'I knew who I could go to': how Walz gave his queer school students a refuge

A straight, football-coaching national guardsman wasn’t the LGBT+ ally that Seth Elliot Meyer expected.

But Meyer, who came out as queer in his freshman year of high school in 2000, admits he was wrong about Tim Walz.

“I just sort of naively believed that someone who was a big, masculine dude with a deep voice was never someone who’s going to be on my side,” Meyer says. “As much as those younger students who were courageous enough to be out in those years, it was just as important to have those very kind of ‘normal,’ strong, straight, masculine allies backing us up.”

Before he was governor of Minnesota, before he was a member of Congress, and before he was a candidate for the next vice-president of the United States, he was “Mr Walz,” a geography teacher at Mankato West High School, roughly 80 miles south of Minneapolis.

In 1999, Walz agreed to be the faculty adviser for the school’s first gay-straight alliance (GSA). Walz and his wife Gwen, who also taught at the school, were a refuge for their LGBT+ students, alumni tell The Independent. Dozens of those former students are now campaigning for him to reach the White House.

In 2018, Walz told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that he felt it was important that he served as a GSA faculty adviser because “it really needed to be the football coach, who was the soldier and was straight and was married”.

There are now roughly 4,000 such groups, now known as gender-sexuality alliances, across the country. “He was totally fine being a dude who would say, ‘Why the hell aren’t we all treated equal?’” Meyer, 38, tells The Independent. “A lot of people have talked about how he’s genuine or not phoney, and that’s true, but I don’t think that’s quite specific enough,” he says. “He just sounds like a human being before he sounds like a politician.”

At a Philadelphia rally earlier this month, Kamala Harris introduced her running mate by telling supporters how an openly gay student had asked Walz to serve as the group’s faculty adviser.