The powerful back story of Tim Walz's support for gay students and marriage equality

As Christian nationalists demonize LGBTQ people, a former student and friend of Harris' VP running mate and his wife explains how their values guide them to fight for equality.

When Jacob Reitan was a student at Mankato West High School in Mankato, Minnesota, where Tim Walz taught social studies in the 1990s—long before a political career that would eventually take him to the Minnesota Governor’s Mansion, and now as the VP running mate on a presidential ticket—Reitan was a student in Gwen Walz’s class.

Reitan was closeted in a time when being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender was deeply shunned by many Americans, particularly in rural and small-town America. Bullying in schools was rampant from big cities to the most remote parts of the country, and it was often dangerous to be openly queer as hate crimes escalated.

“Gwen was my English literature teacher in 10th grade,” Reitan told me in an interview on my SiriusXM Progress program. “And in 10th grade, I knew that I was gay, but I was living in the closet of one. It was an echo chamber. I was out to no one, but I was wrestling with this reality. That was difficult because not only did I not tell anyone that I was gay, I also knew no one who was gay.”

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Reitan, who would go on to become a gay activist in later years and an attorney, remembers feeling very lonely in the small city of Mankato, the county seat of Blue Earth County, 82 miles south of Minneapolis.

On the first day of class with Gwen Walz, she said something at the beginning that stirred Reitan.

“She started the class by saying that this was a safe place for gay and lesbian students,” Reitan vividly recalls. “I had never heard any teacher say anything positive about gay kids from the front of the class. My heart was beating out of my chest. I thought, Does she know that I'm gay? Is that why she's saying this? And it stuck with me.”

Reitan soon decided to come out as gay, telling his sister and a good friend first. The third person he came out to was Gwen Walz.

“Gwen and I had long conversations about being gay, and she talked about being supportive of a previous student of hers who was openly gay when [she and Tim] were teaching in Nebraska and things that they had done to support that student,” he recounted. “And so I knew that Tim and Gwen were supportive people that I could go to.”

Within the year, Reitan, the first student at Mankato West to come out as gay, worked with other students and created the gay-straight alliance at Mankato West. As Vice President Harris noted in her introduction of her running mate in Philadelphia two weeks ago, Tim Walz, the social studies teacher and football coach, became the faculty adviser to the group.

Both Tim and Gwen Walz became lifelong friends of Reitan and his family. Reitan told me about how their faith is what guided them in supporting LGBTQ people.

“Tim's core is the concept of treating people with compassion, equality, and justice,” Reitan said. “And it's in Gwen's core too. Gwen, in high school, would talk to me about why it was important to her because of her faith.”

“We talked about how I come from a Lutheran family. My grandfather was a Lutheran minister, and she would say that it's because of her Lutheran faith that she does this. They're very religious people. Gwen prays every day. Their concept of religion includes treating people equally and justly.”

That is enormously powerful to hear at a time when Donald Trump courts Christian nationalists in the evangelical base who demonize LGBTQ people. He’s promised them, as he did in his first term, to strip the rights of LGBTQ people. much of which is outlined in Project 2025.

Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, calls LGBTQ people “groomers"—a grotesque and dangerous lie that implies we are pedophiles—and is opposed to marriage equality and gender-affirming care for transgender people.

So the fact that the Walzes supported marriage equality in 2006 as Tim Walz was embarking upon a run for a congressional seat in a rural, red Minnesota district is pretty astounding. That was a time when President George W. Bush was pushing for a federal marriage amendment, and many states had banned same-sex marriage.

Even most Democratic elected officials, including those from urban areas, publicly opposed same-sex marriage. In fact, they saw the middle ground—the safe space—in opposing the federal marriage amendment while opposing marriage equality. It was pretty cowardly.

But not Tim Walz. Reitan relayed a story from 2006, when Tim and Gwen Walz were mulling over Tim’s possible run for the U.S. House, and they came to his home for dinner.

“My parents had them over, and they were in the basement of my parents’ house with [then Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party] Congressman Bill Luther to sort of discuss what running for Congress looks like,” Reitan explained. “And my mom said to Tim, ‘We know how difficult it is to be supportive of LGBT issues in southern Minnesota because of what Jake had been through.’”

“I'd been through some bullying. And she said, ‘You don't have to be for gay marriage on account of our family.’ And Tim said to my mom, ‘I need to look my gay students in the eye. I'm for gay marriage.’”

A week after Tim Walz announced his run for Congress in a district formerly held by a Republican, Reitan said Walz was interviewed on a local radio show.

“All these states were [changing] their state constitutions to ban gay marriage,” he remembers. “And in his first week on talk radio, KFAN Radio in Mankato, they asked him, ‘Are you for or against the federal marriage amendment?’ And Tim's response was, ‘I'm not just against the federal marriage amendment. I'm for gay marriage. My marriage to my wife, Gwen, is the most important thing to me. I would never vote to deny that joy to anybody else.’” Walz won that House seat and was re-elected several times.

At around the same time, in far-off San Francisco, District Attorney Kamala Harris was championing marriage equality. She’d spent Valentine’s Day of 2004 officiating same-sex marriages. Mayor Gavin Newsom had asked city hall clerks to start issuing licenses to same-sex couples two days before. In a matter of days, it was all shut down by the California Supreme Court, which nullified the 4,000 marriages performed.

Then came Proposition 8 and a years-long battle in California and the country, until the Supreme Court made marriage equality the law of the land in 2015.

But before that, Vice President Joe Biden had come out for marriage equality even before his boss, President Obama, who would become a powerful champion too, after previously publicly opposing same-sex marriage. After Biden became president in 2020, he rolled back much of the damage Trump had done, working with Vice President Harris, further pushing for protections for transgender people, and defining a powerful pro-LGBTQ administration.

It’s heartening—life-affirming—to know that that would continue under a Harris-Walz administration. It’s also great to know that Harris and Walz were in the same place 20 years ago, fighting against discrimination in very different locales and with very different experiences, and may now bring it all to the White House together.

You can listen to the full interview with Jacob Reitan here.