A Night Out With Cynthia Nixon, New York Gubernatorial Candidate—And Miranda Hobbes, Fictional Feminist

A Night Out With Cynthia Nixon, New York Gubernatorial Candidate—And Miranda Hobbes, Fictional Feminist

It was, in many ways, a quintessential night out in New York City: bartenders poured cosmopolitans, heels clacked on the cement floor, more than one carefully positioned beret bobbed among the crowd despite the elevated temperatures, and the topic of conversation ranged from stilettos to the scourge of machine politics, as conversation in 2018 is wont to do. The only thing separating the buzzed-about event on July 12 in Greenwich Village from any number of film premieres or restaurant or gallery openings around town was the evening’s real draw: Cynthia Nixon, the public education advocate currently running for governor of New York and former star of one of the most popular television shows of all time, Sex and the City. (Hence the cosmopolitans.)

Even before she announced her candidacy in March, Nixon’s character from the HBO series—the workaholic, menswear-loving, unapologetically outspoken Miranda Hobbes—was the subject of a kind of feminist renaissance spurred on by the Instagram fan account @everyoutfitonsatc (522k followers and counting). Her campaign teamed up with the account’s creators, Lauren Garroni and Chelsea Fairless, for a fundraiser billed as “An Evening of Miranda With Cynthia Nixon,” which proved to be an excellent opportunity to introduce both political supporters and fans of a fictional feminist to a relatively radical real-life candidate.

Nixon has framed herself as a challenger not just to the right-wing misogyny of the GOP and Donald Trump, but to the New York Democratic establishment. Her opponent and longtime incumbent, Andrew Cuomo, has been endorsed by Joe Biden, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, and Hillary Clinton; Nixon has been backed by the Bernie Sanders–created Our Revolution organization and the Working Families Party, and has endorsed and been endorsed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 28-year-old Bronx woman who recently challenged another deep-pocketed incumbent Democrat and won. Nixon has, like Ocasio-Cortez, identified herself as a Democratic socialist and called for universal health care, universal rent control, ending cash bail, legalizing marijuana, abolishing ICE, and ending economic inequality. She has also staked a claim to a cause close to many New Yorkers’ hearts: saving the subway. “If we let the subway die, we let New York die,” she said onstage at the event in July, “and right now it’s on life support. I am going to hold the most wealthy New Yorkers accountable for paying their share.”

Given her political outsider status, many wondered exactly how Nixon would acknowledge her own celebrity, specifically the huge fandom around Sex and the City. The answer seems to be a cautious embrace that began as a merchandise collaboration. Garroni and Fairless designed and supplied a range of tote bags and T-shirts for the campaign that finally connected Miranda to Nixon: I’m a Miranda and I’m voting for Cynthia, they proclaim. “It’s crazy,” said Garroni of the partnership. Fairless said that it was definitely “some law of attraction shit” that the hero of their social feed was actually running for political office, and that they get to help.

The mostly female audience at the event seemed excited to see a woman whom they already know running for office, especially after the disappointment of the 2016 presidential election. Comedian, actor, and Orange Is the New Black star Lea DeLaria was on hand to introduce Nixon (as well as stage an impromptu strip auction of the campaign shirt straight off her back) and told Vogue that those who have been surprised by Nixon’s leftist bent haven’t been paying attention. “Her politics has always been the same, from day one,” DeLaria said. “This is not a surprise to me, this is who she is.”

“An Evening of Miranda” was one of the only times Nixon has spoken candidly and at length about her experience on the show that made her famous. Garroni and Fairless’s program included a catalog of their favorite Miranda moments, as well as a discussion of the condition that they have dubbed “Mirandaphobia” (though arguably the most ambitious, funny, forthright, and empowered woman on the show, Miranda has historically been maligned as the least attractive). They pulled up a screenshot of the character’s Wikipedia page photo as evidence: The image is an unflattering photo of Nixon as Hobbes eating lunch. (“I wasn’t aware of that,” Nixon said later.) In an effort to correct the record, Garroni and Fairless displayed clips of Miranda fishing a piece of cake out of a trash can and crying in a dressing room after the death of her mother, which they found to be authentic, even aspirational.

Listening to Nixon weigh in on the Miranda-issance illustrated just how much her own arc—from television star to activist—has differed from her character’s. While Nixon became increasingly outspoken about her political beliefs as her public profile rose (becoming a vocal defender of public education in the early 2000s, campaigning for same-sex marriage, fundraising for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio), Miranda’s most beloved looks—a pair of overalls and a puffy coat; a pair of Clout goggles at a New York Yankees game; an androgynous suit with a tie—were all from the earlier seasons of the show. “The show got more and more popular, and the characters got more and more glamorous,” Nixon explained from the stage. By the serie’s end, Miranda’s wardrobe, she agreed, had become much more whimsical in tone, almost as if to soften the more “difficult” or unconventional aspects of her plotline—like being a single mother struggling to answer the question of whether she actually needed a partner at all. The audience groaned, as did Nixon, when a photo of the full cast in their desert-inspired ensembles from the second (and heavily criticized) Sex and the City movie was shown on-screen.

“I think it’s a feminist show, but in many ways the shortcomings of the feminist movement are reflected in it,” Nixon said from the stage, noting that the world of the series was “a very thin slice of an extremely white, extremely affluent New York.” That isn’t the New York she aims to rally behind her candidacy. “Unless it’s intersectional, and unless it includes women of color and trans women in leadership roles,” she said, “we cannot succeed and, we found, move forward in feminism.” After a renewed call for support ahead of a fundraising deadline, Nixon announced that her team had just dropped off 65,000 signatures (more than four times the required amount) in order to get her name on the Democratic primary ballot. “I am part of a movement,” she said. “It’s a movement that is happening across this country and it’s happening in New York State.” She ended the evening amid a scrum of selfie-seekers and supporters, who, judging by the 10,000 people who have donated to her campaign in the last month alone, may have come to see Miranda, but likely left supporting Cynthia.