Senator Tammy Baldwin has made history throughout almost every stage of her nearly four-decade career.
Along with being the first out LGBTQ+ woman elected to the House of Representatives in 1998 (where, with Barney Frank, she cofounded the Congressional LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus in 2008) and the first out LGBTQ+ person elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012, Baldwin was also the first woman from Wisconsin to serve in each of those roles.
And yet, when she was first elected to political office at the age of 24, Baldwin’s sexuality was not a history-making event. “I was the third gay person elected to the Dane County board,” she told me. “I look back sometimes at that experience and wonder would I have had the courage to be ‘The First’, if I hadn’t have had these incredible role models who had at least paved the way for me.” They encouraged Baldwin to be open about her queerness and gave her real, tangible examples of what an out LGBTQ+ politician looked like — a rarity in the mid-80s.
“It is a new world and that is pretty amazing to have witnessed in a short period of time. But we still have a long way to go.”
This interview was originally record in September 2021. It has been edited and condense.
Jeffrey Masters: From the very beginning, your career has been defined by firsts, either as the first woman or the first LGBTQ+ person in many roles. Were you known as the gay Congressperson, the gay Senator? How much was that a part of your identity in the public sector?
Tammy Baldwin: That’s so interesting because the first office I ever ran for was the Dane County Board of Supervisors. And I was the third gay person elected to the Dane County board. And I look back sometimes at that experience and wonder would I have had the courage to be the first, if I hadn’t have had these incredible role models who had at least paved the way for me. And then thereafter, I was the first openly gay person elected to the state legislature, and the first, but I had had these incredible role models, and it’s hard to be it if you can’t see it. And so I remember just seeing their leadership, and they also encouraged me to run, into run out, and sort of said, “You’re not going to be in the closet. You have company here.” So that’s kind of the ancient history that a lot of people don’t know.
Let me tell you about a time when I was running for the state legislature. And every story written about my candidacy was, can a gay woman win? Are the voters ready? And it was all about that. It was also the year of women in politics. Remember 1992? When Anita Hill and all of that, and everyone was running for office? So I got asked a lot about being the first woman, the first out lesbian. And I finally sort of had a conversation with some of the reporters locally who were going to be covering me for the whole race. And so they were coming back and coming back, and I said, “It’s fair to write that story once, can the gay person win? What’s your gay agenda, whatever it is, but it’s not fair to write it every single time.
And I’m running to be a representative for all my constituents. And I have a very broad, a very progressive agenda that has to do with jobs and health care and quality childcare and mental health services and all sorts of things I work on to this day.” And I think they did get better at it. Each of the reporters who was sort of covering me realized that that was a fair request.
JM: That’s interesting that you brought up being the third gay person in that role when you were first elected. I feel like it’s distasteful to ask, but I was wondering if you considered not being out at that time?
TB: Well, here’s the issue. And that is that when I was campaigning, my campaign literature said where I stood on local issues affecting the LGBTQ community, but nobody at the doors when I knocked on their doors and said, I want you to vote for me. I want you to elect me to the County Board. I’m working on this and all of these things. Nobody ever said, are you gay? And so it’s trying to figure out how do I be true to, I’m running as an out lesbian. It just doesn’t necessarily come up in conversation, out as the reporters, the media covers it, but not necessarily the average voter who you’re having a conversation with. The closest I came to sort of putting it in their face is just talking about how our county needed stronger anti-discrimination policies and that I would be pushing to that.
JM: Now you’re not the only queer person in Senate. There’s two in the Senate. There’s nine in the House of Representatives. It’s kind of amazing, but early on were you required to speak up on behalf of all gay people? Were they turning to you at meetings and saying like, “Hey, Senator, you’re gay. What do gay people think about this?”
TB: Actually, it was kind of different. When I was in the House of Representatives, one of the things that I really wanted to do was make myself available for conversations with colleagues of both parties to be able to get them to voting yes on the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act, to get them to a place where they could vote yes, for back then it was the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, now it’s the Equality Act, and try to prevent passage in Congress of an anti-marriage bill that was floated, or actually constitutional amendment, I think, well, that was at the state level mostly, but it’s what I often sit down and talk about, say end of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. It was really interesting because what I would find out oftentimes is that particularly my Republican colleagues would say, I have a cousin, or I have a son, or whatever, who’s gay, and yet my district is so opposed to this, and I’m getting so many letters, et cetera. And then I sort of walked through, well, how do I get them to yes, they must care about their family member, maybe they’d be encouraged to know that many of the big corporations in their district have already passed nondiscrimination policies and would have their back if they voted yes. You sort of figure out, but yeah, they would ask candid questions of me. Not what do gays think about this, but how can I explain this vote to my constituency?
JM: You mentioned the Equality Act a few times. And just to be completely honest, I am not optimistic that it will pass in the current Senate. Are you?
TB: Well, I’ll tell you a couple of things. One is right now, the rules of the Senate provide that to pass substantive legislation like the Equality Act, we need 60 votes. And we only have 50 Democrats, 49 of which are signed onto the Equality Act. So we’d need either all 50 Democrats plus 10 Republicans, or maybe 11 Republicans and that one Democrat doesn’t vote yes, I don’t know, but that’s the current rules. And that’s what all of us as advocates are working to achieve. And I’ve been meeting one-on-one with Republicans who have either a track record of having supported ENDA in the past and might look at a broader bill, which is necessary because of the lack of protections in the states, or want to get to yes because they have a loved one they want to protect, or want to get to yes because they want to be able to say I was on the right side of history.
Whatever their reason, I’ve been sort of meeting one-on-one with individuals, to see if we can get close to that 10. I think if we could even get five, frankly, I think there’d be some momentum of, okay, I wouldn’t be alone in supporting this. So it would bring some others over the finish line. Now, then there’s the other prospect. The other track is there’s a number of bills that are being stymied right now because of the filibuster and the 60-vote requirement. And the question is, are we going to confront that? I, for one, support getting rid of the filibuster, getting rid of that 60-vote majority, or creating reforms that don’t allow the minority party to prevent forward progress. So we will probably end up having that debate maybe sooner rather than later. And it might not necessarily be around the Equality Act. It may be something else, voting rights or the debt ceiling or who knows. But we’re going to get to it.
JM: You think this year?
TB: In terms of the filibuster, I think we’ll start seriously. We’ll have to.
JM: So to my question about your optimism, that the Equality Act will pass. Do you think it will pass in President Biden’s first term in office?
TB: I wouldn’t describe myself as optimistic. I’d just describe myself as hopeful and working really hard to get there.
JM: When it comes to these more recent advances, marriage equality, again, but also more recently Bostock v. Clayton County about LGBTQ employment discrimination, I think that I perhaps naively would have looped these in with the way that I thought about Roe v. Wade, that they were just settled law. And yet with this new restrictive law in Texas, Senate Bill 8, and the subsequent declining by the Supreme Court to delay implementation, we’re seeing how fragile these things are. How worried are you? And do you think we should be, that we may go backwards on these advances that do concern the LGBTQ community?
TB: We always have to be vigilant, but I feel as though with regard to marriage equality, that all of the predicted ways in which the sky would fall and people would be. Think of all the arguments we were hearing during the efforts to get marriage equality. None of the doomsday situations that people talked about have come true. And that’s why I think it’s probably under less threat than some of the other advances that we’ve seen.
JM: I mean, using marriage equality, as an example, Barack Obama ran for his first term being opposed to marriage equality. And now years later it’s unthinkable that any Democratic politician wouldn’t support it. That is what we’ve seen from the outside, but you have the unique experience of having worked in Washington throughout this very quick change. Were there indicators that you saw in Washington that there was this change on the horizon?
TB: Oh, interesting. I mean, look, I remember when I first came into the House of Representatives, there was not a single federal statute that referenced the community. And I remember vividly coming back from the White House on the day that President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act. And I was doing a little social media video with a staff member. And so I said, “It’s hard to fathom that this is the first time that our community is now reflected in federal statute.” And after we finished recording, the staff person said, I think you made a mistake, then it was Congresswoman Baldwin, “I think you made a mistake, Congresswoman. I think it’s the first time this president signed something into law that mentioned the LGBTQ community.” I said, “Nope. It just happens to be the first time ever.”
Think how far we’ve come since then. Then we did hate crimes. We did the repeal of don’t ask, don’t tell, and a number of executive orders which aren’t statute, but et cetera. And then the court in marriage equality, and now we have at least a part of the Equality Act enshrined in case law, dealing with employment. And so all of those things, it’s such great strides, and partly through legislation, partly through court cases, but it is a new world. And that is pretty amazing to have witnessed in a short period of time. But we still have a long way to go.
JM: When it comes to working with politicians across the aisle, I understand having policy disagreements, but when someone is lying about the results of the presidential election, how do you just ignore that in order to get anything else done with these politicians?
TB: You don’t ignore it. It’s very serious. Part of leadership is truth-telling. Part of leadership is also pointing out when there is a big lie, and it’s being perpetrated. And I would say it’s not insignificant the amount of time I spend trying to either tamp back at conspiracy theories around the coronavirus pandemic or the big lie about the last elections. We have got to rely on facts, and we have to push back when misinformation is flying around.
JM: And so with the big lie about the election, does it feel less feasible working across the aisle now, compared to when you first joined the Senate?
TB: It varies so much from issue to issue. I’ll tell you the one thing I would say is that over the course of time where I’ve seen ramping up of partisanship, it seems like there’s more issues and more legislative measures that say Mitch McConnell and the Republicans want to say this issue is what divides Democrats and Republicans, we must stop it. But as we saw on infrastructure, as we saw on a number of other pandemic response under the Trump administration that Congress worked together on, there are things we can work together on. But it almost rests on Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy not saying this is the dividing line between Democrats and Republicans. And so you’re seeing that right now on the continuing resolution to keep the government open and raising the debt ceiling. These are things we all did together in a different era.
JM: I know that you do work with the Victory Fund, which helps to increase the number of LGBTQ elected officials. And one of my favorite stats of theirs is that queer men run for office at a higher rate compared to women, but queer women win a bigger percentage of the elections when they do run. The most recent stat is that queer cis women win their races 69% of the time. I think that’s pretty remarkable. Not to put you on the spot, but do you have a grand theory for why that is? Why queer cis women win their elections at higher rates?
TB: I mean, I think those track some of the, especially the early data about women running for office, there’s all sorts of reasons of folks who have looked at gender in politics. Women don’t run for office, feeling like, “Well, I haven’t mastered all the issues.” If it’s a part-time office, it’s like, “Well, I’m just beginning my career, they’ll notice that I’m away a lot.” Or, “I want to wait till my children are grown.” Right. And so those probably are the big three that women will say. Guys don’t necessarily say the same thing. It’s like, “Oh, I’ll learn on the job.” And, “Hey, my boss will, maybe they’ll see me away, but they’ll know that I’m networking, so I’m probably going to bring in more business because I’m meeting all these people, these important powerful people.” And oftentimes they have somebody else who’s raising the kids more hands-on, and they’re not saying, I’m going to wait until my kids are in college before I run for office. I can just note that about my colleagues, to know that it’s a different proposition to be a mom with toddlers in the Senate and being a dad with toddlers in the Senate.
JM: But what about that part about queer women winning the races out at a higher rate?
TB: Yeah. So what I’m getting to is that when women do run, they have overcome all of these things, which probably means they did study up a whole bunch, and they were very planful about it. And so a lot more thought and preparation probably went into doing it, and therefore, a higher success rate.
JM: I also think that one of the consistent things throughout modern history is that we want politicians who are authentic. And when you come out of the closet, there’s this perception that like, “Oh, Tammy’s out about her sexuality. She’s such an authentic person. We can trust her.”
TB: Yes. Here’s my favorite part about that. When I was running for the state legislature, I ran into a fellow who I’d known on a different set of issues, I think veteran’s issues. And there was some article that he had read that was obviously the first time he was learning that I was an out lesbian. And so he came up to me and he said, “I saw that article.” And I thought, here comes trouble, when I saw him coming up. But he said, “If you can be honest about that, you’ll be honest about everything, and you have my vote.”
But yeah, I think it was not only authenticity, but integrity and truthfulness. Yeah, I’m not hiding anything.
Click here to listen to the full interview on the LGBTQ&A podcast.
LGBTQ&A features interviews with the most interesting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in the world. Hosted and produced by Jeffrey Masters. @jeffmasters1
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