WHEN SHE SET foot on the Stanford campus on the first day of her freshman year, Rachel already had some inkling about the kinds of careers that weren’t a natural fit for her, which included the sciences, business, literature, and math. Building on the volunteer work she’d done at the AIDS clinics during high school, she knew she wanted to help people, specifically those who were disenfranchised, so she chose classes that would help her learn how to do just that. It didn’t take long to realize that her chosen major would fall under public policy.
Her first year turned out to be a rough one. “I was definitely one of those kids in college who did not know how to do college,” she admitted. She signed up for an art course during her first semester, and the professor handed out a reading list and a reserved reading list. Rachel didn’t know how that worked; she thought she could take out the reserved books and return them at will. So she checked out the entire reserved list and lugged all the books back to her dorm room, figuring she’d get to them in the next couple of weeks and that she could renew them if that didn’t happen.
When she tossed the books on her bed, she didn’t know that books on the reserved list were strictly for in-library use—there was typically only one copy of each title available for a class of two hundred students—for a half hour or an hour tops, and that fines were accruing by the minute. In pre-email days, college libraries typically slipped overdue notices into students’ college post office boxes, so when Rachel got around to checking her mail a couple of days later, her box was filled with overdue notices in bright fluorescent colors.
“I had no idea how any of this worked,” she said years later, and felt her cheeks burning when she brought the books back, certain everyone was talking about her. She ended up paying a fine of several dollars.
She lived in Paloma in a freshman dorm before she moved to Theta Chi, a fraternity whose claim to fame was a vending machine that dispensed bottles of beer. She then moved to Columbae, a dorm that served vegetarian meals and espoused “social change through non-violent action” based on Quaker values.
Rachel felt a real sense of freedom for the first time in her life, just from being away from conservative Castro Valley and out from under her parents’ roof. And being on her own was intoxicating.
But she was insecure about the fact that she had gotten in at all.
“I was not expecting to get into Stanford,” she admitted. “I felt like a criminal, like I had stolen some more deserving person’s spot.”
As it turned out, she wasn’t too far off the mark: Thanks to a peek at her admissions file she discovered that she had indeed just made it into Stanford by the skin of her teeth. The chance to view her file was the result of a lawsuit against the Admissions Department. All undergraduates were allowed to examine their files for one day only, and it was there that she learned that she was the fourth-to-last student to be accepted into the class of fourteen hundred. “[Originally], I didn’t make the cut, but somebody in the Admissions Department liked the combination of different things that I had done, liked my essay, and said that I maybe had leadership potential,” she said.
She was disappointed to discover that Stanford wasn’t the bastion of liberal values that she had expected. “Stanford was all bright eyed and bushy tailed and into in-line skating and jogging and email,” she said, none of which interested her.
She was also uncomfortable whenever a fellow student took it for granted that she was straight. What was worse, she was caught totally off guard by the homophobia she encountered from fellow students and faculty. “I was frustrated by the casual antigay stuff that I saw among college freshmen,” she said.
She had met another student who had recently come out as a lesbian, who came from a family of Christian fundamentalists—her father was a minister—and Rachel was impressed by her actions. If she can be out, I can be out, she thought.
She also had an ulterior motive: “I wanted to attach my face to those [homophobic] comments and see if they still wanted to say them,” she said.
So in January 1991, Rachel decided to come out of the closet. First she came out to a few friends who reacted positively and wanted to know why she hadn’t told them before. “I had dropped all these hints,” she said. “I was waiting for somebody to ask me.” She was greatly relieved, and they discussed the pros and cons of coming out publicly; her friends wholeheartedly encouraged her.
Rachel was sick with the flu at the time, but at one point she just decided to get it over with by posting flyers in the bathroom stalls of her freshman dorm. In the flyer, she broke the ice by questioning the wisdom of the First Gulf War, which had recently started, and then dove in to announce that she was a lesbian. “I wanted everyone to know at once, and also to provoke people who couldn’t handle it,” she said.
Her dorm mates supported her decision and cheered her on, which bolstered her resolve to live openly. “It was empowering,” she said, “there was a posse of people behind me.”
But she was caught off guard when she received no blowback from the antigay contingent. “It didn’t lead to any soul-searching conversations with previously homophobic people the way that my seventeen-year-old mind thought that it would,” she admitted.
Years later, she marveled at her chutzpah. “It was such an obnoxious thing to do,” she said. “Why did I think anybody in my freshman dorm would care? I was ninety percent attitude.”
Later on, she attributed that attitude to youth and arrogance. “I thought that everything I did had to make a statement, I had a confrontational mind-set,” she continued. “My attitude was not to try to bring people along gently and persuade people and show people by my evident humanity their callousness, I just wanted to throw something up in people’s faces.”
So she took the next step. A couple of months later she decided to come out to the entire Stanford community in the most public way possible, via an article in the college newspaper, The Stanford Daily.
Jill McDonough, a friend whom Rachel had confided in early on, admired her courage. “Rachel made one choice when she was seventeen, and it was a domino, it made all the other choices clear,” she said. “No one at Stanford was saying they were gay, and she saw that it was a lie. She decided, ‘I’m not going to be a hypocrite. I’m going to have courage.’”
The only other publicly out lesbian in her class, Saydeah Howard, agreed to also come out to the entire school with her, so Rachel called up an editor at The Stanford Daily and asked if they were interested in the story.
After the article was published on March 4, 1991, the reaction was more positive than she had expected, though several readers assumed that Rachel and Saydeah were lovers. “She was not one of the many girls I was sleeping with,” Rachel said years later when asked about the story.
Though the entire campus now knew she was gay, she hadn’t mustered up the courage to tell her parents the news. As staff writer Robin Mathison put it, “Seeing no urgent need to tell them, [Rachel] said she [had] decided to wait on it.”
She wanted to wait a few days; Rachel had planned to visit Castro Valley that weekend and decided she would finally tell her parents on Friday, March 8. The editor had scheduled the article to run the following week. But then the article was published a week early, on Monday, March 4, and someone clipped the story and sent it to her parents.
The fallout was immediate and intense, and Rachel doubted her decision when she realized how much she had hurt her parents. “They were in tears,” she said. “They’re very Catholic and were worried that I was going to go to hell and would have a hard life. But they were also upset that they had raised somebody so callous and nasty and disrespected them enough to not tell them but tell the newspaper. They didn’t deserve it, and I don’t blame them. I was obnoxious.”
Her mother later admitted Rachel’s announcement came as a shock and that she and Bob struggled with the news both “intellectually, as well as emotionally,” said Elaine. “It was worrisome because of the idea she would encounter prejudice and bias in her life. Life is hard enough without having to deal with a lot of prejudices. We just wanted her to be safe.”
Rachel returned to campus, and it took some time and soul-searching, but she and her parents eventually worked it out.
Once the dust had settled, Rachel resumed her saber-rattling on behalf of a wide variety of causes and movements. She joined and organized several gay and lesbian groups, focusing on the AIDS movement and helping its victim. “I wanted to be helpful,” she said. “I felt like [the AIDS movement] was a righteous thing that I had some connection to, which meant doing work in prevention and awareness.” She became involved with several campus groups to promote gay and lesbian interests and AIDS education, and she helped run the on-campus Ye Olde Safer Sex Shoppe, where students could pick up condoms and contraceptives and learn how to prevent the spread of the HIV virus.
Rachel also helped out with an annual condom-rating contest during National Condom Week, and she knew that humor would help deliver her message far more effectively. “We want to make it fun and want people to see the variety that is available,” she said, adding that it was not necessary to test them out for real in order to vote for their favorites. As she drew up the ballots for the contest, her humor was evident even back then as she tried to steer voters toward lesser-known brands. “They’re butt-white, clinical, and smell like old tires,” she said. “Why would you want to roll a rubber tire on your schlonger?” During the actual contest, she advised that students first give them a close visual examination and then pull on them, blow them up, and/or slide them onto their fingers before proceeding to real-world experiments.
Her organizing and community-gathering gene also went into overdrive. She joined the Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Community Center at the university, signing on to help run a weekly social night for lesbian and bisexual students, which would provide them with ample social opportunities while recruiting them to help out with various other activities offered at the center.
She also helped out with protests when conservative speakers arrived for campus events. William F. Buckley Jr.’s appearance attracted hundreds of conservative students and professors, as well as citizens from the wider community, and the vast majority showed up wearing business attire and suits. Rachel gathered together a few friends from the gay and lesbian center, and they showed up at his talk holding signs that read, “Thank you for wearing a suit and tie in support of gay rights.”
She also crashed an event called Conservative Coming Out Day, stole the group’s sign, and changed it to “Sexually Frustrated Conservative Mud Wrestling Day.”
Undoubtedly, she was the most visible out lesbian on campus, and that, combined with her involvement in the gay and lesbian organizations, meant that students who were harassed by other students, faculty, or administration because of their sexual orientation flocked to her for advice. Many, understandably, didn’t want to file complaints or charges against their harassers, but foreshadowing the #MeToo movement that would arise nearly three decades later, Rachel provided a welcome and sympathetic sounding board while gently encouraging them to file complaints.
She was also harassed on at least one occasion. Not long after her coming-out story was published, Rachel was at a fraternity party and was helping a female friend who had had too much to drink. A guy at the party yelled at her, calling her a dyke, and physically attacked her before others pulled him off of her. “I was terrified,” she said. “It was a mildly confrontational situation, but because he knew I was gay he used that as an excuse to escalate it into a violent situation. I had no idea what to do.” Shortly after, she signed up for a self-defense class.
In the fall of 1992, she traveled to London for a term so she could study how health and public policy played out on an international stage. She found the students at the London School of Economics to be vociferous political activists, in stark contrast to her peers at Stanford. “It was integral to what they were studying and doing in school,” she said, adding that she developed a real affection for London on her trip.
Rachel was also starting to exhibit the complexity that would color her views and perplex even her biggest fans later on. At Stanford, she wasn’t shy about stating that she thought that people who considered themselves to be politically correct could actually be a threat to society. “A ‘PC’ agenda is dangerous,” she said. “Nobody’s allowed to say homophobic comments, so it goes unchecked.” She added that people with antigay views should be able to voice them out loud in public and get it out in the open, in part so that she could learn where their opinions originated from and try to educate them.
She found that not everyone was accepting of her out status, particularly in academic circles and even in her own department. Professors and students in her public policy classes tended to lean more conservative than liberal, and as a result she found herself espousing radical views and positions in classes and seminars in order to defend her views. “It was difficult to be out as a lesbian and out without being radical,” she said. “It was hard to be who I was in that kind of academic setting, but I also think that taught me how to articulate my positions clearly and argue for myself in a way that I might not have done otherwise.”
Rachel spent her summers working at a variety of jobs and internships, one year at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics in Philadelphia and another in Washington, D.C., working with the National Leadership Council on Health Policy Reform, a think tank that specialized in developing health public policy. They put her to work on a project that was supposed to last until she had to return to Stanford. She soon realized that another nonprofit organization in the city had finished work on a similar project a few months earlier. Her supervisor couldn’t find another project for her to work on, so Rachel turned her attention to helping launch a local office for the Lesbian Avengers, a new organization founded in New York City with the aim of improving the lives of queer women nationwide, and her co-workers even pitched in to help with media contacts and outreach and press materials.
After the internship ended she returned to campus. Despite her studies and her friends, she still felt like an outsider at Stanford. Even though she had wanted to feel like an outsider in high school, she felt that she was accepted by her peers for her frequent polarizing views, when her rebukes against the administration and social mores had received knowing laughs and recognition. That wasn’t the case in college. “I didn’t feel very welcome at Stanford,” she admitted.
“I never felt like I really fit in, so I decided that as long as I’m here, I’d like to use the incredible resources of this place to accrue some assets, to try to build something that I could use in this fight that I felt ethically and culturally to be part of.”
In addition to everything else that was going on for Rachel in college, it didn’t take long for class issues to rear their ugly head. Back in high school, she had always assumed she came from an upper-middle-class family, but once she arrived at Stanford and encountered fellow students who had attended some of the country’s elite private schools and clearly came from extremely wealthy families, she was caught off guard. “I felt culturally alienated,” she admitted.
She found her antidote in several arenas. One was her studies. “I put together coursework that would help me be the best AIDS activist around, and I wanted to get better at it,” she said. “I wasn’t aiming at the future because I wasn’t thinking ahead. When you know people who are dying young, you don’t think, What do I wanna be when I grow up?”
And she chose her courses with this in mind. “I took statistics courses because I thought I needed to be better with the statistical part of the arguments, and I took philosophy courses because that was about rigor in argumentation,” she said. “I took history and politics because I wanted to understand the context of what I was doing in public policy, and I did a concentration in health policy, even though it’s the most boring freaking legal policy you could possibly study.”
So when it became time to declare a major at the end of her sophomore year, she looked at the wide variety of classes she had taken so far, discovered that she had the most credits in public policy, and used that to declare her major.
Her thesis topic explored how dehumanization affected AIDS patients and activists, or “how people can have a strict moral code about how other people ought to be treated and still treat people very badly,” she explained.
Even though her fellow students could be indifferent or outright hostile toward her, her professors adored her. “She was a brilliant student,” said Roger Noll, professor emeritus of economics at Stanford and former director of its Public Policy Program, who worked closely with Rachel. “[She was] one of those that only come around every few years or so.”
“Maddow was one of the dozen best students I have taught at Stanford,” said John Cogan, a professor in the Public Policy Department. “I have never met any student who has her level of commitment and dedication to public service, bar none.”
The late professor Susan Okin agreed. “Rachel has a sense of purpose and strength of character that I am confident will carry her far,” she said. “She has increased my faith in the next generation.”
Her senior thesis won the university’s Robert M. Golden Medal for Excellence in the Humanities and the Creative Arts. “I still send students to that thesis as a model,” said Debra Satz, faculty director, Bowen McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford.
To supplement her college workload, Rachel began to volunteer with the San Francisco chapter of ACT UP, an acronym for AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. Founded in 1987, the group regularly held demonstrations in major cities across the country. Her work with ACT UP thrilled her and she was able to put her academic knowledge to work before she graduated. Through the organization, she also became involved with a group of people who believed the same things that she did. She was finally an activist, and it was her ACT UP work that convinced her to cram in as many credits as possible so she could graduate early.
Besides, she wasn’t thrilled being at Stanford; coming out had exacerbated her feeling of being an outsider in a negative way. Money was also an issue: she had amassed a significant amount of student debt, so by graduating early she could cut down on an additional year’s worth of tuition and college expenses. After she came out of the closet, her relationship with her family grew tenuous, so she was forced to become as self-reliant as possible, supporting herself and paying for tuition and living expenses even though it was incredibly difficult at times. “Even as a nineteen-year-old, I decided to take care of myself as much as possible,” she said.
Because of the stress, she was sometimes tempted to quit school and fling herself into activist work, but she stuck it out because she was well aware of the value of a degree from a prestigious university. “[My Stanford degree] taught me how to write and speak in defense of a position, and what could count as evidence and what couldn’t,” she said years later.
At Stanford she also got a firsthand glimpse at how others would distort and misinterpret her work for years to come. “When I graduated, the head of my department stood up and thanked me for my work on women’s rights, and I didn’t do that at all,” she said.
She graduated with a 3.8 grade point average in just over three years, and word about her prowess was already starting to spread. She won an honorable mention in the Elie Wiesel Foundation Prize in Ethics Essay Contest, a yearly essay competition, for “Identifiable Lives: AIDS and the Response to Dehumanization,” which was subsequently published in An Ethical Compass: Coming of Age in the 21st Century, a collection of winning essays from the contest. She also won a John Gardner Public Service Fellowship, a program that would help support her while she spent her postgraduate year working for a low-paying nongovernmental organization or government job where she could focus her efforts working on AIDS policy and activism.
She already knew she wanted to live in San Francisco, so she moved to the city in 1993 and took a job at the AIDS Legal Referral Panel (ALRP) while continuing her activist work with ACT UP.
She was on her way and always attuned to spotting injustice from organizations as well as people. In the summer of 1992, she watched the Republican National Convention on TV with a few friends, in a way to help identify the enemy. One night, Pat Buchanan—a far-right Republican who had served as senior adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan—gave a speech where he declared a culture war against those who didn’t believe as he did, poking a God-fearing finger at everything the Left—and Rachel—held dear: environmental rights, feminism, abortion, and gay rights.
“I felt my country was declaring war on me,” she admitted.
Rachel viewed his words and ideas as fuel to help carry out her own mission as an activist. She couldn’t have predicted that at one point in the future, not only would she be working alongside Buchanan, but they’d be good friends.
For now, she flung herself into the world she loved, fighting for people who couldn’t fight for themselves.