Nancy Pelosi on AIDS, trans rights, the legacy she resists claiming — and why Democrats must ‘win big’

Tourists are already taking photographs outside Nancy Pelosi’s office when I arrive at the Longworth House Office Building at 10:30 on a Thursday morning with photographer Mike Nelson.Inside, a staff member conducting a Zoom job interview asks an applicant, “Why are you interested in working in this office specifically?”One possible answer hangs nearby.A framed display shows the men who had served as speaker of the House before Pelosi, their portraits arranged around the woman who broke the sequence.“Speaker Pelosi, Christopher Wiggins with The Advocate is here to see you,” communications director Ian Krager says as he invites us inside her spacious office with a view of the Capitol dome.Pelosi would speak with me for more than an hour, and would then keep talking through the photo session. She dislikes having her picture taken but had agreed to sit for a portrait.Before my first question, Pelosi describes the tributes accompanying her final year in Congress. That morning, she had told Krager she wanted to discuss the future. But there is no talking to Pelosi about the future without touching on the recent past, if only so she can redistribute the credit. She announced in November that she would retire after nearly four decades in the House and two separate stints as speaker.“I’ve got so many accolades, I’m embarrassed by it,” she confesses.A month earlier, I had watched her at the Equality PAC National Pride Gala as a tribute video to her allyship played. Pelosi stood facing the screen, absorbed.“Yes, I am,” she says when asked whether she is allowing herself a victory lap. “As long as it shows collaboration,” and “the courage of the members, the activism of outside groups,” she adds.“It’s fun to see,” she admits. “But it is kind of embarrassing. Like, come on, all right, enough.”Pelosi has spent her career in superlatives: the first woman speaker and one of her generation’s most effective legislative tacticians. Her job, a