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A debate is raging in America's cities and towns over the issue of gay Boy Scouts. At a time when the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. has announced that lesbians are welcome, the Boy Scouts of America (BSA)-an organization allegedly founded by a closeted homosexual [see related story on page 56]-is expelling youths and leaders who acknowledge being gay. A handful of government organizations, such as the San Francisco school board, are cracking down on the BSA for its discrimination, while private group such as the United Way are considering withholding funding from the largest boys organization in the nation. Perhaps most important, gay ex-scouts are coming forward in increasingly large numbers with stories of emotional abuse. "Growing up gay was hell," says former scout Charles Galvin, 31, who grew up in Marin County, north of San Francisco. He says he had longed to get some understanding from someone in scouting. "Instead," he says, "I got fag jokes around the campfire." Granted a congressional charter in 1916 to use the organization's name in perpetuity, the BSA is the most well-known youth organization in the United States. As of the end of 1900, according ~ BSA spokesman Blake Lewis, the organization comprised 4.2 million young people from ages 8 to 17 supervised by 1.2 million adult volunteers or "scouters." More than 395 regional scout councils oversee the day-to-day operations of over 50,000 Boy Scout troops, approximately 54,000 Cub Scout packs for boys under age 11, and roughly 25,000 Explorer posts for scouts 18 and over. The group has a total of 3,578 paid adult staff members nationwide. For many, who rise through the ranks as boys and then go on to become scouters, involvement in scouting is a lifetime commitment. Lewis could not estimate a total annual budget, saying that each local council handles its own finances, but the amount of money involved is impressive: The United Way, a considerable but by no means the only source of funding for scout councils across the country, provides nearly $90 million per year. TROUBLED BOYS Most media attention around the gay issue has focused on the adult troop leaders known as scoutmasters-notably the ten-year legal battle of Timothy Curran, the ex-Eagle Scout who was denied a scoutmaster position in Berkeley, Calif., after his gayness became known. Relatively little has been written about the effect of the BSA policy on gay adolescents struggling to accept their sexuality. But gay ex-scouts are now raising their voices about the hell they say the scouting organization has put them through. The organization describes itself as being "deeply concerned about the general welfare of our nation's children." But many ex-scouts charge that the organization cares only for the welfare of heterosexual children, heaping mental abuse on and dismissing any boys and scout leaders found to be gay. The loudest chorus of protest has come from San Francisco, where the school board voted Sept. 12 to bar the BSA from conducting programs in city classrooms during school hours (access by the BSA and other groups to school facilities after school is legally protected under state and federal laws). Ex-scout Patrick Renner, 20, now lives in San Francisco but grew up in Dayton, Ohio. Renner, who reached the second highest rank in scouting, spent his summers working at various summer camps run by the local scout council. At age 16 he says he was dismissed from his job as dining hall steward at Cricket Holler Cub Scout Camp in Dayton and given one hour to leave the camp after his gayness became known. '"There'd always been rumors about me," he says, "because I had a high voice and what would have been considered effeminate mannerisms." He says he was later interrogated "like a court-martial" by the camp chaplain and two other camp officials. "I really felt unwanted," he recalls. "School was basically a hell where I was harassed and abused all day to the point where I came home crying. Scouting just rubbed it in my face." Daniel R. Campbell, Ph.D., a former scoutmaster and Eagle Scout who now teaches history at Michigan State University in East Lansing, points to the unfairness of the scout policy that homosexuality is incompatible with scouting. In an unpublished letter to the New York Times, he emphasized that most boys enter scouting at an age at which "they are in no position to make any commitment" about their sexual orientation and then are put in the position of having to keep their sexuality a secret. If they obey the Scout Law and tell the truth, they get kicked out. HETEROSEXUAL VALUES The BSA's stated purpose is to help youths develop the skills and self -reliance that will make them better men. National scouting spokesman Lewis says the group puts "very strong emphasis on outdoor activities," including camping, hiking, and wilderness survival, geared toward "developing values and personal skills." He admits that the BSA emphasizes "heterosexual, old-time family values." Another scout who learned the hard way what those "old-time family values" mean is Chris Strobel, an 18-year-old from Stockton, Calif. As Strobel tells it, when he most needed support from scouting, what he got was his walking papers. Strobel joined the Cub Scouts at age 8 when, he says, recruiters came into his third-grade classroom to make a pitch. He moved up through the group's three achievement levels-Bobcat, Wolf, and Bear-and then continued into Webelos, a transition program that leads to becoming a full-fledged Boy Scout, which he did at age 12. Strobel loved scouting. "In my eyes," he says, "scouting had been this really great organization." Having had problems with his parents and with school, Strobel says scouting became "something really, really special to me, because this was something I was good at." He quickly assumed responsible positions in the troop, becoming a senior patrol leader as well as den chief to the Webelos pack. But Strobel, 16 at the time, was also coming to terms with his homosexuality, and - although he thinks no one had any concrete reason to suspect he was gay- had gotten some static about it from the younger kids. He was troubled. "I guess," he says, "society had succeeded in making me believe I couldn't be a scoutmaster, I couldn't join the Army, I couldn't have a family." Encouraged by the Boy Scout Handbook, which suggests that scouts with questions about sex and relationships discuss them with their scoutmaster, Strobel decided to discuss his sexual feelings with the assistant scoutmaster of his troop. He remembers, "I honestly felt that they would be the organization, if any, to support gay youth." The conversation was tense and awkward. "My feeling was he didn't know what to say;" Strobel remembers. "But he came across as being supportive." The next morning Strobel got a call from his scoutmaster, who told him that "my personal preferences were in conflict with the Scouting principle. I couldn't believe this vas happening." A meeting was arranged at which, like Renner, he was interrogated about his sexuality. "They were trying to find out if I was gay or just a confused kid," he says. After telling Strobel that he "wasn't old enough to make a decision like that," his questioners decided to let him remain a Scout. Strobel was overjoyed. "I got really psyched up," he says. For several months everything seemed fine. Then, after he developed a close (but, he says, non-sexual) friendship with a younger boy, things suddenly changed. He went to a troop meeting last March. "The scoutmaster pulled me out of the meeting and told me that word had come from the council that I couldn't stay that I had to leave," Strobel says. Without a ride, he walked home alone. "I was really hurt, really scared, really suicidal," he recall. Strobel is still feeling the damage and is angry about "the garbage they're filling the kids' minds with," he says. "It's really dangerous. Most of my friends from scouting are not comfortable around me, or their parents do not want them around me." THE EXCEPTIONS But in a few troops, openly gay men seem to have been tolerated, even in leadership positions. Harold Klein of Queens, NY., says he was openly gay as a scoutmaster from the mid '70's to 1981 without any problems. "It was never an issue," he recalls. "My lover was my assistant scoutmaster. We were not only gay, we were an openly gay couple." Jeff McElroy, a 36-year-old Los Angeles attorney, grew up on scouting in the Midwest and spent many summers in the '708 and early 80's on staff at the Philmont Scout Ranch and Explorer Base in Cimarron, N .M. He recalls that "many of the men" who worked at the BSA's oldest national summer camp were gay, although most were closeted and many had not come to terms with their sexuality. "In our own quiet, self-hating way," he reminisces, "we were homosexuals." Like many in scouting, McElroy says the organization played a huge role in his development. "There really was an emotional impact," he recalls. He remembers it as a frustrating period of having to repress his true feelings. In his later scouting years, he says, "I felt betrayed." Since leaving scouting he has discovered "an informal network" of gay ex-staffers. Rob Schwitz, 21, of St. Louis worked his way up through the ranks to Eagle Scout and then, as an adult, served on the staff of Camp Joy, the Boy Scout summer camp in Carlyle, Ill. He says that as early as 1987, "there was definitely another gay person in the camp staff" and that "I knew that there were other adults within the council who had engaged in same-sex activities." But , when Schwitz became involved in a public battle with the Air Force over whether he could remain in the Air Force's Reserve Officers' Training Corps program as an openly gay man, he was summarily expelled from scouting. Another staffer at that same summer camp had a similar experience. Morris Grooms, 28, says that he worked at the camp for several years in the mid '80's and that the camp's director and others in administration knew he was gay. "They said it would be OK," he says. But when rumors started that he was having an affair with another young man on staff, he was quickly given the ax. Both he and Schwitz received terse form letters advising them that they had to "sever any relations that you may have with the Boy Scouts of America." Camp director Kevin McPherson declined to comment on the charges or on any aspect of the BSA's policy on homosexuality, referring inquiries to spokesman Lewis at the national headquarters in Irving, Tex. Lewis, while reluctant to comment on specific cases with which he says he is not familiar, speaks at length about the antigay policy. The Boy Scouts, he says, is "an organization that's based on traditional family values. It's our feeling and our position that persons who are living a homosexual lifestyle do not present a role model that's consistent with the values of scouting. It's based on the Scout Oath," he adds, pointing to the oath's phrase "morally straight." According to Lewis, the BSA does not necessarily condemn those who disagree with the group's chosen values. "We're not saying you're bad," he says, but he defends the BSA's right to define its own set of moral standards. "If you agree with those values, come on board," he says, adding that the prohibition on homosexuality is "something that's been with scouting for many years." FIRST GAY SCOUT'? Perhaps the prohibition has been around for many years, but many believe that the British founder of the Boy Scouts, Robert Baden-Powell, was himself homosexual, albeit largely repressed. Biographer Tim Jeal concludes in his 1989 study The Boy-Man, "The available evidence points inexorably to the conclusion that Baden-Powell was a repressed homosexual." Among other things, Jeal cites Baden-Powell's extraordinarily close, decades-long friendship with Kenneth McLaren, with whom he served in the British military and always made sure he bunked; his often-expressed enjoyment of watching young men swim naked; his equally strongly expressed disdain for female nudity; his late and possibly reluctant marriage; and his disdainful references to adolescent boys' attraction to girls as "the rutting season." In fact, the BSA's rigid antigay stance seems to be at variance with the group's own printed materials, which make frequent references to respect for the rights and dignity of others. The Boy Scout Handbook section on "The Meaning of the Scout Oath" tells scouts that, among other things, the phrase "morally straight" means to "respect and defend the rights of an people." The words heterosexual and homosexual do not appear. Another scout publication, a pamphlet entitled "Scouting for the Emotionally Disturbed," starts out by stating flatly, "Scouting is for all youth." On page 5, the same pamphlet continues, "All people need safety, security, to belong, to be loved, to be fulfilled, to express themselves, and to create"- exactly the experiences gay scouts accuse the organization of denying them. LESBIAN SCOUTS The Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. has no comparable anti-lesbian policy. Last June the organization issued a national policy statement explicitly rejecting judgment on or interference with any girl's sexual orientation. It reads, "Girl Scouts of the USA., a private organization, respects the values and beliefs of each of its members and does not investigate or intrude into personal matters. Therefore, we do not have policies that focus on individual sexual preference." Florence Newsom, executive director of Los Angeles Girl Scout Council (covering much of central Los Angeles and some adjoining communities), adds, "We have absolutely no objection to persons of different lifestyles within our program." Can the BSA be induced to change its policy? American Civil Liberties Union attorney Jon Davidson, who is representing Curran, thinks that public pressure rather than the court system may provide the best hope for change. Describing the judiciary as "frequently hostile," Davidson says, "I'm really excited about the community response, particularly in the San Francisco Bay area. I don't think change will come quickly, but I do think the Boy Scouts' policy eventually will change." Davidson and others were briefly encouraged by a decision by the United Way of the Bay Area in San Francisco to withhold a $9,000 special grant to the Mount Diablo Boy Scout Council (the council involved in the Curran suit) over the antigay policy. The Northern California United Way has not made a final decision on the matter, but there has been no sign of a nationwide move by United Way organizations to withhold funding over the issue. According to Tony DeCristofaro, director of public relations for United Way of America, local United Way organizations are separate entities, bound together in a comparatively loose national association. Each is able, within certain parameters, to set its own nondiscrimination policy. Only the San Francisco and Chicago United Way groups explicitly prohibit funding agencies that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. The Chicago United Way chapter has put its local scout council on probation but has taken no concrete action. In an attempt to appease critics, the BSA has announced a national program called Learning for Life, which will offer instruction in character building and citizenship in the classroom, regardless of a participant's sexual orientation. But the program is separate from regular scouting. Gay and lesbian leaders in San Francisco quickly blasted the proposed program. Openly gay school board member Tom Ammiano, calling the plan "separate but equal," went ahead with a successful move to bar in-school scouting programs. So far, these and other efforts- including the recent announcement by San Francisco radio host Ken McPherson that he is forming Forgotten Scouts, a national organization of gays who have been involved in scouting - seem to have had little effect on the BSA's hostility to gays. Homosexuality, Lewis says, remains incompatible with scouting, period. For the foreseeable future, gay scouts will have to either hide their identity or face expulsion in most cases. As ex-scout Campbell
says, "It is difficult enough in our culture for young people to come to terms with being gay. Many face rejection by family, friends, and associates. Many commit suicide. For the Boy Scouts to not only be insensitive to these facts
but to add to personal anguish at a time of personal crisis is unconscionable." |
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