Tim Walz supported LGBTQ rights as a high school teacher and as governor

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

Jacob Reitan, now an LGBTQ activist and advocate, 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 modeled values ​​of inclusion and respect,” Reitan, 42, told MSNBC this week. “I was bullied in high school. [Their values] It helped not only me, but also, I believe, it helped the attacker. It showed the bully a better way forward, and I can think of no one better than Tim Walz to show that better way forward for America. ” GSA member Seth Elliot Meyer attended Mankato West from 2000 to 2004 and had Walz in 11th grade history. . Meyer, 38, said he initially expected to hate Walz because he was a football coach and a hunter.

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

Meyer, who was bisexual in high school, began attending GSA meetings his freshman year. He said he and the other four club members were scared of being 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 agree with who I was and speak my mind, and whether it was GSA matters or anything else, was happy to be questioned and challenged, because I wanted to question and challenge things.

Meyer now teaches German and philosophy at Woodward Academy, a private middle and high school in Atlanta, and is an advisor to 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 in Mankato West from 2000 to 2001, during her freshman year, because she had a crush on one of the founding members. But she got to know Walz better through a biannual trip to China in the summer of 2001 that he organized for students. That trip, and something Walz told her, 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 said, ‘I love this. I love China. I want to do this for the rest of my life,’” Scott recalled. “And then it 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 the University of Wisconsin at Madison and major in Chinese, and then you’re going to go to China and get a job,’ and that’s 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 clothing manufacturing.

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

“That was his goal for us, to take us a little bit more out of our comfort zone,” she said of Walz. “I think this is what Mr. Walz wants for the United States. He wants to take America slightly out of its comfort zone and make it a little better.”

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

Beck now works in disability services and advocacy, and she said when she ran into Walz at the state Capitol in March, he remembered her.

“We’ve been talking for 20-odd years, and having your 10th grade geography teacher remember you after all this time means something,” she said. “I couldn’t call him Governor Walz, because he will forever be Mr. Walz. He is genuinely the teacher who was in the hallway greeting all the kids every morning, high-fiving and bumping fists. He knew what was going on and what was going on inside the school. He was ingrained in the structure of it.

A pivot to politics

Walz, who served in the National Guard from 1981 to 2005, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2018 that he believed it was important for him to be a GSA advisor because “he really needed to be the football coach, which was the soldier, he was straight and he 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 transitioned from teaching to politics.

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

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

Walz defeated a Republican candidate at a time when only one state, Massachusetts, had legalized same-sex marriage and Vermont allowed civil unions. Minnesota did not pass a bill codifying same-sex marriage until 2013, and gay marriage would not be legal in the US until 2015.

Walz too 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 to 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 which prohibits outside authorities from enforcing other states’ laws that prohibit gender-affirming care, for example, by attempting to subpoena health information or issuing warrants under such laws out of state.

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

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

“There has never been a note like this,” Trump said Wednesday morning on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends.” “This is a passage that would want this country to become communist immediately, if not sooner. We don’t want security. We don’t want anything. He really likes transgender people. Anything transgender he thinks is great, and he’s not where the country is on anything.”

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

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

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