Fact Check: Unpacking the Claim That Walz 'Recruited Young Boys' into 'Gay Club' at School

While serving as a teacher and football coach at Mankato West High School, Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz was the faculty adviser to a Gay-Straight Alliance club founded in 1999.

In August 2024, the managing editor of the Christian satire website The Babylon Bee, Joel Berry, used that fact to claim in an X post that "Tim Walz recruited young boys into a gay club at school."

Via X, Snopes asked Berry whether he was making a satirical point of some kind by describing Walz's involvement with a club dedicated to bringing straight and gay students together to fight homophobia in that way. He said he was not.

"Some might argue my characterization of Tim Walz's involvement in a GSA was crass, but it isn't untrue," Berry responded. "One of the job descriptions of a GSA leader is recruitment of kids into the club." To make this point, Berry provided Snopes with, among other things, a document and video for GSA advisers with tips for increasing turnout including "provide food at your meeting" and "it's important to give people something to look forward to at every meeting."

Snopes asked whether Berry was implying that Walz used the club to groom boys for sexual abuse or that Walz himself was a sexual predator. "I'm not accusing Walz of being a sexual predator," he said, "but I am accusing him of propping up a system that enables and encourages the predation of children."

Given the heated rhetoric, this piece takes a closer look at what Walz actually did during his time as a faculty adviser to a small-town high school GSA.

A Gay Club?

The Mankato West High School Gay-Straight Alliance formed thanks to the efforts of one student, Jacob Reitan, who had been bullied for the perception that he was gay. Despite significant abuse, he wanted to come out as such before going to college, and asked the school if he could create a Gay-Straight Alliance, as reported by The New York Times in August 2024:

Taunts and threats escalated as rumors about Jacob Reitan's sexual orientation swirled around his southern Minnesota high school during his senior year in 1999.

Someone chalked a slur on his driveway in giant letters. His mother recalled being horrified by anonymous mail that arrived at their home, including one message that said her gay son would be better off dead.

After the teenager found his car window smashed in the school parking lot, he told officials at Mankato West High School that he intended to come out of the closet and sought their support to start a gay-straight alliance club.

Gay-Straight Alliances have been around since at least the 1980s, and their explicit aim has always been to reduce homophobia through dialogue between gay and straight individuals. They are not "gay clubs," as the explicit point of these clubs would be incomplete without straight allies.

More recently, such clubs — which are also increasingly described as Gender and Sexuality Alliances —  have been cited by anti-critical race theory and anti-LGBTQ+ activists as part of a broad conspiracy to exploit children. Berry repeated these arguments in discussion with Snopes:

Good Leftists don't think of themselves as individuals but as cogs in a system designed for a purpose. In this case, the system is designed to break down innocence and sever the bonds of family to make kids more exploitable. They're working to create a culture in which the exploitation of children isn't just normalized, but celebrated as a moral good.

Though its meetings drew few students, the GSA Walz advised in 1999 significantly improved Reitan's life and largely ended the bullying he experienced as a high-schooler. "Club meetings drew a smattering of students," the Times reported . "No one else came out of the closet during the period Mr. Reitan led it, he said. But the bullying largely ceased."

Recruited Young Boys?

Not only is the notion of "gay recruitment" a well-known homophobic dog whistle, but the claim that Walz specifically recruited "young boys" is misleadingly narrow. The club did not aim to recruit male students exclusively, but students of any gender and sexual orientation. Further, he did not conceive of the GSA or seek out its leadership. He was asked by the principal of the school to supervise it. He described both aspects of the GSA's formation in an ad that ran during his 2018 campaign for governor of Minnesota:

I had students come to me who were concerned that there was an uptick in some bullying towards our gay and lesbian students, and this is in the mid-'90s. They asked if I would be interested in helping start a Gay-Straight Alliance group. My answer was absolutely.

I recognized my responsibility, in that you have an older, white, straight married male football coach who's deeply concerned that these students are treated fairly and that there's no bullying.

And the idea that my [football] players would be interested in coming to that [group] and learn and to speak, to create a culture in a school that was welcoming, open, and understanding was something Gwen [Walz, also a teacher at Mankato West] and I always strove for.

"It really needed to be the football coach, who was the soldier and was straight and was married," Walz told the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2018. "In other words," the Tribune wrote in a profile of the then-gubernatorial candidate, "he would be a symbol that disparate worlds could coexist peacefully."

"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." Another student from Walz's time with the GSA recalled to the Times the attitude Tim and Gwen Walz took:

"The Walzes were both like, 'There will be nothing but respect,' and it was just like laying down the law," said Nicole Griensewic, 41, a former classmate of Reitan's. "It was really bold."

In response to critics, Berry posted on X: "In a world where the truth is suppressed, the truth will look like hyperbole." A crucial corollary to this point could be this: In a world without context, anything can look nefarious.

Sources:

Coolican, J. Patrick. Tim Walz's Campaign for Minnesota Governor Aims to Bridge the Great Divide. 14 Oct. 2018, https://www.startribune.com/tim-walz-s-campaign-for-minnesota-governor-aims-to-bridge-the-great-divide/495297961 .

Londoño, Ernesto. "25 Years Ago, a Gay Student Sought Support. His School Turned to Tim Walz." The New York Times, 20 Aug. 2024. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/20/us/tim-walz-gay-students.html .

"Mission, Vision, & History." GSA Network, https://gsanetwork.org/mission-vision-history/ . Accessed 23 Aug. 2024.

Tim Walz: Coach, Role Model, Ally 🏳️‍🌈 | When My LGBT Students Approached Me in the Mid-1990s Asking Me to Help Them Start the First Gay-Straight Alliance at Mankato West High School, My Answer... | By Tim WalzFacebook. www.facebook.com, https://www.facebook.com/govwalz/videos/tim-walz-coach-role-model-ally-%EF%B8%8F/10101099675953009/ . Accessed 23 Aug. 2024.