Minnesota Gov. and Vice President hopeful Tim Walz (D) inspired generations of students during his time as a founder of the Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) at the Mankato West High School in Minnesota. Now, some of his former GSA students are coming back to discuss all the ways in which Walz, as well as his wife Gwen, helped them personally.
One student, Jacob Reitan, was a gay student bullied for his sexuality. He turned to Walz for help, and Walz made a huge impact on him.
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“Both Tim and Gwen were incredibly supportive of their gay students, and they modeled values of inclusivity and respect,” Reitan told MSNBC. “I was bullied in high school. [Their values] helped not just me, but it also, I think, helped the bully. It showed the bully a better path forward, and I can think of no one better than Tim Walz to show that better path forward for America.”
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While introducing Walz as her running mate to a rally audience of 14,000 in Philadelphia last Wednesday, Vice President Kamala Harris noted that, while working as a high school teacher and football coach back in 1999, Walz advised the school’s first GSA to help LGBTQ+ students, she said.
“Tim knew the message that it would send to have a football coach get involved. So he signed up to be the group’s faculty advisor, and as students have said, he made the school a safe place for everybody,” Harris noted.
At the time, the AIDS epidemic had already reached its height, killing hundreds of thousands of predominantly queer men and making pariahs of them in the eyes of many vocal conservatives. Minnesota also had a law criminalizing same-sex sexual encounters and a marriage ban on its books as the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t overrule such laws until 2003 and 2015, respectively. As
Seth Elliot Meyer, a bisexual former student, had initially thought he’d clash with Walz, as he was a hunter and a football coach.
“I was a leftist punk rock, anti-everything kind of kid,” Meyer told MSNBC. “In the year that I had him, what I learned is that he really cared about everyone and wanted everyone to be seen.”
“I had a really hard time in high school, and I felt like a lot of teachers wanted me to be someone else,” Meyer said. “Walz was in a minority of teachers who wanted me to be OK with who I was and speak my mind, and whether it was with GSA stuff or anything else, was happy to be questioned and challenged, because he wanted to question and challenge things.”
Larissa Beck attended the GSA as an ally, and had Walz as a history teacher. She ran into him year later at the state Capitol, and Walz remembered her.
“We’re talking 20-something years ago, and to have your 10th-grade geography teacher remember you after all of that time, it means something,” she said.
“I couldn’t call him ‘Gov. Walz,’ because he will forever be ‘Mr. Walz.’ He’s genuinely the teacher that was in the hallway greeting every kid every morning, giving high fives and fist bumps,” she continued. “He knew what was going on and what was happening within the school. He was ingrained in the fabric of it.”
Another student, Emily Scott, talked about the ways in which Walz inspired her on a trip to China. “We were on a river boat cruise in Guilin, and I turned to Mr. Walz, and I said, ‘I love this. I love China. I want to do this for the rest of my life.’”
“And then he set up the next 10 years of my life. He said, ‘Emily, here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to go to University of Wisconsin at Madison and major in Chinese, and then you’re going to go to China and get a job,’ and that is exactly what I did for the next 10 years of my life.”
Walz has advocated for LGBTQ+ rights ever since.
When Walz ran for Congress in the early 2000’s, he actually consulted with the Reitan family on whether it’d be worth running on a platform for gay marriage. He wanted to be able to look his gay students in the eyes and say he was for them.
As a U.S. House member, he supported the repeal of the military’s ban on out gay, lesbian, and bisexual service members. He also helped secure enhanced funding for and prosecution against hate crimes motivated by anti-LGBTQ+ bias.
As governor, he has opposed bans on trans athletes in school sports teams. In April 2023, he signed a statewide law protecting people seeking gender-affirming care in his state from out-of-state investigations and prosecutions. He also signed a March 2023 executive order directing the Minnesota Department of Health to prepare a report summarizing scientific studies on the safety and effectiveness of gender-affirming healthcare.
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