Jacob Reitan

Who is Jacob Reitan?

Jacob "Jake" Reitan is an LGBT activist who founded the Soulforce Equality Ride.

Reitan was born in 1982 in Mankato, Minnesota into a Lutheran family and is one of four siblings. He came out to his parents while a junior in high school. In high school, he helped create the first gay-straight alliance at Mankato West High School. He graduated magna cum laude from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, majoring in Communication Studies and Political Science. He received his masters from Harvard Divinity School. He is attending the University of Minnesota Law School.

After some experimentation in 2005, he and Haven Herrin launched Soulforce's Equality Ride Project in 2006. He was arrested for trespassing at Liberty University in March where he said: "We want to come to the school today to say, 'learn from history.' We have a right to be here, because this school teaches that being gay is being sick and sinful. We have a right to question and to show how we are children of God." A few weeks later at West Point, just before being arrested, he said that "We're going to take this country by storm and in five years' time, it's going to be a different country because of us."