Can A Scout Be Gay?

By John Cloud/New York

It's one thing to say, as most Americans have for years now, that people shouldn't be fired from their jobs just because they are gay. But what if that job is to take care of your son on a Boy Scouts' camping trip? He may need comforting after a nightmare, or a pat on the back when he skins his knee. You may know rationally that gays are no more likely to molest children than are heterosexuals. And you may know that virtually all psychiatrists have agreed for years that kids can't be "turned" gay. But your gut may say something else, something biased.

Although an uneasy consensus is forming in favor of gay equality, the toughest test is what that equality will mean for our kids. This week the U.S. Supreme Court will take that test when it hears oral arguments in the case of Boy Scouts of America v. James Dale. The ruling, expected by summer, should settle the question of whether the Boy Scouts have to admit openly gay men and boys.

The Scouts have fought gays several times before, going back to the '70s, and always won. But this is the first such case to reach the high court, and it comes after a unanimous lower-court ruling against the Scouts. If the gay activists pushing Dale's case win, they will have cracked one of America's most traditional fraternities, a group that receives strong support from conservatives. If the Scouts win, they will help activists on the right reinforce a crumbling heteros-only wall around key social institutions (marriage being the most fraught).

The case will also help decide how much legislators can advance gay equality. Eleven states have laws barring employers from firing workers for being gay, and at least eight more have considered such legislation this year. The Boy Scouts contend that hiring openly gay leaders would interfere with the Scouts' First Amendment right to express the view that homosexuality is wrong and would violate their First Amendment freedom to associate, or not, with whomever they please. They also warn that if they lose, all organizations that serve a specific group--they point to the N.A.A.C.P--would have to become all-inclusive.

Gay-activist attorneys say the presence of a few gays wouldn't keep Scout officials from maintaining anti-gay views, since the vast majority of scouting activities never involve discussions of sexuality or politics. They say the issue isn't so much a group's right to exclusivity--no one is arguing that the Ku Klux Klan must admit Jews--as it is whether a group like the Boy Scouts, which generally welcomes every boy, can claim that being anti-gay is part of its core values. (As a practical matter, the N.A.A.C.P isn't worried: it has filed a brief against the Scouts.)

But even if most scouts and their parents don't discuss homosexuality, some care deeply about it. Opponents of gay equality--not just Scout officials but also Fundamentalist Christian landlords who don't want gays to move in, and conservative charitable groups that don't want to serve gays--are increasingly using the First Amendment as a shield. At the heart of these conflicts is this question: If all Americans must eventually associate with gay people, even in a close-knit setting like a Scout troop, how will some continue to express their contrary moral views about gays?

James Dale, 29, walks into Florent, a hip French eatery near a predominantly gay neighborhood in Manhattan. "Hi, Jaaaaames," coos Bruce, the maitre d', as he leans over in his black leather pants to kiss Dale, who has become something of a gay celebrity because of his case. Later, as Dale slices into his medium-rare tuna steak and sips a glass of Chardonnay, he seems a world away from S'mores over a campfire.

But Dale used to love all that stuff back in Middletown, N.J., where he grew up and, at age 8, entered Pack 142 of the Cub Scouts. Then known as James Dick--he understandably had the name changed--he became a model scout, earning 30 merit badges as well as the coveted eagle scout rank. He was on a first-name basis with the older men who ran scouting locally, and he gladly gave speeches to civic groups extolling pinewood derbies and asking for donations. According to the rules, scouts stop being scouts at 18, but Dale quickly became an assistant scoutmaster.

Then he went to college at Rutgers, and it changed him. Dale, who had attended a military high school and voted for George Bush three months after his 18th birthday, got involved with left-wing campus groups, according to acquaintances. He became a vegetarian and wore combat boots. After he came out of the closet during his sophomore year, he was elected co-president of the campus gay group.

The men from the Monmouth County Boy Scout Council might never have known, since Dale didn't have much contact with them from college. But on July 8, 1990, the Newark daily newspaper ran an earnest article about the plight of "homosexual teenagers," of whom Dale was still one. He had spoken at a conference on why gay teens commit suicide at high rates, and his picture appeared, showing him gesticulating next to a lesbian fellow student.

Yikes! thought the Scout councilmen, who revoked his Scout membership. When Dale asked for an explanation, they said the Boy Scouts of America "specifically forbid membership to homosexuals." Angry and sad--Dale had hoped to be a scoutmaster after college--he brought his case to the main gay legal organization, the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, which sued. Then in 1991 Dale gained solid legal footing when the New Jersey legislature, in an unrelated move, added gays to the state's Law Against Discrimination.

Today the crux of the Scouts' case against Dale is that he is a "gay-rights activist" who won't be able to "communicate scouting's moral values." In fact, it's difficult to imagine Dale sleeping in a tent at all these days, much less inveighing against gays around a campfire. Last summer, before his lawyers made him stop talking to reporters on the record, Dale joked with one that he was happy not to have to wear the uniform, "a cotton-poly blend." He lives in lower Manhattan and works as ad director of POZ, a magazine about AIDS. He has dabbled in modeling and appeared in January 1999 among the "OUT 100," a list of influential people compiled by a gay magazine.

But if it is hard to imagine Dale's spreading the word that gay is bad, his attorney, Evan Wolfson, says the Boy Scouts rarely convey that message themselves. He says the Scouts have never taken a position on homosexuality outside a court case. "The anti-gay view is never communicated to any member," Wolfson says. "The freedom of association turns on what brings members together. And scouting is not about bigotry." (Interestingly, the Girl Scouts have an antidiscrimination policy that is understood to forbid bias against lesbians--though Girl Scout leaders aren't supposed to display their sexuality in any way.)

Boy Scouts attorney George Davidson protests that their anti-gay position is "hardly under a rock," but he admits that if you check out SCOUTING.ORG, read the Boy Scout Handbook or go with your son to a troop meeting, you'll hear nothing about gays. He also acknowledges that, perversely, if they were more stridently anti-gay--if they were the Boy Scouts of the K.K.K.--they would have a clearer First Amendment claim that admitting gays would destroy everything they stand for. "Look, if this were a business, the Boy Scouts would simply put a few lines [of anti-gay rhetoric] in a corporate handbook and be done with it," says Davidson, who usually defends major businesses.

So why not? Because the Boy Scouts are torn between competing sides in the culture wars. One faction is composed of such sponsoring institutions as schools and fire departments--more and more of which have policies that prohibit discrimination against gays. Also part of this faction are liberal religious groups that have filed a brief on behalf of Dale, including committees from the United Methodist Church, the Unitarian Universalist Association and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. Together members of this faction sponsor some 22,000 Scout units (roughly 20% of the total). If the Scouts became a fiercely anti-gay group, many churches and schools would quickly drop them. That's why the Scout oath is so mushy, requiring its takers to be "morally straight," a term devised a century ago, before the word "straight" had a sexual implication. Today, however, it is the term to which scouting officials must point when asked for a statement of their views on gays.

For some, the Scouts have already gone too far in being anti-gay. The city of Chicago has battled the Scouts for more than four years. Its Commission on Human Relations ruled in 1996 that the Scouts broke a city ordinance when they barred former eagle scout Keith Richardson from applying for a job because he is gay. The next year the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois sued Chicago itself for sponsoring 28 troops of Explorers, a career-oriented Boy Scouts program for older youth. It was the first time a chartering institution, rather than the Scouts, had been sued. In 1998, the city relented and withdrew its sponsorship.

But the Boy Scouts of America headquarters in Irving, Texas, is controlled by another faction in the debate, those for whom "morally straight" definitely means sexually straight. In recent years, members of the Mormon church have become a powerful force within scouting. Today nearly 10% of the members of the Boy Scouts Advisory Council live in Salt Lake City, Utah, home of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Latter-day Saints constitute less than 2% of the U.S. population but 21% of the boys in the core Boy Scouts program, more than any other group.

The Latter-day Saints have been instrumental in helping defeat pro-gay initiatives in at least three states. In 1995 Jack Goaslind Jr., a prominent church member who currently sits on the Scouts advisory council, said the church "would withdraw our charter membership" if scouting were required to admit gays. Moreover, in the Dale case, most major conservative groups in the U.S., from the Family Research Council to the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, have sided with the Scouts.

But the most wrenching internal controversies for the Scouts have involved gay boys, not gay leaders. Local scoutmasters routinely allow boys who come out to remain in scouting, though if headquarters finds out, locals risk losing their charter. In August a 16-year-old eagle scout applied for a job at Camp Yawgoog, a Boy Scout retreat 30 minutes west of Providence, R.I. Camp director Gary Savignano, reeling from a recent pedophilia scandal, asked the boy if he was gay. When the boy said yes, Savignano told him he couldn't have the job.

A sit-in ensued, and someone eventually pointed out that Rhode Island has a law against anti-gay discrimination. The local Scout council issued a statement offering the kid the job. But when the men at Scout headquarters heard about the controversy, they had spokesman Gregg Shields confirm that the boy can't be a scout if he is gay. The local council quickly backtracked, reaching an uneasy compromise with headquarters: the boy kept the job--and his scouting membership--but he had to agree not to talk about being gay. Since then, the United Way and other funders have been under pressure to stop donating to the Scouts.

Most such skirmishes are on hold as everyone waits for the Supreme Court. In the meantime, the Boy Scouts try to remain an organization where no one talks about homosexuality in an age when everyone talks about it.

--With reporting by Leslie Everton Brice/Atlanta, Wendy Cole/Chicago and William Dowell/Camp Yawgoog

With reporting by Leslie Everton Brice/Atlanta, Wendy Cole/Chicago and William Dowell/Camp Yawgoog