The Complex Reality of the Boy Scouts’ Gay Ban

On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.

—Scout Oath of the Boy Scouts of America

A Scout is: trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.

—Scout Law of the Boy Scouts of America

I was not athletic or popular in school. I was a nerdy, artistic kid who struggled mightily to fit in with my male peers, especially. I felt I lacked a certain toughness or masculine edge that all the other boys seemed to possess effortlessly. While they played first-person shooter video games with zeal, I sat in the corner and pretended to care. When my parents signed me up for Little League, I passed the time picking dandelions in the outfield.

It was in this environment—of awkward attempts to join sports or otherwise butch myself up—that the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) became my refuge. It was one of the few places where the rules made sense to me, and where my skills were valued. Maybe I’d never learn how to throw (or catch) a football, but I could create a Pinewood Derby car that took home a trophy every year. And maybe I would never be good at Call of Duty, but I could organize a campout without hesitation. In other words, the Boy Scouts was the place I fit in and knew how to succeed.

What I’ve come to discover by writing this book about LGBTQ people in the BSA is that I’m far from alone. Nearly every LGBTQ Scouter I’ve interviewed has told me something similar: that in a world of toxic masculinity and homophobia, Scouting—though not totally immune to those forces—was the closest thing they had to a safe haven. This is why it is particularly cruel that antigay policies existed at all, and that they were often obfuscated and not clearly shared with membership: It was entirely possible for queer kids to gravitate toward Scouting—find a home there, excel there—only to discover after the fact that their identity rendered them an outcast.

This is true of James Dale, the Scouting poster boy turned Supreme Court plaintiff, who learned about the ban on gays only as he was being kicked out for being gay. It’s true of countless others. And it’s true for myself: I didn’t realize that Scouting prohibited gay members until the policy debate blew up in 2012, a year after I earned my Eagle Scout rank, and a couple of years before I would come to accept my own queerness.

The tragedy of this state of affairs did not fully click for me until recently, during a conversation with John Halsey. Halsey has been an active member of the BSA for more than 60 years and has accomplished just about everything you can in the program. He’s an Eagle Scout, of course, and as an adult volunteer he’s served as a council president in Boston, not to mention various regional and national leadership roles. His uniform is positively dripping with awards.

The first time I called up Halsey, I was looking to conduct a pretty routine interview for this book. I wanted to know about his experience at the Boy Scouts of America national meeting in May 2013, where he was one of the hundreds of Scouters who voted to end the BSA’s ban on gay youth.

But before I could start asking my questions, Halsey wanted to make a point: The ban on gay members never should have existed in the first place; voting to end it simply steered the BSA out of a decades-long detour it never should have taken.

Halsey said this as someone who has been involved in Scouting almost his entire life, long before any policy concerning gay members existed. He joined in the 1950s, his youth in the program coinciding with what many see as the golden age of Scouting. Membership was at an all-time high, and it seemed that virtually every boy in America joined the program, at least briefly.

And yet, despite those decades also being a time of rampant homophobia, Halsey says “sexuality was never a topic in Scouting.” He told me: “The fact that somebody might be gay really didn’t have any bearing on anything. And, frankly, nobody thought anything of it.”

That is, until 1978.

The 1970s were a tough time for the BSA. “If the period from roughly 1945 to 1970 was the ‘golden age’ of American Scouting, the 1970s was, to a certain extent, its dark age,” writes Chuck Wills, in the BSA’s .

The membership boom had faded. To stem its losses, Boy Scout executives were trying to retool the program to appeal to a growing number of urban (read: non-white) youth. The BSA had never explicitly endorsed racial discrimination but had historically allowed local troops to keep out Black Scouts if they wanted to. The last racially segregated Boy Scout council (in North Carolina) was not integrated until 1974.

This massive registration drive started in the late ’60s but fell apart by the mid ’70s, when news broke that the BSA was inflating its membership numbers for the sake of federal funds. Reports showed that a council in Chicago claimed a membership of 87,000, when the true number was about 52,000, according to a New York Times article. The BSA’s chief executive at the time, Alden Barber, owned up to the problem, and was quoted in the Associated Press saying, “If we were in the business of covering it up, it could be the Watergate of the Boy Scouts.”

But the BSA was covering something up in those years—and it was much more sinister. From almost the inception of the Boy Scouts of America, its leaders knew it had a pedophile problem.

The organization’s so-called perversion files—a record of child abusers within the ranks—date back to around the time the BSA was founded in 1910. The list was a closely guarded document available only to top BSA executives.

The BSA used these files to systematically identify child abusers, kick them out, and ensure they couldn’t rejoin a different Scout troop (though plenty of pedophiles slipped through the cracks of the BSA’s blacklist, allowing hundreds of child molesters to continue in Scouting). The organization’s leaders, however, typically kept all of this information away from the general public, the police, the media, and sometimes even the parents in the offender’s troop. So it went for more than 50 years.

In 1978, when the Boy Scouts prohibited gay members in writing for the first time, Halsey watched with skepticism. By this point, he was in his 30s, a businessman who still volunteered heavily with the Scouts. The BSA, on the surface, said its new antigay policy was a response to an incident in Minnesota, in which two teenage boys were kicked out of a Scouting unit for admitting they were gay. The new policy, the Boy Scouts explained, was in the “best interests of Scouting,” as homosexuality was not “appropriate” and could not be condoned in the program.

But Halsey saw the policy as something entirely different. “The Boy Scouts—not unlike elementary schools, not unlike YMCAs, not unlike youth sports—tends to be a magnet for people who have a predilection to be involved with young children: pedophiles. And that’s no secret, everybody realizes—and has realized probably for decades—that the antenna needs to be up around pedophilia where there are young children. And the Boy Scouts failed in their mission there, and then they looked for a scapegoat,” Halsey says. “And they decided the way to create a scapegoat was to create division within the membership by placing blame on the gay community, which has nothing to do with the problem at all.”

When I first heard Halsey say this, I nearly fell out of my chair. It hit me as a theory I had encountered before, or maybe even arrived at myself. But I couldn’t place it. I dug through my notes, racked my brain, but couldn’t find any trace of this idea. Perhaps it simply matched up with a deeply held intuition I had: that, from the very beginning, the BSA knew gay men were not a problem, but decided to villainize them anyway.

I called Halsey again to try to flesh this out, maybe scare up some proof for what I saw as a provocative claim.

He explained his theory to me one more time: The antigay policy in 1978 grew out of a series of management failures at the highest levels of the BSA. The membership cheating scandal was certainly one of them—and the only one known to the public at the time. But there was also the compounding failure to stem decades of known child abuse in the organization.

“It’s my opinion that a decade-long—or longer—very poor management, failure to address the issue, denying that pedophiles roamed among us, caused an explosive situation,” Halsey said. It could not be kept under the covers for much longer. In the mid-1970s, news broke that a Boy Scout troop in New Orleans was formed for the express purpose of giving its adult leaders access to children whom they sexually abused, causing a PR nightmare for the BSA. And indeed, the BSA would come to face many sex abuse lawsuits in the 1980s. “Somebody had to be the scapegoat. It couldn’t be the chief Scout, it couldn’t be regional directors,” Halsey continued. “My opinion is that when the lid was blown off, a clear decision was made to introduce a person’s sexuality into the equation, and I feel that gay Scouters were targeted as the problem.”

Many, if not most, Americans at the time did indeed conflate homosexuality with pedophilia, and some still do to this day. In 2024, “groomer” has become the slur of choice for Republican politicians looking to demonize the LGBTQ+ community. So it might seem, on the surface, that the BSA’s religious, overwhelmingly conservative leaders in the 1970s were genuinely trying to keep pedophiles out by banning gays from the ranks. But the logic didn’t hold.

When I spoke to Neil Lupton, a Scouting volunteer of roughly the same age and experience as Halsey, he told me about a conversation he had with a friend who was a regional Boy Scout staffer in the late 1970s. It was right after the antigay policy was instituted when women were being admitted to the organization for the first time as adult volunteers. Lupton, in a joking way, posed a question to his friend: If the antigay policy is about keeping out gay men who would naturally be attracted to little boys, wouldn’t the same logic also prohibit straight women? In other words, should we admit only lesbian women to ensure they won’t be attracted to the boys? His friend chuckled and said, “Asking those types of questions is the kind of thing that will prevent you from rising higher in this organization.” The exchange was casual, but it illustrated a truth about the BSA: Pointing out logical inconsistencies was not welcome.

The BSA’s actions also belied the idea that pedophiles and gay men were one and the same. Though gay men could and did end up in the BSA’s confidential files alongside child molesters, their files indicated it was their sexual orientation, not crimes against boys, that barred them from the ranks. Indeed, records dating back to the 1920s show that BSA knew exactly who these child abusers were, and—consistent with research about the demographics of pedophiles—they were usually straight, often married men with families. As Patrick Boyle notes in : “Pedophilia is a sexual preference all its own, independent of one’s preferences with adults.” The playbook for dealing with these molesters was consistent: remove the offending leader, but protect his identity and his reputation.

This is not quite how the BSA handled known gay men in the organization. “Avowed homosexuals,” as the organization long called them, were often swiftly kicked out, and when they had the audacity to fight back, they were publicly maligned in the press and the courts.

So while the general public may have thought pedophiles and homosexuals were one and the same, the BSA seemingly knew the difference, and treated them accordingly. Child abusers, it must be said, were sometimes given more respect and privacy than openly gay men who committed no such crimes.

It is, of course, impossible to know the motives of Scout executives from decades past. Alden Barber, Harvey Price, and Downing Jenks—some of the top BSA leaders during the late 1970s—have all since died. We can’t ask them why they instituted the antigay policy, or why they failed to properly address the issue of child sex abuse.

But here’s what we can say: Experts have known for decades that homosexuality is not linked to pedophilia. In fact, most offenders are heterosexual men who are close relatives of the abused child. The idea that gay men are somehow more likely to abuse children has been thoroughly debunked. Whether the BSA’s executives knew this in 1978, we may never know, but it doesn’t seem inconceivable. Their actions—treating pedophiles and homosexuals somewhat differently—suggests that they did. Gay men at the time, with little cultural acceptance or power, were a prime scapegoat, even if the BSA knew they weren’t the problem. And there were certainly others during this period, like John Halsey and Neil Lupton, who did not buy into the myth of gay abusers.

But maybe divining the motivations of these executives is not the point. Because whether by design or by effect, the battle over gay membership served as a 40-year distraction to solving the problem of child sex abuse in the organization. As sex abuse claims rolled in through the 1980s and 1990s—resulting in large financial settlements—the BSA spent untold sums of money in court fighting the likes of Tim Curran and James Dale: exemplary Scouters who committed no other sin than being gay.

“For Scouting, it seemed to be more important to exclude gay Scouts and Scout leaders than it was to fix the pedophile problem,” said journalist Nigel Jaquiss, speaking in James Dale’s attempt to volunteer as an openly gay man in the program grew into a highly public, eight-year legal battle that ended in the Supreme Court of the United States in 2000. What most people didn’t know was that in the very same years that the BSA was in court fighting to keep Dale out of the ranks, the Scouts were receiving more than 100 child sex abuse allegations annually.

Indeed, the BSA trailed other youth organizations in their eventual efforts to prevent abuse. The organization did not start requiring criminal background checks for volunteers until 2008, and it wasn’t until 2018 that those checks became required for all adults, including parents, who chaperone campouts. And while the BSA launched its Youth Protection Training in 1990, it did not start requiring its volunteers to take the training until 2010.

For Halsey, it all comes back to a failure in leadership—the very thing the Boy Scouts prides itself on teaching its members.

“I personally believe, based on my observations and analysis and what I’ve seen, we had a 20-year window where national BSA leadership was so timid and ineffective that they chose to scapegoat a whole community,” Halsey said.

With catastrophic consequences.

Amid mounting sex abuse lawsuits, the BSA filed for bankruptcy in 2020, and by November of that year some 82,000 claims of abuse had been made against the organization, according to The New York Times. The resulting fallout—financially and reputationally—could threaten the very existence of the Boy Scouts of America.

Adding to these tragedies, the ban on gays heaped on another layer of shame and stigma that incentivized victims of sexual abuse to stay silent, for fear that speaking up could get them (incorrectly) branded as gay, and potentially even kicked out because of it. Not to mention an entire generation of boys and men in the organization who were gay but were irreparably scarred by their experience in, or rejection from, an organization that otherwise could have been a safe haven.

“We added to a challenging time for these young men. That was unnecessary,” Halsey said. “They had an anchor called Scouting, which helped them weather the challenges of growing up, because there are challenges in growing up. And we’re talking about sexuality, that’s obviously one of those challenges, but there are many challenges of growing up, and Scouting has the beauty of being the anchor in the storm. And the sad truth is, we denied a certain group of boys and men, young men, the opportunity to hold on to that anchor.”

This excerpt from (Simon & Schuster, 2024) appears by permission of the publisher.

Mike De Socio is an award-winning independent journalist who writes about social justice and solutions. He grew up in New Jersey, where he became an Eagle Scout, and later earned a degree in journalism from Boston University. His work has been published in The Washington Post, Bloomberg, the Guardian, Fortune, Xtra, YES! Magazine, and more. He now lives in upstate New York.