As Minnesota Governor Tim Walz vies for the U.S. vice presidency, new details are surfacing about his teaching career, including the impact he made as faculty advisor for a high school Gay-Straight Alliance club. However, sources say the Walz family were LGBTQ+ community boosters even before then, as especially evidenced by one extracurricular Indigo Girls concert where the Walzes taught in Nebraska.
In an interview with the New York Times this week, Jacob Reitan — a former student of both Walz and his wife Gwen Walz (nee Whipple), both teachers at Mankato West High School in the 1990s — described feeling stunned when Ms. Walz announced her husband would be leading the GSA. Reitan said he had been subjected to homophobic abuse by other students, but confiding in Ms. Walz that he was gay gave him enough confidence to also come out to his parents, and eventually the school. After coming out, and with Mr. Walz in charge of the GSA, the bullying generally came to a halt, he said.
“It was important to have a person who was so well-liked on campus, a football coach who had served in the military,” Reitan told the Times. “Having Tim Walz as the adviser of the Gay-Straight Alliance made me feel safe coming to school.”
While Walz certainly deserves credit for stepping up, it seems to have been Gwen Walz who understood the raw importance of LGBTQ+ allyship in the mid-90s. Before the Walzes became involved with the GSA, Reitan recalled, Ms. Walz told him she had offered support to another gay student while teaching in Nebraska at the school where she and her husband met. A spokesperson for Ms. Walz confirmed to the Times that the couple chaperoned the anonymous student at an Indigo Girls concert — truly, one of the decade’s strongest bastions of queer community and camaraderie.
Of course, in 2024, that kind of concern for the wellbeing of LGBTQ+ students is liable to get you called a “groomer.” Since joining current Vice President Kamala Harris on the Democratic presidential ticket, Walz has come under heavy fire from the far right, with former President Donald Trump accusing him of being “very into transgender” (don’t threaten us with a good time) and Trump’s former advisor Roger Stone outright calling Walz a faggot.
Some criticism is more warranted: Walz’s speech to the Women’s Caucus at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday evening was interrupted by pro-Palestine protesters, speaking out against the Biden administration’s sale of arms to Israel and Harris’s own comments dismissing such protesters earlier this month. At least 13 protesters have been arrested in Chicago since the DNC kicked off at the start of this week.
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