In a video intended to help introduce vice presidential nominee Tim Walz to a national audience ahead of his Democratic National Convention speech Wednesday night, a handful of students from his years as a high school teacher sang his praises.
One called him “jovial,” another “engaging,” another a “big part” of the local community.
For Jacob Reitan, Walz was the teacher who had his back against bullies during one of the most difficult chapters of his teenage life, when he came out as gay just before his senior year of high school a quarter-century ago, in 1999.
“When I decided to come out as gay, we started the Gay Straight Alliance,” said Reitan, now a 42-year-old lawyer. “Tim Walz was the faculty advisor.”
The decision by Democrats — and the presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris — to include Reitan and other references to Walz’s staunch support for LGBTQ+ rights was in some ways an obvious one. Queer voters number in the millions, and a politician having a decades-long record of support would be seen by many of them — and many other liberals — as a positive thing.
Still, the decision was a defiant one, too — a doubling-down on the Democratic ticket’s queer allyship at a time when Republicans are pushing an anti-LGBTQ+ agenda, hammering Walz on his legislative record supporting queer rights, and suggesting he is too progressive for the average American voter.
In one characteristic barb, former President Donald Trump recently criticized Walz as being “very heavy into transgender.”
In interviews with The Times, LGBTQ+ former students of Walz said his support embodies his simple commitment to fairness and kindness, and against bullying and injustice.
When Walz took the DNC stage Wednesday night, he struck many similar notes.
“That family down the road — they may not think like you do, they may not pray like you do, they may not love like you do, but they’re your neighbors, and you look out for them and they look out for you,” Walz said. “Everybody belongs.”
Reitan said in an interview that Walz and his wife, Gwen — also a popular teacher at Mankato West High School in Mankato, Minn. — had been flagged to him as LGBTQ+ allies when he was a younger student. He had Gwen Walz as an English teacher and recalled her telling him and his classmates on the first day of instruction that her classroom was a “safe space” for gay students.
Later, Reitan was being bullied at school and decided to form the Gay Straight Alliance, not just for him but for future LGBTQ+ students at the school. The principal recommended Walz as the faculty advisor, and Reitan said he immediately recognized the significance of having the backing of the school’s football coach. Gwen Walz’s support also was invaluable.
“The concept of Tim being the advisor was a product of both their support, but also the optics of it,” Reitan said.
That the Walzes were willing to step up as they did — especially at “a different time for gay people that was not easy” — showed “the character that they have as individuals,” Reitan said.
“They were a gift to the students at West High School. They’ve been a gift to the state of Minnesota,” he said. “And I’m thrilled that the nation is getting the chance to know them both.”
Since picking Walz as her running mate, Harris has seemed happy to highlight his queer-friendly past, and his advising of the Gay Straight Alliance.
“At a time when acceptance was difficult to find for LGBTQ students, Tim knew the signal that it would send to have a football coach get involved,” Harris said at one campaign rally, to raucous applause. “And as students have said, he made the school a safe place for everybody.”
In her own video Wednesday night, Gwen Walz talked about her husband teaching for 15 years, helping lead the school’s football team to a state championship, and teaching students “that we’re all in this together.”
She said that he agreed to be the Gay Straight Alliance advisor “because he knew how impactful it would be to have a football coach involved,” and that he “inspired his students” and “changed lives.”
After Walz was elected to Congress in 2006, he continued his LGBTQ+ allyship — supporting the right to same-sex marriage, which wasn’t affirmed nationally until a Supreme Court ruling in 2015, and calling for the repeal of the federal “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which forced gay and lesbian service members to hide their sexuality or face removal from the U.S. military.
Walz continued to support queer rights as governor. He signed an executive order protecting transgender people’s access to gender-affirming healthcare in Minnesota. He also signed two significant laws: One bans debunked conversion therapy practices aimed at changing or suppressing a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity; the other protects transgender people and their families from out-of-state subpoenas, arrest warrants and extradition requests related to their receiving gender-affirming care in Minnesota.
At a California delegation breakfast at the DNC on Wednesday, Equality California Executive Director Tony Hoang praised Walz as “a person who has been there for LGBTQ youth since the ‘90s,” and said he and Harris deserve LGBTQ+ people’s votes.
Seth Elliott Meyer, 38, who is queer, is another former student of Walz. By the time he got to Mankato West, his sister and brother had already had Walz as a teacher and coach, and he’d heard all about how great Walz was. But he wasn’t sold.
“I’d heard his reputation as a hunter and a coach and a social studies teacher, and I thought, wow, that doesn’t sound like my kind of guy at all,” Meyer said in an interview, with a laugh. As “a combative, punk rock 14-year-old,” hunting and football just weren’t his things.
It wasn’t until Meyer had Walz as his history teacher his junior year, in 2002 and 2003, that he realized what all the hype was about, he said — when Walz “won me over with his rampant niceness and fairness.”
“He was one of those teachers who wanted to make everyone feel included and involved and valid,” Meyer said.
Meyer tries to remember those lessons today, he said, including when he’s advising his own students at the Atlanta school where he now teaches — and serves as the Gay Straight Alliance advisor.
