Get Used to It: Ep. 63, "Voices of Our Lives: Tammy Baldwin"

hi i'm sheila cuell and coming up on get used to it we're going to have a one-on-one talk with united states congress member tammy baldwin don't go away [Applause] so [Music] hi i'm sheila kuala welcome to get used to it today we have a special treat for you uh if you watch the show you know that occasionally we do a series we call voices of our lives where we talk to a particularly wonderful individual from our community someone who has ascended to great fame and glory through their own talent and courage and today's guest is no exception we're really happy to have congressmember tammy baldwin from wisconsin many of you probably know that tammy served in the wisconsin state assembly for six years and in november 98 she was elected to the congress she's the first open gay or lesbian non-incumbent ever elected to that august some would say maybe not so august body but welcome tammy well it's delightful to be here really glad that you could be with us and kind of catch you on the fly while you're in los angeles thanks for doing this our viewers in these sort of one-on-one interviews are often i think very interested to know kind of where people came from their family where they grew up so who who raised you tell us a little bit about your family about where you grew up and then i'll ask more questions as we go along i was born and raised in the district that i now represent madison wisconsin is my home and born to my mother when she was 19 years old and an undergrad at the university of wisconsin-madison shortly thereafter she moved back in with her parents my grandparents and was raised in this wonderful sort of intergenerational household where i had a lot of input from from two generations of people and it was a wonderful experience we had a lot of affiliation with the university community my grandfather was a professor my grandmother was on the staff and as i mentioned my mother was a student and i got to see through all of their eyes the impact that institution had on our community but madison is a wonderful place to grow up it had some attributes of a bigger city probably because of the state capitol and because of the university even though it's a fairly moderate sized city as as they go so what kind of support did you get as a child i mean you seem to be a very confident person and certainly you're actually pretty young to be in the congress and often that kind of confidence reflects a kind of support or encouragement as a child what was it like for you growing up there's several things that i can look back at and sort of see where strengths or characteristics of members of my family were passed along let's say in one respect i remember a really strong work ethic in the family and my my grandfather was a scientist at the university and was in this tireless pursuit of the truth through his experiments and through his publishing and defense of his of his work and so i watched this man just in many ways almost obsessed with this search for scientific truths secrets that would unlock information that would help solve disease diseases and help us understand how the human body worked for what whatever good that could produce my grandmother was much more of a a creative soul her job at the university was the head costume designer at the university theater so she brought me behind stage and showed me you know how to take a bolt of fabric and turn it into an elizabethan costume or how to go from the drawing board to a suit of armor and you know it's magical experience for a young child my mother in perhaps because she was so young and divorced when i was just a couple months old i got to really watch her come of age in many ways as a child which is something that many children don't get to experience she struggled with being so young and having a young daughter and being recently divorced and i think as a very young child i did a lot of negotiating between her and her grandparents which gave me these tremendous skills for being in a legislative body where you're always negotiating between um various folks with different different issues and i would say that those three predominant characteristics really stuck with me as i as i grew up and and started applying those skills outside of a family context uh you've talked about your mom in terms of her activism and i don't know if that was well she was at the university or or later tell us a little more about her she taught me the politics of the streets and my grandparents were much more traditional in their approach to politics they would they had a concern they would write to their congress person my mother as many in her generation took to the streets and said you know there's something going wrong here and we have to speak out we have to do something about it and so as a young child one of my earliest memories of my mother's activism was actually being at a bus station with my grandparents and sort of waving to her as she and a number of friends from the university boarded a bus headed down to mississippi and they were participating in a civil rights march against racial segregation policies as i was a little bit older they became real involved in the anti-war movement and i i remember being in a car with my mother once and you know at every major corner on the university campus there would be people sitting with picket signs and literature you could pick up and read more what can you do and she said you know do this for the guys um with the picket signs so as a little kid you know like a little flower child i was learning the peace sign and and i saw her participate in in demonstrations on campus the university of wisconsin madison was one of the campuses that really had a a strong and loud voice and in marking its dissent with the policy to be involved in the vietnam war a little bit later on and by then i was approaching my teen years i my mother began to be more involved in the feminist movement and as i was remarking last night back when they called it women's lib before they um ever had um you know they were still in consciousness raising sessions and it was really interesting for me to then later learn about that period of time as an adult and then recollect my mother participating it and her eyes opening up to many of the double standards and inequities that she had endured in in her life but yes she taught me the the activist politics and i i remember her bringing me as a oh i must have been nine or so years old to the rock musical hair on its first tour and and i loved it and i learned all the words and i i think of how horrifying that must be to a parent of their 10 year old singing if you think about all the words of that musical a little bit distressing probably took more to my grandparents than my mother but but it for me captured through music the passion of that generation and i remember really searching as i approached adulthood for the chance to participate in something as meaningful as i saw their efforts on a multiple on multiple issues does it give you a kind of politic though i mean uh a lot of children it can kind of go either way they they tend to reject their parents politics whether they're conservative or progressive or radical and then sometime around in your 30s you look at yourself and you say oh there's an awful lot of my parents in me and their beliefs or what they gave to me what do you think you took away from your mother's activism i don't think i ever rebelled against it but i think given the examples that were offered to me as a youngster my grandparents model of political participation and my mothers what i tried to do is combine them all and to realize that you can be effective sometimes in the very traditional model and and other times the issue or the circumstances call for a different type of activism a different type of involvement and so when i tackle an issue today or you know in the past decade i've sort of felt like i've been given all these different tools and all these different ideas and sometimes my instinct may be to say well our real task right now is public education and so we should be doing the more media oriented visibility work and rallies might be exactly what we need to do right now or really we need to get the legislators hearing from people so letter writing campaigns is what we need to to organize right now and and so i feel like watching the strength of all these various ways of communicating um and and creating change helped inform uh my politics and my approaches to politics now but often there's a through line really in the way people view uh what they do or how they go about it i mean there there's certainly a range of of politics and often that relates to how you think things should get done for instance uh uh millions of people in this country are don't have medical insurance and uh many of us think that the the government needs to take responsibility for that i mean a lot of what i guess we call the the democratic ethic and i know that you have had a passion for social justice through your life do you find that that really informs your work absolutely and in fact that that issue specifically was the cornerstone of of my political career i i believe that in many ways our society has confirmed its belief and support in for example public education for all but we haven't the people have not yet insisted that their government say we need health care for all and and then when you talk about the strategy to get there and especially as we sit here at a time when there's over 43 million people in this country without insurance what i think of as as the foundation that needs to be laid to finally get that past is to give a voice to those 43 million people and so again i go back to my mother's uh more more more or less her approach to politics because i have just no question in my mind that if 43 million people could speak at once we could do it in a week you know that that that would be such a tidal wave that no one could ignore it and so the question then is you know how do we engage um more and more people into bringing their government around because that that's truly the way it should work so did you go to the same university in madison your grandfather was at in your grandmother was at and your mother went to did you go to the same school for law school i went to the university of wisconsin-madison but actually my grandfather was born in new york my grandmother was born in england my mother was born in new york city also before they all relocated to wisconsin and so i didn't follow i couldn't follow all of their educational paths the one escape i ever had from wisconsin just because after you know growing up there i wanted to get a taste of another part of the country i did my undergraduate work at smith college in northampton massachusetts and i had one semester and summer during those years where i studied in washington d.c as i was completing my political science or government major and and then returned and actually doing it that way was i think very helpful because i feel like i live in wisconsin and i live in madison by choice not because i was born there and just never got around to leaving and i very definitely chose to come home after my college years what was college like at smith oh it was it was a perfect choice for me i i didn't know it when i was choosing it in fact it was my rebellion i had wanted to go to harvard and i didn't get in and and so it was the fall back and uh i had qualms about going to an all-women's school and yet four reasons of learning just enhancing my self-esteem and my belief that i could do anything going to that institution was wonderful i mean all of the student leadership positions were occupied by young women all of the scholarships the awards the opportunities every role model you saw among the students were positions that women held and you just developed this belief that you could do anything you could aspire to anything that the faculty i had a double major in political science or government and mathematics had i been at any other university one percent of my faculty in the math department would have been female if you know by national standards at smith it was almost 50 50. and there i saw these brilliant mathematicians who were women and so at a time you know when you're 18 19 years old where it's so easy to i think be intimidated from asserting yourself and and aspiring to be anything i i got all the support in the world and it was a wonderful institution for me so tammy last night when you were talking to the crowd you mentioned that you had come out in your junior year at college so now we know that you were at smith and you're having a wonderful time and faculty as women and it's a really good place for you but something must have happened to trigger this i mean what happened in your life and how did this all come about and how did you feel about it you know it was really interesting there there's a longer story but in many ways it happened very suddenly for me sort of like you know a hammer hitting me on the head going oh my god this explains a whole lot of things but a lot of the longer part of the story was um my beginning to ask myself questions after a dear friend of mine was struggling to come out to me and not necessarily feeling safe enough yet to tell me but i had no question in my mind of what it was she was trying to tell me and and trying to understand what she was going through i think made me start to ask a lot of questions to myself and it was a just a very a powerful set of memories for me i she struggled so hard and in many ways her struggles uh to build trust to figure out a way to safely come out to me made it so much more easier for me to do because she almost had done some that painful stuff for me uh i feel like she gave me a great gift in that sense of being able to allow me to walk through that journey with her but still it had to be it had to be kind of a struggle for you to begin to tell people it was i i think it's also very important for me to go back in time and remember those because i think oftentimes after we come out and we've come out not only to our friends and family but to in the newspaper on television and with headlines and that we forget about that initial moment in which uh you're disclosing to the first person or the first family member and it was terrifying in each case i was really lucky in the responses i remember once being so nervous to tell one of my friends back in madison as i come out at smith college and i was home for a break and i sat down with my friend dana and she was so angry with me and it was why didn't you tell me three months ago i'm your best friend it wasn't i'm angry with the information you're telling me and you know so what how lucky i was my mother and my grandmother were both wonderful my grandfather had passed away before before i came out in their own unique ways my mother had a large circle of friends who were gay or lesbian in madison and after i graduated from college and returned to madison when i finally worked up the nerve early on in that summer to tell her oh she wanted to introduce me to all of her friends and and while we weren't of the same generation it was just so wonderful she'd have her dinner party and my mother would invite all of her gay and lesbian friends over and and yeah she was really hoping to do what she could to to make it easier because when i returned to madison i really didn't know anyone in the community and had to search to find a community i remember one of my favorite coming out stories at smith it was when i attended my first lesbian dance and i was going with my with my girlfriend and i was walking towards the student union and you know scared to death of of who would be there who would see me going there all of those things and i look and there's a bunch of protesters with picket signs marching in front of the student union and i'm like horrified that the first time i ever go to a dance i'm going to have to you know i don't know what i didn't know what was going to happen as i approached it was a group of protesters protesting the fact that the second floor of the student union wasn't accessible dikes with disabilities were out there marching saying we want to be able to go to the dance also and it was the name of their group protesting the college and its ability to accommodate people in wheelchairs and with other physical disabilities and you know i can't you can imagine the side relief i had like oh i should have a picket sign too but yeah it is it is important to sometimes go back and remember that each one of those steps was terrifying and then freeing terrifying and then freeing i remember the first time i came out in a newspaper article right after it was the first in-depth treatment of the issue after i was elected to the county board in in 1986 and i didn't know how my life would change the day before the major newspaper in the area would print my picture and my quotes in the interview and i was just terrified and and then all of the support that flowed from that article made me feel so much more free and every time it's that that juxtaposition of terror then joy so when you got back to madison what kind of work did you do i mean it sounds like you were engaged in or thinking about public policy or even electoral politics right away but was there a particular area that you worked in before you before you ran for office for the first time i had um a great sort of warm-up to running for political office i graduated from college and returned to madison and got an internship that summer in the governor's office governor anthony earl was our last democratic governor and he was working on advancing comparable with pay equity legislation through the legislature and i got a chance to be a policy intern in his office on that issue and this was cutting edge legislation this was one of the first states to really go through and look at not just equal pay for equal work but equal pay for comparable works what we were finding in those years is that yeah we had made a lot of progress when two people were working side by side in having pay equity but we had jobs that were dominated by female workers and jobs that were dominated by male workers that had similar levels of responsibility consequence of error supervisory responsibilities etc and the pay inequities were enormous and so this landmark legislation was going through i had a chance to work on that it was sort of my uh my my first sort of policy roll up the sleeves issue and then i also had a real keen interest in electoral politics and started thought well let's start with local races and i contacted my alder person and said i'd like to work on the city council races and you know not many people just call out of the blue and say they want to volunteer so i was put in charge of somebody's campaign without knowing a whole lot about what i was doing but just getting in there and demystifying what electoral politics was all about you know how do you communicate and how do you run a campaign and then i think that the best sort of demystification process for me was when i volunteered with the national women's political caucus to monitor women's issues at the city council and county board level and um in in in doing so i would attend the meetings and you know i think the women's political caucus of dane county just sort of here's this energetic woman he'll send her to some meetings and maybe she'll work out that energy but i would watch these debates and say i could do that i'm as smart as anyone debating these issues and it was one of the moments at which i could suddenly see myself in those roles and so in in the in the fall of 85 i enrolled in law school and my county board supervisor decided to retire and i thought well you know why don't we do it all at once first year law student run for county board and i did in my campus district and that's the first office i sought or helped but it's interesting that you would go into uh electoral politics i mean here's your grandfather who's an academic your grandmother who's an artist in in an academic setting uh your mother who's an activist and probably not all that trusting of electoral politics um what is it that drew you to uh this this the democratic process for getting things done well i guess in part through my internships and my issue interests i was very interested in health very interested in poverty issues and i felt in order to make an impact that that's where the resources were that's where the programs were being set up and administered especially at the county level which in our county ran all the child welfare programs the poverty programs we were struggling with a lot of issues and i just felt that that's where i could make a better difference a bigger difference and i didn't think that enough people who shared my perspective were sitting in the room so did it make any difference that you were a lesbian i mean here's the headlines in the newspapers but everybody's very supportive had there ever been an open gay or lesbian supervisor before yes and in fact i'm so grateful because it partly because somebody else had shattered those glass ceilings it allowed me to confront the challenges that i needed to to come out in such a visible way and to be the first in other venues later on there were two openly gay members of the county board when i was elected to the county board in 1986. wow and dick wagner and kathleen nichols had been out for about um two or three years and you know i didn't have much of an excuse if i wanted to stay in the class that they obviously it hadn't hurt them electorally and um oh they were there to support me there to help me in any way possible they also opened up another incredible door which was this i know you're very familiar with the organization from participating it in it is this network of openly gay and lesbian elected and appointed officials across the country which became such a an important support group for me when i was first elected in 1986 and attended my first such conference there were 14 openly gay and lesbian elected officials sitting around this table we were there were a few people who couldn't make it to the conference but we represented almost all the openly gay and lesbian elected officials in the world we at the table what included chris smith was a member of parliament in england and and it was just amazing but we we shared we offered advice and counsel and support to one another and it would have been much harder for me without those folks and they all gave me the the confidence i needed several years later to think about taking a next step where i wasn't going to have as much company talk about that next step well i had been on the county board for six years when my state assembly person decided to run for congress and he was a wonderful role model he had always been supportive of me in local office he by the way his name is david clarenbach was he was responsible for passing in wisconsin the nation's first bill protecting sexual orientation as a protected class passing a civil rights law in 1982 it was seven years before the next state was able to pass such uh such a bill and um and and so he had really been a pioneer in in many respects he has a political legacy that's much broader than that but in any event he was running for congress and i remember about a year and a half out him taking me aside and said i'd really like you to think about running for my seat it was one of those moments that you you sort of sit there in disbelief and say i can't believe david clarenbach is is encouraging me to run for his seat um but it gave me some forewarning it gave me a chance to really think through whether i wanted to what sort of impact i could make and it became very clear to me that i could could have a real impact in the state legislature and had a real tough primary it's a pretty democratic seat so the the more significant race was in the democratic primary but again it had a wonderful coalition of supporters who in my race saw well they experienced with me all those people saying well it's probably going to be tough for you to win this you know you're an out lesbian there hasn't been a woman in this seat you're awfully progressive all of the things i heard again in the congressional race a little young for this and so many people related to that um experience of being cautioned against something and and not being seen as credible for irrelevant factors and and that sort of group of people began working together to get me elected people who've been told you can't do this because exactly exactly don't try that the voters just aren't quite ready and and i'm used to myself that these naysayers are not necessarily the opposition they're often our friends supposedly saying well you know this is a really key seat and we can't afford to lose it and you know we need the perfect candidate let's say the candidate from central casting i'm not one of them so what was your campaign like when you first ran for the state assembly oh it was um very very spirited i'd say we were and this is so similar to my congressional campaign but focusing on organizing voters who historically had not shown up to the polls and that we absolutely couldn't win unless we could generate the energy and the excitement to get people out it was very volunteer intensive and it was very focused on gaining a strong youth vote registering people on campus getting getting them to vote early on in the semester but did the newspapers insist on doing the same headline every time lesbian running for assembly two things were interesting there were two headlines that happened one this was the year of the woman politics this was 1992 and so i would i was the only woman in my primary and i would always be asking how is it to run as a woman and um you know what um what is it like to what would it be like to be the first openly gay or lesbian member of the wisconsin legislature you know it's great i mean we have all these people supporting us and we get wonderful volunteers but sometimes running for higher office don't you worry or didn't you worry that all of those people out there that you didn't really know who were reading this press and didn't really know you that much that that somehow they were going to take this into account in a way that wouldn't help weren't you anxious that maybe some of this would put the kibosh on your uh your race yeah um i i knew very little about dealing with the press at that point because in our community the county board is a very low profile office it's very little press coverage we have huge county boards 39 of us and each of us represented about 10 000 people and so when i ran for state assembly it was a real uh new level of scrutiny and when i started to see all the focus on um the year of the women in politics and on my being the first uh openly gay or lesbian candidate for the state assembly and and certainly would be the first openly gay or lesbian member i i began to worry and and didn't know what sort of impact it would have on on voters and people deciding what they were going to do and also very concerned that i would be viewed very narrowly as having only a narrow set of issues that i cared about and despite the fact that i would try to turn an interview back to a focus on the things that had led me to politics in the first place you know health issues and you know community issues and poverty issues it was really frustrating to me at that point as i was sort of learning without a lot of people to show me how yeah i met elaine noble once when i was going to law school at harvard and she had just been elected to the massachusetts legislature and she told the story about a woman in her district elderly irish woman who came up to her on the street and poked her really hard in the arm and said now remember dearie you're there for all of us and i think the notion was that they wanted to remind her that she was representing a district that had a lot of different kinds of people in it and they didn't want to hear that she was just doing this one kind of issue and i think it's the same for everybody i mean you're always a certain kind of person catholic might be elected but you'll have jews in your district you have to think about all of that but people don't really know very much about gay people and they seem to have this underlying fear that we're only going to concentrate you know on these gay issues when we generally represent a real broad scope of interests just like anybody from any community but you must have actually uh sold that i think to your district because you've been re-elected quite a few times as i recall yeah well you know there's a couple of interesting things that happened one thing that i began to discover was that my being out and the focus in the media about my being a lesbian challenged a couple of other myths that voters have about politicians and that is a sort of cynicism about um you know all all politicians do is decide what the opinion polls say and that's what they decide to stand for because all they care about is being re-elected and so when somebody is out in office it's viewed as as being you know disclosing something that's against your electoral interest against your political interest and and therefore it sort of is a signature of integrity and um i love telling the story of this sort of gruff big old man who walked up to me one day and i really was nervous when i saw him approaching he seemed very determined a little bit angry and gruff and and he said well you know if you're willing to be honest about that you'll probably be honest about anything and everything and you know he basically made it really clear that that that had won his vote and i think it allows people who are out in office and you know certainly all politicians who take principled stands that are viewed as being against their electoral interests sort of rise above the general cynicism that people have about office holders but but back to your your focus on um you know the anxiety about can an out lesbian or an out gay man in office represent everyone you know that i i think we we demonstrate through our leadership and most of the people who have been successful in winning office as openly gay or lesbian candidates have been people with a very broad agenda who as we often say they're not the gay candidate they're the candidate who happens to be gay in my case in my congressional race my major focus was on on health care reform and in fact by that point i had learned a lot more about dealing with the scrutiny that a campaign got to be much more successful in making sure that there were more balanced reporting on why it was i had a passion to represent the people of south central wisconsin but you know sometimes there is a difference i mean sometimes as gay and lesbian electeds it's usually us who bring the legislation to protect our community to uh to protect us at work and to protect our kids we're not the only ones i mean straight legislators also bring these bills and i love them for it but but there's a certain authenticity to our voice that has to be brought i think to this work um and i guess i don't think of myself as a legislator who happens to be a lesbian because i'm really called upon and so is carol migdon in our assembly to kind of be the lesbians you know the gay people with the authentic voice and i i don't know whether you've experienced this in your work as well do you find that sometimes in the course of your service you are called upon to play that role absolutely and i would say it is very clear to me that i bring my life to work with me i bring my life experiences to work with me and the challenge when we serve in legislative bodies that are not as diverse as our nation is is that we end up being the voice for many people who don't have a seat in or a voice in these legislative bodies i i bring my experience as a woman to work with me every day i work in an institution that's about you know 86 percent male and i bring my experience in life as a lesbian to work with me every day in a body that's 99 heterosexual it's absolutely vital that i use that voice and and talk about my life experience and use the power that i have with the position to both stop harmful things as well as advance things that advance a civil rights agenda for gay and lesbian people so here you are safely and sconced in this wonderful wisconsin assembly how is it then you come to decide to run for congress i mean it seems to me like a really big step it was a wonderful set of opportunities to explore very similar to my experience with the state assembly i had someone take me aside somebody who i looked up to to tell me to think about doing it it was paul soglin who at the time was the mayor of madison and had made a run for the congressional seat in 1996 against the then incumbent scott and this was before his campaign was over he took me aside and he said one of two things is going to happen i'm either going to win in which case i don't plan on staying in congress for a long long time and i want you to think about succeeding me or i may lose in which case i want you to think about running and it was another one of those moments where you feel humbled by somebody thinking of you and thinking that that i would be the the person to do it um i think that the other part of the thought process always for me in looking at advancing in politics is where or whether i would have a bigger impact by running for higher office i actually miss the closeness to the constituency that i had as a county board member i knew my neighborhood that i represented i knew a good percentage of the 10 000 people i represented i knew the issues really really well and yet i would go to the body that where they sent me and find that they didn't have the resources or the power to solve all the problems that i knew so intimately at that local level of government and it's a trade-off but there are other opportunities that are obviously opened up at the congressional level and i ultimately decided that that is where i could have the greater impact what's it been like for you in congress oh it's been it's been wonderful i um i i say i feel like i'm still in my honeymoon period everyone's been you know very welcoming and even the people that you would be most surprised to find out are being respectful and dignified are still being very kind if i were to describe how how the first few months have been in fact i remember going home after about three months in congress for a break that we had and giving a series of speeches and and i sort of said the headline on my first few months is joy terror stress and and joy is about you know walking into the u.s capitol for the first time about to be sworn in i was able to bring you can bring children up to the age of 12 onto the floor by rule of the house and so i was able to bring a young girl named katie to witness my swearing in she and her moms had worked on my campaign tirelessly throughout the summer before i mean she had she had dropped leaflets in her neighborhood and knocked on doors and done everything that everyone else had done and so she'd seen this from beginning to end and and it was so wonderful to have this young girl who got to witness that and then sort of looked at me and said i could see being here someday and and you know it it was just wonderful terror terror is is doing things for the first time for example walking into the judiciary committee for the first time i i watched a little bit of the impeachment i know that that room was filled with tension and partisan rancor and here i was a freshman member on that committee wondering how i'd be received and other things that you do for the very first time that you have no idea what what it's going to be like my first floor speech i uh i typically still get a little nervous when i speak in front of crowds but what i've never experienced before is trying to give an impassioned speech in a chamber that's almost empty and if if you watch c-span you know sometimes that depending on the time of day when you get your chance to make your remarks that room can be completely empty and i came marching onto the floor to give my speech you know the gentlelady from wisconsin is recognized for five minutes on the patient's bill of rights and there's four or five people in the room and they're not even paying attention because they're preparing for their speech making and you sort of spend the next five minutes trying to develop an intimate relationship with the c-span camera and then the the stressful aspects of the job you know i approach this sort of light-heartedly but trying to establish two homes trying to get used to a new schedule with your time at 15-minute increments oftentimes two things at every 15-minute increment and and learning the names and the faces and you know the issues and the home states of 434 new colleagues the part i love about the stress though is that it is through the pressure and the tension and the stress that you determine what's really important and that you have to make those decisions well you got a whole lot of press when you were invited to to speak to the press i guess at the the national press club um and i'm not sure that everybody actually saw the approach that you took which um everybody was very pleased about i think reading about it would you tell a little bit about that because apparently you just charmed the pants off of everybody well it was great i remember finding out that we had gotten the offer to participate in this i guess biennial event at the beginning of every session of congress the washington press club foundation holds a charitable ball for raising money for scholarships where the featured speakers are four freshmen members one democrat one republican from each house and we are invited to give humorous remarks now i don't do stand-up i'm almost very i'm intimidated of the idea of presenting jokes and presenting humor but we sort of analyzed this and said you know this is a real opportunity to bomb or to succeed and and we knew and as it ended up being the case you know and there there's about 1200 people there's the new york times table the cnn table there's the speakers table and the majority leaders table and all of these amazing figures to listen to us and we played with it we sort of came up there and i said i think i know why you've asked me to speak here tonight because i'm a member of a group that has been historically discriminated against has been the subject of harassment of the workplace um the subject of base humor of course i'm talking about blondes especially blonde's named tammy and you know everyone in the room is getting more and more nervous like she's not going there is she's really not going to bring that up but then we just played with it for a long time and frankly i recall later on having several quite conservative members of congress coming up and reading lines back to me um and recalling some of the blonde jokes that we were making and how how wonderful to to have a sort of introduction to many of the people who i'm just gonna serve with so it was a great opportunity and and uh we had fun with it and you have a partner now yes lauren how long have you been together four years it must have been pretty stressful for her i mean you were talking about having you know the two homes and how has that all worked out well it's interesting one thing that is good is that as we were as we were dating as we were getting together she knew that this was a distinct possibility and so um fortunately no surprises but oh it's been an incredible challenge you have to really really focus on family too you know to be able to endure a hectic campaign and now the the commute back and forth she uh because of her own career has chosen for at least the time being to to remain in wisconsin she's an attorney um advancing in her firm hopefully will achieve a partnership at some point and and really is devoted to her her career and so i do make a habit to try to get home every weekend if possible i'm there four days and in washington three days it doesn't always work out that well especially as our workload in d.c gets higher and she's made a commitment to try periodically to take a few days off and and come and visit during the week in in washington and and does she get her spouse pin she does every member of congress gets issued a congressional sort of lapel pin to identify us and we all get issued a spouse pin and it was a thrill when i was able to pin her sort of on the day of swearing in and a friend recalls to me that that was one of the most moving images that she saw of all of this sort of history making adventure that we've been on and she went home and told her partner i i saw tammy pin the spouse pin on and it was very moving tammy thanks so much for making this happen i know you had to really go out of your way and kind of stop by on your way to the airport and we're very very appreciative that you took the time to do this oh well this has been a joy for me too we're glad you took the time to join us too and uh maybe as you look at your united states congress the house of representatives and maybe even the united states senate we look at our gay and lesbian members might have to just say to america get used to it [Music] we taped this show on father's day and our director jesse lawson and our producer terry house and i all lost our dads a fairly recent time ago so we wanted to dedicate this show to them to jesse lawson senior to marvin house and to arthur kewell