The life of Rachel Maddow

How a Rhodes scholar and AIDS activist became America’s most unlikely cable television host.

Rachel Maddow might be the most unlikely cable television host in the country.

Combining humor, empathy, and some serious research, Rachel Maddow was the first of a new kind of less angry political television host. She’s also the first openly gay host.

Maddow is known for being extremely intelligent — she earned a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, and it’s obvious in her lengthy, well-researched monologues that she opens her show with every day. She’s also more civil than some of her peers. She’s chided Pat Buchanan for telling another commentator to “shut up,” and she refuses to act as a referee while guests fight, unlike on her competitor’s shows.

Maddow did not come straight to journalism. Friends thought she’d be a professor or an activist. But after deciding that she liked explaining things to people on a local radio station, it was only a matter of time. She went from that radio station to a bigger radio station, to television, to the face of MSNBC.

As Ben Wallace-Wells put it for Rolling Stone: “What Maddow is trying to build is a different channel for liberal anger, an outsider’s channel, one that steers the viewer’s attention away from the theater of politics and toward the exercise of power, which is to say toward policy.”

Here’s her life so far.

Rachel Maddow was born on April 1, 1973.

She grew up in a centrist house in Castro Valley, east of San Francisco — Maddow later described it as a “middle-class, suburban upbringing.” Both her parents, Bob and Elaine, were Democrats, but they voted for President Ronald Reagan.

Maddow has no memory of reading children’s books, instead she inhaled local newspapers and her dad’s law school texts.

She went to Castro Valley High School.

In high school, she was athletic. She was particularly good at swimming, basketball, and volleyball. But when she injured her shoulder in her final year, she had to decide whether to carry on as an athlete, which meant getting surgery and delaying college, or to push on. She pushed on.

In 1990, when she was 17, she enrolled at Stanford University to study public policy.

Roger Noll, Stanford’s director of public policy at the time, said Maddow was the sort of brilliant student who appeared only every few years. Her professor Debra Satz often showed her students Maddow’s undergraduate thesis on changing perceptions of AIDS.

Early on as a freshman, Maddow came out in an open letter she stuck up in bathroom stalls in her dormitory. She said she wrote the letter so that anyone who was homophobic would have a chance to be open about how they felt, and she could face any hostility head on.

The university’s newspaper, The Stanford Daily, published a story about it and described her as was one of two openly gay freshmen. When a reporter later asked whether the other person was her girlfriend, she said, “Funnily enough, only one other person was out, and she was not one of the many girls I was sleeping with.”

As Jill McDonough, a college friend of Maddow’s, told Rolling Stone: “No one at Stanford was saying they were gay — there were no other out lesbians — and she saw that it was a lie. The choice was, ‘I’m not going to be a hypocrite. I’m going to have courage.’”

A clipping of that article was mailed to her parents, which was how they found out she was gay. They didn’t take it well right away.

For a year after college, she worked as a prison AIDS activist with Act Up and the AIDS Legal Referral Panel in San Francisco.

“We were taking this overwhelming, maddening, depressing, very sad thing that my community and my city were going through and figuring out what pieces of it we could bite off and fix, finding winnable fights in something that felt like a morass and was terrible,” she told The New Yorker.

For years she would continue working with AIDS groups and studying how people perceived and dealt with it.

After several stops, she ended up finishing her doctorate, on AIDS health care outcomes in prisons, in western Massachusetts. She told The Nation she wanted to live somewhere where’d she be unhappy.

“And I have no interest in New England, hate winter, don’t like the country, not fond of animals,” she said.

Maddow was friends with Cory Booker at Stanford and Oxford.

In 1995, Maddow moved to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar — she was the first openly gay women to do so. She studied AIDS in prisons for her doctorate.

She was also on a Marshall Scholarship, for “intellectually distinguished young Americans” likely to be future leaders.

Despite her scholarships and undergraduate success, she felt out of place and put her studies on hold. She moved to London and worked for an organization called AIDS Treatment Project.

 

Booker, now a New Jersey senator, said that while he was surprised she went the way she did, she was always about making a contribution.

“She wasn’t just about giving commentary; she was an activist,” he told New York Magazine in 2008. “She wanted to change the world.”

After getting her Ph.D., she continued working as an activist. But to pay the bills, because she wasn’t “a trust-fund kid,” she delivered packages, did yard work, and cleaned out buckets at a coffee-bean factory.

When Maddow worked with AIDS advocacy organizations, she wasn’t particularly interested in politics, but she did donate to Harvey Gantt’s campaign for North Carolina’s Senate.

His opponent, Jesse Helms, vehemently opposed funding AIDS research because of his views on homosexuality, according to The New York Times.

She does vote now, at the voting booths in Massachusettes. But it’s not a lengthy process. She registers for a party right before primaries and unregisters right after.

Maddow had a life-changing year in 1999. She started dating the artist Susan Mikula …

The couple met in Massachusetts, while Maddow was still finishing her thesis. Mikula was looking for someone to clean her yard, and Maddow applied.

It was love at first sight. “Bluebirds and comets and stars. It was absolutely a hundred percent clear,” Maddow told The New Yorker.

It helped that Mikula had her initials in metal leaf on her jeep’s door — which Maddow, a fan of kitsch, told New York magazine was very hot.

Their first date was at “Ladies Day on the Range” hosted by the National Rifle Association. They went because they both like shooting, though Mikula is the only one with the hand-eye coordination for it, Maddow told Rolling Stone.