Unraveling the claim that Walz recruited ‘young boys’ for a ‘gay club’ at school

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

In August 2024, the editor-in-chief of the Christian satirical website The Babylon Bee, Joel Berry, took advantage of that fact to claim in an X post that “Tim Walz recruited young boys for a gay club at school.”

Via X, Snopes asked Berry if he was making a satirical point by describing Walz’s involvement in a club dedicated to bringing together straight and gay students to combat homophobia. He said he wasn’t.

“Some might argue that my characterization of Tim Walz’s involvement with a GSA was crude, but that is not untrue,” Berry responded. “One of the job descriptions of a GSA leader is to recruit children to join the club.” To make this point, Berry provided Snopes with, among other things, a document And video for GSA advisors with tips to increase attendance, including: “provide food at your meeting” and “it’s important to give people something to look forward to at every meeting.”

Snopes asked if Berry meant that Walz used the club to manipulate boys into 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 perpetuating a system that enables and encourages the predatory behavior of children.”

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

A gay club?

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

The ridicule and threats increased when rumors about Jacob Reitan’s sexual orientation circulated at his southern Minnesota high school during his senior year in 1999.

Someone wrote an insult in large letters on his driveway. His mother recalled being shocked by the anonymous mail delivered to their home, including one saying her gay son was better off dead.

After the teen found his car window broken in the school parking lot, he told Mankato West High School officials that he wanted to come out and ask for their support to form a gay-straight association.

Gay-Straight Alliances have been around since the 1980s and their explicit goal has always been to reduce homophobia through dialogue between homosexual and heterosexual individuals. They are not “gay clubs” as the explicit purpose of these clubs would be incomplete without hetero allies.

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

Good leftists don’t see themselves as individuals, but as cogs in a system designed for a purpose. In this case, the system is designed to destroy innocence and break the bonds of family in order to make children more exploitable. They work to create a culture where the exploitation of children is not only normalized, but celebrated as a moral good.

Although the meetings attracted few students, the GSA advised Walz in 1999 to improve Reitan’s life considerably and largely end the bullying he experienced as a high school student. “Club meetings attracted a handful of students,” the Times reported reported. “No one else came out during Mr. Reitan’s tenure, he said. But the bullying largely stopped.”

Recruited young boys?

Not only is the idea of ​​”gay recruitment” a well-known homophobic whistleblower, but the claim that Walz specifically recruited “young boys” is misleadingly narrow. The club was not designed to recruit exclusively male students, but students of all genders and sexual orientations. Further, he did not create the GSA or seek its leadership. He was asked by the director of the school to supervise it. He described both aspects of the formation of the GSA in an advertisement who ran during his 2018 campaign for governor of Minnesota:

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

I realized my responsibility because there is an older, white, heterosexual, married male soccer coach who cares deeply about making sure that these students are treated fairly and that there is no bullying.

And the idea that my (soccer) players would be interested in coming to that (group), learning and speaking, creating a culture at a school that is welcoming, open and understanding, was something that Gwen (Walz, also a teacher at Mankato West) and I always strived for.

“It really had to be the football coach, who was a soldier, who was straight and who was married,” Walz said told the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2018. “In other words,” the Tribune wrote in a profile of the then-governor candidate, “he would be a symbol that different worlds can coexist peacefully.”

“It was important to have someone on campus who was so well-liked, a football coach who had served in the military,” Reitan said told The Times. “Having Tim Walz as an advisor to the gay-straight alliance made me feel safe coming to school.” Another student from Walz’s time at GSA recalled to the Times the attitudes Tim and Gwen Walz took:

“The Walzes both said, ‘There will be nothing but respect,’ and it was like they were laying down the law,” said Nicole Griensewic, 41, a former classmate of Reitan. “It was really brutal.”

In response to critics, Berry wrote on X: “In a world where the truth is suppressed, the truth will seem like an exaggeration.” One crucial implication of this might be this: In a world without context, anything can look evil.