Tim Waltz, the running mate of Minnesota governor and now vice president Kamala Harris, was a middle school teacher and football coach in rural Minnesota nearly two decades ago. He also invested time and energy in helping his students form the school’s first Gay-Straight Alliance in 1999, and several students who were part of it were dubbed “Mr. Walz” accepts a fool and anyone.
Jacob Reitan, now an LGBTQ activist and lawyer, 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 Reita’s formative years.
“Both Tim and Gwen have been incredibly supportive of gay students, and they have modeled the values of inclusion and respect,” Reitan, 42, told MSNBC this week. “I was bullied in high school. [Their values] not only did it help me, but I think it helped the bully as well. It showed violence a better way forward, and I can think of no one better than Tim Walz to show that better way for America.
GSA member Seth Elliot Meyer attended Mankato West from 2000-2004 and was Walz for 11th grade history. Meyer, 38, said he expected Walz to hate him at first because he’s a football coach and hunter.
“I was a left-wing punk rock, anti-everything kid,” Meyer said. “What I learned in the year I had him is that he really cared about everybody and wanted everybody to show up.”
Meyer, who was bisexual in high school, began attending GSA meetings her freshman year. He said he and four other members of the club were afraid to be seen together for fear of violence.
“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. However, Walz was in the minority of teachers who “wanted me to be okay with who I was and speak my mind, and whether it was about GSA materials or something else, I was happy to be questioned and challenged because I wanted to ask questions. and challenges things.”
Meyer currently teaches German and a senior philosophy class at Woodward Academy, a private K-12 school in Atlanta, and he is the adviser to the 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 in 2000-2001 because she had a crush on one of its founding members. But he knew Walz well from his biannual trip to China for students in the summer of 2001. Scott, who now lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, said that trip and something Walsh told him changed his life.
“We were on a riverboat ride 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 recalls. “And then it shaped the next 10 years of my life. He said, “Emily, what are you going to do? You go to the University of Wisconsin in Madison and major in Chinese, and then you go to China and get a job,’ and that’s what I did for the next 10 years of my life.’
Scott lived in China for ten years, learned to speak Chinese fluently, and worked in the clothing industry.
Scott said they took two overnight trains during the school trip, which they “unbeknownst to”. The baths were just a hole that opened onto the track.
“That was his goal for us, to push us out of our comfort zone a little bit,” he said of Walz. “I think that’s what Mr. Walz wants for the United States. He wants to take the United States out of its comfort zone and make it better.”
Larissa Beck, 38, attended GSA meetings as an ally during her time at Mankato West until 2004, when she employed Walz as her 10th-grade history teacher.
Beck now works in disability services and advocacy, and she said she remembers Walz when she ran into him at the state Capitol in March.
“We’re talking 20 years ago and it means something for your 10th grade geography teacher to remember you after all this time,” he said. “I couldn’t call him Governor Waltz because he would be Mr. Waltz forever. He is truly the teacher who greets, high-fives and punches every kid in the hallway every morning. He knew what was going on and what was going on inside the school. It was absorbed into his tissue.”
A turn for politics
Valz, who served in the National Guard in 1981-2005 This was reported by the Minneapolis Star Tribune In 2018, he said he believed it was important to be a consultant at GSA because “You really had to be a soldier and a football coach who was straight and married.”
Her support for LGBTQ Minnesotans didn’t end when she left Mankato West High School; her track record shows consistent support for the queer community as she transitions from teaching to politics.
Reitan said Walz spoke with him before he announced his 2006 run for Congress Reita’s mother, Randiabout running on a platform that includes support for same-sex marriage.
“My mom actually told him, ‘Tim, you don’t have to be pro-gay marriage for our family,'” Reitan said. “But she said, ‘Randi, I have to look my gay students in the eye and say I’m pro-gay marriage.’
Walz defeated a Republican incumbent in just one state, Massachusetts, which legalized same-sex marriage and Vermont allowed civil unions. Minnesota did not pass a bill codifying same-sex marriage until 2013, and same-sex marriage would not be legal in the United States until 2015.
Waltz too defended against “don’t ask, don’t tell”. In 2009. The policy, which prevented gays and lesbians from openly serving 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 the “trans asylum” bill became law, Minnesota did It is one of 14 provinces it prohibits foreign authorities from enforcing the laws of other states that prohibit gender-affirming care, for example by attempting to subpoena health information or by issuing warrants under such out-of-state laws.
Last year, Walz also signed an executive order protecting transgender people’s access to health care in the state and a bill banning so-called conversion therapy, a discredited practice that attempts to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.
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 ticket like this,” Trump said on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” Wednesday morning. “This is a ticket that wants this country to go to communism immediately, if not quickly. We don’t want security. We don’t want anything. He is very transgender. Any transgender he thinks is great and he’s nowhere in the country.
As for his former students, Walz’s candidacy for vice president will allow them to reconnect with each other and “Mr. Waltz.”
“I talked to hundreds of people in high school that I hadn’t talked to in 20 years,” Meyer said. “Even people who disagree with him think he’s a good guy and it’s time for American politics to have a good guy.”
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