Long before he entered politics, Tim Walz spent years teaching at a high school in southern Minnesota. He was a memorable figure inside and outside the classroom, a beloved educator who helped coach the football team to a state title. But for a small group of students, he was something even rarer.
Those students knew Walz as a person who would stand up for others no matter their sexual orientation, even when they faced hostility elsewhere. A quarter-century ago, such acceptance and understanding were far from common. Walz and his wife Gwen offered that unequivocally.
“Both had a way of making you feeling included and welcome,” said Jacob Reitan, a former student at Mankato West High School. “They were very special.”
Walz, now the governor of Minnesota and, as of Tuesday, the running mate of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, has long been a vocal ally of LGBTQ+ causes. Perhaps nowhere has his support meant as much as at Mankato West in the late 1990s.
Reitan was a sophomore when he arrived in Gwen Walz’s English class in 1997. He hadn’t told anyone yet that he was gay, but it had been the subject of rumors since middle school.
On that first morning, Walz told the class that theirs was a safe place for gay students. Reitan was stunned. He had never heard a teacher stand up and say anything about gay issues.
“My heart was beating out of my chest,” Reitan recalled this week.
When he decided to come out to a few select people, the first person he confided in was his best friend. The second person was his sister. The third person was Gwen Walz. And then the summer before he’d be a senior — after two years of bullying that even followed him home, with a homophobic slur chalked on his family’s driveway — he decided to come out to everyone. He also resolved to form the school’s first gay-straight alliance.
It was a bold idea, especially because of what had happened just a few months before as some students worked to organize a human rights-focused week.
Reitan and Amanda Hinkle, a senior at the time, had made a massive banner promoting the week. Then, on “Gay Awareness Day,” some “150 kids threatened to leave school if anything more was said about sexual orientation,” Hinkle wrote in her journal that day. “Kids were tearing down signs that said stuff about gay tolerance.”
Even so, Reitan kept moving forward. He talked to his family, his guidance counselor, the school principal and two teachers he knew would support the alliance: Tim and Gwen Walz.
Ultimately, Coach Walz would become the nascent GSA’s faculty adviser. The choice sent a message given that the football team was not known to be an accepting environment.
“It was important to show it was a value that would be reflected in all corners of the school,” said Reitan, now 42 and a lawyer.
The GSA was only five or six students. In the spring of 2000, it organized another week focused on human rights, with each day highlighting a different type of discrimination. The group arranged for speakers to address an all-school assembly.
Some parents didn’t allow their children to attend school on the day that was devoted to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, said Laura Matson, a member of the GSA who is straight. She remembers Walz tried to lift her spirits.
“He was really steadfast in his support,” she recounted. “He said, ‘Some people just don’t understand, and that’s okay. We’ll keep doing what we’re doing and raise awareness.’”
Matson, 40, described the GSA as a safe space, one where Walz wasn’t always present but members knew the social studies teacher was available to provide guidance. “It was important to learn how to be an ally and how to have conversations around identity at a young age,” she said. (Matson is also a lawyer, and the Harris campaign is a client at her firm, though she is not involved in that work).
Today, she has many friends who identify as queer or trans. “That experience of being in the GSA has informed every sort of identity conversation and allyship effort I’ve made,” she said.
Kris Breyer was another straight student in the GSA. The group sometimes met at lunch and mostly hung out and talked. It put its name on various school events, sponsor-style. “We could, as a group, say, ‘We’re also a part of this, and it’s not weird or uncomfortable or abnormal for people of different interests to be included in these activities,” he said.
Breyer was busy at Mankato West — on the soccer team, in drama, as a member of the band and choir. Broad interests did not feel strange, he said, in part because Walz modeled them.
“As a kid in high school who sees the cool teacher who, across the board, everybody respects and loves, going out of his way and helping these other sidelined kids? You think, well, I can do that,” said Breyer, 41, a retired police officer who’s now an investigator for a district attorney in Oregon.
Mankato West’s theater scene also drew Micah Kronlokken when he started at the school in 2001. His castmates told him about the Walzes, who were described to him as “incredibly supportive” of LGBTQ+ students.
That fact alone gave him a sense of security. “Even as a closeted kid, just knowing that there are at least two teachers here that I know are safe people — that probably meant more than I could comprehend,” said Kronlokken, 37, an actor and theater marketer in Chicago.
Again and again this week, Walz’s former students effused about the lasting impact he and his wife had on them.
“They were just a huge influence. On, truly, my life’s direction and career,” said Hinkle, 43, who lives in Ontario and is a theater educator in New York City. She credits both, whom she knew through classes and clubs, as models of social justice and community-building.
The same holds true for Reitan. In his 20s, he became an activist. He was arrested repeatedly while protesting the U.S. military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that prohibited openly gay individuals from serving in the armed forces.
In 2010, he was invited to Washington to witness President Barack Obama signing the bill that repealed that policy. Also present: Walz, by then a member of the House of Representatives.
It was a full-circle moment, Reitan said. Seeing a form of discrimination “fall in front of my eyes with Tim was pretty special.”
