When Left is Right

Maddow was, according to her parents, a curious, serious child who never spoke baby talk. When her mother, Elaine, would walk into the kitchen to prepare breakfast, the 4-year-old Rachel would be perched on a stool, with her nightgown and bed socks on, reading the newspaper. Maddow remembers when she was 7, standing in front of their black-and-white television during the 1980 election and loathing Ronald Reagan, although she is not sure why now: "All I remember is the feeling of dislike," she says, laughing. "Maybe I have reverse-engineered it into my memory." As a teenager, her dreams revolved around basketball, swimming and volleyball—she wanted to be an Olympic athlete until a serious injury dashed her hopes. She was a fierce performer who insisted on playing through injuries and amassed a collection of crutches of varying heights. When she wanted to learn to ride a bicycle without training wheels, she circled the streets day and night. Her father, Bob, says it took one weekend. Her success has delighted, but not surprised, her parents. At least not in the way her sexuality did.

When Maddow came out as a lesbian at 17, she announced it by putting up posters in the bathroom of her freshman dorm at Stanford, a place she had found to be surprisingly homophobic. It was January 1991, and on the posters she made a sarcastic reference to the first Gulf war, which was just beginning, then suddenly she declared she was gay (the implication: deal with it). "I didn't want any drama," she says. "I didn't want any personal touchy-feely BS from anybody. I just wanted to get it over, and make a joke about it, and move on. It was such an obnoxious thing to do when I think about it. Why did I think anybody in my freshman dorm would care? I was 90 percent attitude."

Someone else cared: her parents, whom she hadn't yet told. When an article about her outing ran in the student newspaper, someone mailed it to them anonymously. They were shocked. Elaine said it was difficult "intellectually, as well as emotionally," because she was brought up as a strict Roman Catholic. As parents, they were protective: "It was worrisome because of the idea she would encounter prejudice and bias in her life—and I am sure she has. Life is hard enough without having to deal with a lot of prejudices," Elaine said. "We worked it through somehow. We just want her to be safe."

Today, the most important thing in Maddow's life is Mikula, 50, her partner for the past 10 years. They met when Mikula—who is warm, friendly and curvaceous, with vivid green eyes and blond hair—needed a yard boy. Mutual friends recommended Maddow, who was then cleaning out buckets at a coffee-bean factory. When Mikula opened the door of her house near Northampton, Mass., Maddow fell in love instantly: "It was irrational and spiritual and unexpected, and there was a moment where it was like time stopped and it was just like, OK, my whole life is different now." Their first date was at a shooting range—they fired muskets, pistols and rifles and threw tomahawks. Mikula says Maddow was so "unbelievable" with the AR-15 that people stopped to watch. Today, the couple live in Mikula's house with their Labrador, Poppy, and Maddow commutes, spending weeknights in Manhattan. She says their relationship "is the thing about which I am most proud and most protective. And if it made sense for my relationship with Susan that I needed to stop being on TV, and stop being on the radio, and go live full time in the Upper Peninsula in Michigan and raise chickens, we'd go live in the Upper Peninsula and raise chickens. It's the single clearest thing in my life."

Recently, Mikula, who is also an accountant, has been struggling with whether to become a full-time artist. She was up late a few days ago, talking to Maddow on the phone about her anxieties and fears. Maddow listened, then said: "It's not about any of that. It's about the fable you want to write about your own life."

Maddow has her own fable. On Nov. 5, when the clock clicks 9 p.m. and "The Rachel Maddow Show" begins, her "tired and cranky staff" has either gone home or settled into their seats in the control room to monitor the broadcast. A calm and focused Maddow is made up and wearing one of her identical pantsuits (she refuses to say who the designer is for fear of "insulting them"). As an interview closes, she turns to a camera in the chilly, large, red-white-and-blue-splashed studio she broadcasts from and looks directly into the lens. This election, she says with a grin, has destroyed many archaic ideas. There is triumph in her voice: "The idea that America is too flawed, too scarred by racism to elect a black president? That idea is over. When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran said back in April that neither a woman nor a black man could ever get elected in a country like this? How satisfying is it to prove that guy wrong? The idea that liberals can't succeed on television? That's over. Yes, we can." It's a fable for a new age.

© 2008