Former Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA), the first member of Congress to voluntarily come out as gay, has entered hospice care in Maine.

The staunch liberal said that he feels “very good, no pain, no discomfort,” in an interview with Politico on Tuesday. He lives with his husband in Ogunquit, Maine, and is in hospice care as he deals with congestive heart failure.

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“At 86, I’ve made it longer than I thought,” he said. “At some point, my heart’s just going to give out, and it’s reaching that stage. So I’m taking it easy at home and dealing with it by relaxing.”

Frank was first elected to the House in 1980 and served until he retired in 2013. He was the chair/ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee for the last ten years he was in Congress, and he is perhaps best known for the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which increased regulation of the financial services industry after the 2008 crisis.

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In 1987, following a scandal involving a male sex worker, Frank came out. A House Ethics Committee investigated his relationship with the sex worker, and the House voted to reprimand Frank based on evidence that he had used his office to clear 33 parking tickets the sex worker had incurred. Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) – who would later confess to cruising in an airport men’s room – led an unsuccessful effort to have Frank expelled from Congress.

“When I decided, finally, to come out in ’87, it just struck me when I did that … the American people are a lot less homophobic than they thought they were supposed to be,” he told Politico. “More racist, unfortunately, but less homophobic.”

In 2012, Frank became the first member of Congress to marry someone of the same sex when he married his husband, surfer Jim Ready.

Frank said he will soon publish a book about politics. “I face a literal deadline, so I don’t know how we’ll adjust to that,” he said, referring to his health.

His book will argue that Democrats need to reject the far left. “Until we separate ourselves from that agenda, we don’t win,” he said.

“For a lot of my colleagues, the argument has been, ‘well, we don’t support defund the police or open borders, and we don’t say we do,’” he continued. “But my point is, no, it’s not enough… to be silent. We have to explicitly repudiate it.”

Frank said that many on the left have made such issues a “litmus test,” which he argued is bad for the Democratic Party.

He also said that he believes Republicans will face losses in the midterms this year, although he added that it’s one of his “regrets” that he won’t see the current president’s “continued implosion.”

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