Tim Walz’s Gay-Straight Alliance students remember him as accepting and goofy

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and now Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, was a high school teacher and football coach in rural Minnesota nearly two decades ago. He also devoted time and energy to help his students create the school’s first Gay-Straight Alliance in 1999, and several students who were part of it remember “Mr. Walz” as goofy and accepting of everyone.

Jacob Reitan, now an LGBTQ activist and lawyer, was a founding member of the GSA at Mankato West High School in Mankato, Minnesota, about 80 miles southwest of Minneapolis. He said Walz and his wife, also a teacher at the school, provided vital support during Reitan’s formative years. 

“Both Tim and Gwen were incredibly supportive of their gay students, and they modeled values of inclusivity and respect,” Reitan, 42, told MSNBC this week. “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.”

Fellow GSA member Seth Elliot Meyer attended Mankato West from 2000-2004 and had Walz for 11th grade history. Meyer, 38, said he initially expected to hate Walz, because he was a football coach and a hunter. 

“I was a leftist punk rock, anti-everything kind of kid,” Meyer said. “In the year that I had him, what I learned is that he really cared about everyone and wanted everyone to be seen.”

Meyer, who was out as bisexual in high school, started attending GSA meetings his freshman year. He said he and the four other members of the club were scared to be seen together because they feared bullying.

“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, however, “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.”

Meyer now teaches German and a senior philosophy class at Woodward Academy, a private K-12 school in Atlanta, and he is the adviser for that school’s GSA, where some meetings are attended by about 100 of the school’s 1,000 students.

Emily Scott, 41, said she attended GSA meetings at Mankato West from 2000-2001, during her junior year, because she had a crush on one of the founding members. But she knew Walz best through a biannual trip to China in the summer of 2001 that he organized for students. That trip, and something Walz said to her on it, changed her life, said Scott, who now lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. 

“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,’” Scott recalled. “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.”

Scott lived in China for a decade, learned to speak Chinese fluently and worked in garment manufacturing.

Scott said that during the school trip they took two overnight trains, which “were not fancy.” The bathrooms were just a hole that opened onto the track. 

“That was his goal for us, to push us just a little bit further out of our comfort zone,” she said of Walz. “I think that’s what Mr. Walz wants for the United States. He wants to push the United States slightly out of its comfort zone and make it just slightly better.”

Larissa Beck, 38, attended the GSA meetings as an ally during her time at Mankato West until 2004, and she had Walz as a history teacher for 10th grade. 

Beck now works in disability services and advocacy, and she said that when she ran into Walz at the state Capitol in March, he 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. He knew what was going on and what was happening within the school. He was ingrained in the fabric of it.”

A pivot to politics

Walz, who served in the National Guard from 1981-2005, told Minneapolis’ Star Tribune in 2018 that he believed it was important for him to be the adviser to the GSA because, “It really needed to be the football coach, who was the soldier and was straight and was married.”

His support for LGBTQ Minnesotans didn’t end when he left Mankato West High School; his track record shows consistent support for the queer community as he turned from teaching to politics. 

Reitan said that before Walz announced his run for Congress in 2006, he spoke to Reitan’s mother, Randi, about running on a platform that included support for same-sex marriage.

“My mom actually said to him, ‘Tim, you don’t have to be for gay marriage for our family,’” Reitan recalled. “But he said, ‘Randi, I got to look my gay students in the eye and say I’m for gay marriage.’”

Walz defeated a Republican incumbent at a time when only one state, Massachusetts, had legalized same-sex marriage, and Vermont allowed civil unions. Minnesota didn’t pass a bill codifying same-sex marriage until 2013, and gay marriage wouldn’t be legal across the U.S. until 2015.

Walz also advocated against “Don’t ask, don’t tell” in 2009. The policy, which prevented gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military, was in effect from 1994 until 2011.

When Walz became governor in 2019, his support for LGBTQ rights continued. 

Last year he signed a “trans refuge” bill into law, making Minnesota one of 14 states that prohibits outside authorities to enforce other states’ laws banning gender-affirming care, by, for example, attempting to subpoena health information or issue warrants under such out-of-state laws.

Also last year, Walz signed an executive order that protects access to health care for trans people in the state and signed a bill that prohibits so-called conversion therapy, a discredited practice that attempts to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. 

Some Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, have already tried to use Walz’s support for the LGBTQ community to their advantage.  

“There’s never been a ticket like this,” Trump said Wednesday morning on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” program. “This is a ticket that would want this country to go communist immediately, if not sooner. We want no security. We want no anything. He’s very heavy into transgender. Anything transgender he thinks is great, and he’s not where the country is on anything.”

As for his former students, Walz’s ascent to vice presidential candidate has inspired them to reconnect with each other and share their memories of “Mr. Walz.”

“I’ve talked to hundreds of people from high school that I haven’t talked to in 20 years because of this,” Meyer said. “Even people who don’t agree with him, they think this is a good guy, and it’s time for American politics to have a good guy.”

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