insufficient. This book is not an exercise in lament; it is also a response. If the period it chronicles is defined by disruption, then its purpose is to offer direction. Where Project 2025 represented a blueprint for ideological capture of institutions, language, and governance, this book offers a counterpoint: Horizons 2028…
Horizons 2028 is grounded in a simple premise: that the future of public health – and of democratic governance more broadly – depends on rebuilding systems that are resilient to political volatility. That means strengthening not only federal capacity, but subnational leadership. It means embedding community-led accountability into data systems. It means aligning health outcomes with social determinants and recognizing that equity is not an endpoint but a continuous process of adjustment and correction. It means treating global engagement not as optional, but as essential to national well-being. In other words, it is a roadmap not for returning to what was, but for building what is required…
I write as an Independent. Not in the sense of detachment, but in the sense of accountability to evidence, to outcomes, and to the people whose lives depend on both… Independence does not mean neutrality in the face of harm; it means refusing to filter reality through partisan allegiance. Importantly, it also means being guided by a consistent commitment to equity, dignity, and justice. These are not abstract values… They are tested in moments of crisis, when the gap between principle and practice becomes most apparent. They demand accountability not only for what is said, but for what is done – and for what is allowed to persist unchallenged. And they require the courage to name harm clearly, even when doing so is inconvenient or politically unwelcome.
That commitment shapes the analysis that follows, but it is also what makes the writing difficult. Because to document harm is to confront it. To trace its origins is to name decisions and their consequences. And to do so honestly is to risk being read as partisan in a landscape where truth itself has become politicized. But the alternative – silence, or false equivalence – is not acceptable. Not when the stakes are as high as they are. There is, however, a thread that runs through this book that resists cynicism, is not optimism, at least not in the conventional sense, but is something quieter and more durable: a belief that even in moments of rupture, there remains a capacity – within institutions, within communities, within individuals – to reorient toward something better.
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Books
Exploring Renée Richards’s life through lens of a trans author
Surprises await in new book about pioneering tennis star
‘Finding Renée Richards’
By Julie Kliegman
c.2026, HarperOne
$28.99/272 pages
Come on in, the water’s fine.
Wade into it up to your ankles, your calves, your waist, you’ll be OK. You’ll adjust to the waves that swirl around you so come on, dive in, it’s all good. As in the new book “Finding Renée Richards” by Julie Kliegman, that goes for swimming, and for controversy.
Assigned to do a story on books written by trans tennis great Renée Richards, Julie Kleigman read the books and became “transfixed by a woman who had fought so hard to simply live as who she had long known she was….”. Their editor had figured that, as a nonbinary and trans individual, Kleigman would have “something incisive to say…” in an article. Instead, once they met and began interviewing Richards, Kliegman was left frustrated.
Born in the late summer of 1934, Richard Henry Raskind seemed to have arrived with a tennis racket in his hand. His mother was a psychiatrist; his father was an orthopedic surgeon who hoped “Dick” would follow his footsteps but Raskind was drawn instead to ophthalmology and tennis. He was also irresistibly drawn to wearing women’s clothing.
His sister knew of this pull and Raskind eventually came out to both parents, but few others on the tennis circuit were aware. When Raskind visited his hometown of New York City, however, he enjoyed furtively going out in women’s clothing but he also tried to squash the desire; in the meantime, he fell in love, married, fathered a son, and eventually learned that it was possible to become the woman he knew he really was.
To continue playing tennis professionally was a bonus.
And right there were the disagreements Kleigman had with Richards.
Richards, “To this day… [makes] a point of describing herself as a woman, period,” says Kleigman, but she firmly acknowledged Richard, almost as a separate individual, insisting that Kleigman use “him/his” pronouns when describing her earlier life.
And as for tennis and trans women’s participation in the sport, Richards had something even more frustrating to say.
Take that as a fair warning: you might be equally surprised at what author Julie Kliegman uncovered in “Finding Renée Richards,” and you may be truly gobsmacked by reading opinions from other women about the topic of trans women in sports.
That’s the main, huge point of interest in this fascinating book; the other is Richards’s life as seen through the lens of a trans individual. Kleigman’s wrestling with the 90-year-old Richards’ firmly dug-in heels is, in itself, worth your time as a study of highly varying viewpoints. That Kleigman and Richards have both lived at least a part of trans history is somewhat of a key to understanding how this book unfolds, as Kleigman offers up Richards’s tale. Readers who are able to read between the lines will be riveted.
If you’re a sports fan and you have opinions, you must read this book – and that goes double if it’s tennis you love. Also check out “Finding Renée Richards” if you just want a raucously good and very fine read.
The Blade may receive commissions from qualifying purchases made via this post.
Blade Foundation to host fundraiser in Rehoboth on Sept. 12
New book examines fashionista Audrey Smaltz’s fabulous life
Actress takes on bisexual ‘Ma’ Rainey in new Round House production
‘Here the Whole Time’ delivers queer coming-of-age comedy
Pentagon expands testosterone screening as trans troops face hormone therapy restrictions
Enlarging the Supreme Court keeps making more sense
The mastery of love
Gloria Steinem dies at 92
Trans people need a politics of ordinary life
