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A Scout is a friend to all. He is a brother to other Scouts. He seeks to understand others. He respects those with ideas and customs that are different from his own. "from the Scout Law "Brad" is a 16-year-old who lives in Palm Springs, California. If you ask him to name the worst day of his life, the answer is instantaneous: it was March 7, the day he was kicked out of the Boy Scouts for being gay. Facing an array of about 10 Scout leaders and representatives of the local Mormon church which sponsored his troop, he had no representation, no one at all to help him make his case. He recalls being told he was a sinner, an abomination. "I tried to reason with them," he says, "because I wanted to finish my Eagle," but it was impossible. "I was having trouble speaking because I was sobbing. It was the worst feeling." He was given two choices: quit voluntarily or be formally banned from Scouting. Reluctantly, still fighting tears, he left. Silent Victims The Boy Scouts of America's policy banning gays periodically bubbles into public view via a lawsuit here or an anti-discrimination complaint there, but the attention almost always focuses on adult Scout leaders. Adults, after all, are in a far better position than youths to pursue legal action and take a public stand against the huge organization, so media stories on the subject often lose track of the most important element in the equation: the kids. Scouting, after all, involves many more young people than adults, and it stands to reason that out of 4.2 million Boy Scouts many thousands most likely hundreds of thousands are gay. Officially, of course, gays don't exist in Scouting in any capacity. So it was no surprise that when talking to present and former gay Scouts to see what their experiences were like, what one discovers is a Twilight Zone existence eerily like that of gays and lesbians in the U.S. military. Bill Clinton didn't invent "don't ask, don't tell"; the Boy Scouts beat him to it by decades. Gay Boy Scouts seem to be at least as plentiful as gay and lesbian soldiers, and just like queer soldiers they have little choice but to keep their closet door shut tight. But whereas soldiers or sailors entering the military at age 18 or so often have a clear idea of their sexual orientation and voluntarily enter a world where they choose to keep their identity hidden, boys often join Cub Scouts at age seven or eight having no idea they're going to grow up to be different or that the organization to which they're about to devote thousands of hours will reject them when they do. So it was for Brad, who started out as a Cub Scout as a small boy in the southern California community of Arcadia. A few years later his family settled in Yucca Valley, a city of about 25,000, located 45 minutes from Palm Springs, that Brad now calls "a redneck town, very close-minded." He moved quickly up through the Scouting ranks, first in Troop 83 and later, when that troop faltered after its longtime Scoutmaster left, in nearby Troop 80. He was spectacularly successful, and by the time he was 14 Brad became a Senior Patrol Leader, the top leadership level a youth can achieve. By age 15 he reached the rank of Life Scout, just one notch below Eagle, the highest possible. It was a happy period. "I really hit the top when I was 15," Brad recalls. "I was active in the Yucca Valley Youth Commission, in Boy Scouts, I was an honor student at school, in the school band and active in my church.... I got along with everybody. My parents were proud of me." But lurking under the placid surface was a growing unease about his sexuality. "I've always known," Brad says of his gayness. "At age 11 is when it got scary because people start telling you it's a sin. You start seeing boyfriend and girlfriend at school." For a long time the boy tried to dismiss his feelings as "just a phase," but the phase didn't go away. "At age 15 I started to realize I was not going to grow out of it." Brad's secret began to affect him. He had occasional outbursts of temper as well as "depression, thoughts of suicide. I never let anybody know [what was wrong] because I was afraid of having to tell them." He gradually came to accept his gayness, but still kept his secret to himself. He did try tentatively telling a couple of good friends, but got scared and took it back. He finally told his parents, but aside from them he might have stayed firmly closeted had he not started watching openly gay Pedro Zamora on MTV's "The Real World." The show was a revelation. "Pedro Zamora was my inspiration," Brad remembers. "He and Sean, seeing them together made me feel ten times better. [Before that] I didn't know I could have a normal life." It was Zamora's death last December that opened Brad's closet door for good when he wrote "In Memory of Pedro Zamora" on the backpack he brought to school. He hadn't really intended it as a coming out gesture, he says, but it became one when another kid yelled, "Why are you mourning for him? He's a fag." An argument began and quickly escalated until the other boy finally said, "Why, are you gay?" Brad answered "yes," and word soon spread through the school. The youth was the target of growing hostility, taunts and harassment, and got into numerous fights. The news got around Troop 80, too, but there the reaction was different. Instead of taunts, he got silence. "Most people started ignoring me," Brad recalls. "If I walked toward someone they'd walk away or just look down. No one ever said what was up." One day he called a fellow Scout and the boy's 10-year-old brother answered. "We don't want you calling here anymore," the young boy said. When Harris asked why, he replied, "You know." But despite the cold shoulder, Brad kept going to troop meetings. "I was so close to getting my Eagle," he explains. "I just didn't feel like quitting." Things came to a head when the parents of another boy in the troop claimed Brad had molested their son. The troop's leaders set up a meeting to confront him with the charge, and even though the accusation was dropped Brad insists it was entirely bogus, they grilled him about his homosexual ity. Alone against a panel of 10 assorted Scout and church officials, Brad recalls, "They told me what homosexuality was in their view: mainly pedophilia, diseases, and the pure fact that it's a sin, the pure fact that I cannot love and cannot do anything right. They quoted the Bible that it's an abomination." He didn't deny being gay but did try to reason with them in between sobs. He got nowhere. "I cannot describe the feeling," he continues. "Having all these people who'd told you you're the greatest now saying they don't want you and nothing had changed." Not wanting to be formally barred from Scouting, he took the only other option he was offered and quit the troop. Family Values What happened to Brad was normal and proper, says Donald Townsend, Scout Executive for the California Inland Empire Boy Scout Council, which includes Harris' former troop. Although he only took the post last June and was not familiar with the details of the case, Townsend expressed no surprise when the events were described to him. Youths, Townsend explains, are subject to "the exact same policy" on homosexuality as adult volunteers and employees: gays are not welcome, period. If a Scout was believed to be gay, "there would be an investigation. If the boy were homosexual they would be asked to leave Scouting. If it's an avowed homosexual, then it's black and white." "The Boy Scouts of America's mission is to instill traditional family values," Townsend continues. An older Scout like Brad "could be a role model, especially if he's in a leadership position, for the 11- or 12-year-old boys he's working with," and gays don't make appropriate role models. Townsend indicates he has never had to deal with a situation like Brad's, and it is virtually impossible to say how typical the case is. The Boy Scouts, not surprisingly, don't rush to announce it every time they kick a kid out for being gay, and the youths themselves are often closeted and may prefer to forget the whole experience. Still, a handful of cases have come to light. In 1991 Chris Strobel told The Advocate about being kicked out of his Northern California troop at age 16 for being gay, and last year "Matthew," a 16-year-old Virginia boy still in Scouting, told Frontiers about watching a 17-year-old friend be ejected. "They took away his Eagle and everything he'd accomplished," Mat thew told the magazine. "I think it was totally unfair." Mike, a 20-year-old Eagle Scout from the Atlanta area remembers a particularly unhappy experience at a Scout summer camp. "A couple of guys got caught by someone on staff [having sex] in the showers one night," he recalls. The staffer "immediately dragged them out of the showers, back to their campsite, alerted their Scoutmaster, and they had to call up their parents and explain why they were being sent home. I think these guys were about 14 or 15. I got a real sour taste in my mouth from that." But these sorts of events may be the exception rather than the rule. What one hears about most from present and former Scouts, as well as a few adult Scout leaders, is that a cold, dead silence hung over the whole subject of homosexuality. Mike, who is bisexual, says he wasn't even aware of the ban on gays until the summer camp incident and that for the most part the subject simply never came up. "I think it was very much like the military in that unless you ran across it directly most people wouldn't consider it as existing," he explain Jeff Ozvold, an Eagle Scout from Endicott, New York who left Scouting after turning 18 this June, had the same sort of experience. Sex in general was something "we didn't talk about much at all," he says, adding that Endicott is "a conservative area where people don't talk about sex much." Like many, Ozvold started in Scouting very young as a Cub Scout while in the second grade. And his father "a card-carrying member of the NRA, a devoted ditto head, the biggest redneck this side of the Appalachians" was his Scoutmaster. And like Harris, Ozvold was something of an over achiever, earning piles of merit badges. Ozvold only began coming out to a few select friends in January, and in Scouting his closet door remained firmly shut. He says he knows "five or six" other gay youths who were Scouts, all now over 18 and out of Scouting. Uniformly they preserved themselves by keeping their mouths shut, he says. "Everyone kept it hidden and stayed in the closet around leaders and squealers." He also re members two other boys "who quit when they realized they were not straight." Whatever the youths did they did in silence, and except for an occasional joke around the campfire the subject simply never came up. The Right to Discriminate Silence on gay sexuality presents something of a problem for the Boy Scouts because it undermines a key argument the organization has used to defend its right to discriminate against gays. Last February the Scouts lost a hearing in front of the city of Chicago's Human Relations Commission on charges they had violated that city's human rights ordinance by refusing to hire a gay man for a staff position. The Scouts argued that they were exempt from the law on three grounds: that they were a religious organization, that being forced to hire gays would interfere with their First Amendment right of "expressive association," and that heterosexuality was a bona fide occupational qualification for employment in Scouting. To make the "expressive association" argument stick, the Scouts had to argue that being anti-gay is such an important part of Scouting's belief system that being forced to hire a homosexual would interfere with the group's right to express its beliefs. William McLaughlin, director of personnel administration for the Scouts' National Council went so far as to argue that even heterosexuals who support gay rights were not fit to be Boy Scout employees. But critics argue that if opposition to homosexuality is a key tenet of Scouting, the organization has an odd way of expressing it. Nowhere do the words "gay," "homosexual," "sexual orientation" or anything remotely equivalent appear in the Scout Oath or Scout Law, nor is the subject mentioned anywhere in the 660 page Boy Scout Handbook. That jibes with the experiences of the Scouts spoken to for this article. When asked about anti-gay beliefs being a key principle of Scouting, most were incredulous. Mike scoffs at the notion. "I'd have to kind of laugh at that," he says. "I'd never heard anything like that the whole time I was in Scouting." "Roger," a 22-year-old from rural Mississippi who spent his entire youth in Scouting, agrees. If the subject came up at all, he recalls, it was considered "a San Francisco thing," not to be worried about. "Occasionally there was a rumor about someone, but [the rumors were] never taken seriously." That is not to say that there is no homosexuality in Scouting. Several Scouts we spoke to trace their first same-sex experiences to Scout camp-outs always secret and almost never talked about with anyone. As for the idea of Scouting as a religious organization, experiences vary. Ozvold says attention to religion in his troop was nominal: they said grace before meals, but that was about it. Roger, on the other hand, recalls that religion "was very strongly emphasized" in his troop, located in a strongly conservative, Christian community. The National Council of the Boy Scouts of America may set rules, but what goes on at the individual troop level seems to depend a lot on the community, the group sponsoring the troop and the Scoutmaster. One can even hear isolated stories of relatively open gay Scouts or Scout leaders being tolerated with little or no difficulty, but such instances seem to be extremely rare. What's the Real Abuse? One unspoken reason for Scouting's ban on gays may be the insinuation that pedophile Scout leaders will prey on vulnerable boys, but Jim Foster argues that the real child abuse comes from forcing gay kids to stay in the closet. Foster, a licensed Marriage, Family and Child Counselor, is founder of Positive Images, a Santa Rosa, California support group for gay, lesbian, bi or questioning youth. The effect of being forced to deny one's sexuality, Foster argues, "is [abusive]. By the time a child begins to form an articulation that 'fag' or 'dyke' applies to him or her, the damage is done. The internalized homophobia has set in to such a degree" that the result can be "depression, the tendency to addiction, and suicidal ideation." And gay kids, Foster suggests, may feel especially attracted to Scouting if they are feeling insecure about their masculinity. He notes that many may feel that "you can't be masculine if you're gay, but you can if you're a Scout. As for role models, Foster argues, "The real role modeling is that the Scouts kicked [Brad] out. When the other 10 percent see that, what do they do? How much more hate, how much more internalized homophobia do they commit to? It sure reeks of child abuse." Although Scouting is hardly the only place where gay youths are forced into the closet, Foster says, "The scariest thing to me is the kid who goes though the ranks to Eagle. That's the highest suicidal potential because these kids are the perfectionists, the achievers," like Brad and Jeff Ozvold. And when they realize they can't live up to what is expected of them, "these kids will suddenly off themselves." But so far, at least, Brad's story has a happy ending even though his expulsion from Scouts wasn't the end of his troubles. Although his parents had been accepting at first, tension grew in the household and relations with his folks deteriorated. He began secretly attending a gay youth group in Palm Springs, and the leader of the group recommended him for a job at a local gay bookstore. He got it. Last April he moved in with the couple that owns the store, and the men "have basically become my parents," Brad says. "They've also been my inspiration. It's really good to see a gay couple can live a normal life." And since he moved out of his parents' house, the youth's relationship with his family has improved dramatically. "We get along really well now," he says. At least for the time being Brad plans to stay closeted in his new school to avoid the harassment he got before. And odd as it may seem, he's even thinking of joining a new Boy Scout troop to finish his
Eagle while "keeping them wondering" about his sexuality. "I've always liked the Scouting activities," he says, adding, "I'm so close to finishing." Still, he sighs, "The Boy Scouts have not been good to
me. Something has to change." life," he says. "I'm a very lucky person and there's nothing I regret doing. There's nothing I'd really change." ** |
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