Former students share how Tim Walz allyship to LGBTQ+ teens in the '90s changed the course of their lives

A version of this article appeared on Pride.com.

The late ‘90s and early 2000s were a rough time to be a gay teen. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was still in effect, the U.S. was many years away from the Supreme Court legalizing same-sex marriage, Mathew Shepard was murdered in a horrific anti-gay hate crime that made national headlines in 1998, homophobic jokes were the norm on TV, and LGBTQ+ students were being harassed at schools all across the country.

Today we are living through a moment when history is being made by a woman of color becoming the Democratic nominee for president of the United States for the first time — and by Kamala Harris' side is Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, who has been breaking down barriers and standing up for the rights of the LGBTQ+ community since his days as a high school teacher in the '90s.

It was during this turbulent period that gay attorney and LGBTQ+ rights activist Jacob Reitan attended Mankato West High School in a Minnesota suburb where Walz taught social studies and coached the football team.

“I did receive a fair bit of bullying,” Reitan told PRIDE. “My house was egged, my car window was smashed in the school parking lot, gay epithets were chalked in my driveway, a brick was thrown through my dad’s office window.”

Born out of his “activist spirit” and his desire to come out of the closet and stop the bullying, Reitan founded his school’s first Gay Straight Alliance in 1999 with the help of the man who is now delivering stump speeches alongside presidential hopeful Harris.

When Mankato West High School principal John Barnett suggested Walz for the role of GSA faculty advisor, Reitan knew he’d be the right fit because of how accepting both Walz and his wife Gwen — who was also a dedicated high school teacher at the time — had always been. In fact, Gwen Walz was the third person Reitan ever told he was gay after first coming out to his sister and a close friend.

“Gwen was my teacher in the 10th grade, and [she] started her 10th-grade class by saying, ‘This is a safe space for LGBTQ+ people.’ I’d never heard a teacher say positive things about gay people from the front of the classroom,” he said.

Starting a group for LGBTQ+ students and their allies in a small city in the Midwest during the late '90s was no easy feat, but choosing the ultimate All-American teacher to lead it turned out to be a brilliant decision.

Walz was a veteran who devoted himself to his community, coached football, and was married to the cheerleading coach. He and his wife were on the prom committee and took students to China every summer, and Walz even gave up his free time to help build sets for the high school’s theater department. Despite the possibility of blowback from the community and parents, he signed onto the job of faculty advisor for the GSA because he knew it was important.

“It really needed to be the football coach, who was the soldier and was straight and was married,” Walz told the Minneapolis Star Tribune back in 2018.

“I think it would have been a lot easier for students or skeptical adults to push us off or silo the Gay Straight Alliance as a sort of fringe group over there,” said Laura Matson, a close friend of Reitan who helped found the GSA as an ally, “but the fact that Mr. Walz was involved, and Mrs. Walz was also a tremendously supportive figure in school and for the GSA, and having them in that role, I think it made it a lot harder to continue to marginalize the group and our gay students. The Walzes made it clear that they were part of the community just as much as the football team and the cheerleaders.”

With Walz at the helm and the support of the well-respected school principal, the GSA didn’t face as much hate as they expected, but there were still detractors.

Reitan recalls that every time the GSA put up posters advertising the group or one of their events, they would get pulled down and ripped up. Not to be deterred, the high school senior always picked up the pieces and eventually turned them into a mural emblazoned with the words, “Symbols of our hate.”

The group also faced backlash when it came time for them to organize a Human Rights Week for the school, which focused on a different form of discrimination each day for a week, including gender identity, race, religion, sexual orientation, and disability.

Both the school and Reitan’s parents received angry letters and phone calls from disgruntled parents who threatened to keep their teens home on the day sexual orientation would be highlighted, but Walz refused to back down and kowtow to closed-minded parents.

“It might have been easier for them to just say, ‘You know, this is really sensitive. People are upset, let’s try again next year.’ But they didn’t,” Matson explained. “They really supported us, and we went through with it, and they said, ‘If parents don’t want to send their kids to school on that day, that’s their right, but we’ll keep going with it.’”

Moments like this planted the seed for the LGBTQ+ rights activism that became a cornerstone of Reitan’s career. “Those people remain very special to me, including Mr. And Mrs. Walz, for the support that they showed during a time that was not an easy time for gay people,” Reitan said.

In the years since his tenure heading the GSA, Walz has made supporting LGBTQ+ rights a pillar of his political career, never shying away from it even when it may have helped him win elections to do so.

When Walz decided to run for congress, he paid Reitan’s parents a visit, and when they told him he didn’t need to fight for gay marriage on their account, he stood firm in his convictions.

“He said, ‘I have to look my gay students in the eye. I’m for gay marriage.’ And so when he ran for congress the first time in 2006, he ran on the position of being for gay marriage,” Reitan said.

As governor, he went even further and made Minnesota a sanctuary state for transgender people, signed a bill prohibiting bans on books in public schools and libraries, protected access to gender-affirming care, and banned conversion therapy.

This is in stark contrast to JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, who has repeated the conservative narrative that LGBTQ+ people are “groomers” and was the primary sponsor of two bills that, if passed, would have rolled back transgender rights by banning gender-affirming care and disallowing the “X” gender marker on passports.

At a time when it feels like we are backsliding and anti-LGBTQ+ laws are sweeping the nation, and Republicans are spewing hateful rhetoric that doesn’t feel all that different from the Moral Majority of the 1980s, having someone in the White House who is willing to stand up for the queer community will be the bulwark we need.

Walz has proven himself to be a politician capable of creating great change and a staunch LGBTQ+ ally, still both Reitan and Matson described finding out their former faculty advisor was being nominated as vice president of the United States as “surreal.”

“I really believe he is right for this position,” Matson said, “and it is so gratifying and heartening after so many years of rancor and vitriol in our politics to see someone who I genuinely know to be a wonderful person with a good heart having this national profile.”

After talking to a friend who was seeking asylum in the U.S. because of anti-LGBTQ+ violence in his home country, Reitan realized that having an ally in the White House like Walz could create real change. "I can think of no better person to send to talk about those issues and have someone care," he said.

According to Reitan, Tim Walz and his wife Gwen are the kind of people you would want in a position of power, "They're out of a Hallmark movie in terms of how decent they are as people, and it's exactly what would want as vice president."