Tim Walz helped a gay student start a high school GSA. Gwen Walz helped the student come out.

Much has been made of vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz signing on to be faculty advisor for a Gay-Straight Alliance club in the high school where he taught and coached.  

“He made the school a safe place for everybody,” Vice President Kamala Harris shared as she introduced Gov. Walz as her running mate.

Related:

Tim Walz’s gay & bisexual former students praise his life-changing guidance

In 1999, Walz was a teacher and founded his high school’s first gay-straight alliance. His old GSA students still remember him warmly.

“Tim knew the message that it would send to have a football coach get involved.”

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It turns out, though, that Gwen Walz, the Minnesota governor’s wife, was just as important as her husband was in the club’s formation for helping the student who founded it come out.

For years, Jacob Reitan had endured terrible episodes of bullying.

In the 7th grade, Rietan says, he opened a book in the library to find a note that read, “Jake Reitan is gay.”

In high school, someone chalked a gay slur on his driveway in giant letters. Anonymous mail arrived at his home saying Reitan would be better off dead than gay.

And as an upperclassman, the teenager found his car window smashed in the high school parking lot.

That’s when he decided it was time for a change.

Two years earlier, Reitan, now 42 and a lawyer and gay rights activist, was shocked when Gwen Walz, who taught English at the same high school that her husband did, announced that her classroom was “a safe space for gay and lesbian students.”

Reitan, then 15, said he froze and wondered to himself if the remark had been meant for him.

“I did not know any gay people, and there were no gay people on TV then,” Reitan told The New York Times. “It was very much a closet of one.”

Ms. Walz told him later that she thought a reassuring word from an adult could make a big impact on his self-esteem. Soon, she became a close confidant to the teenager.

Gwen Walz and her husband had grown close to another gay student years earlier at a public school in Nebraska, where the couple met each other teaching. They took the student to an Indigo Girls concert, a spokeswoman for Ms. Walz said.

Being an ally to the LGBTQ+ community is part of her Christian faith, the spokeswoman said, a “strong belief that God creates people in the way they are supposed to be, whether that is gay or straight.”

Reitan agonized over coming out. He says the first one to hear him say the words was the family dog, a golden shepherd named Alex.

Next, during his junior year, was his older sister.

And then Gwen Walz, whom he says was the one adult at his school he felt certain would support him. With her encouragement, Reitan came out to his parents.

At that point, the rising senior was determined to come out publicly so his classmates could get to know an openly gay person, he said.

That’s when he approached the school principal about starting a GSA. With Tim Walz on board, Reitan stood at the school entrance, passing out leaflets to students for the new club he founded.

The bullying — for the most part — ended.

“The Walzes were both like, ‘There will be nothing but respect,’ and it was just like laying down the law,” a classmate of Reitan’s recalled. “It was really bold.” 

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