Mike De Socio on the Legal and Cultural Battle for Queer Rights and Recognition Within an All-American Institution

The LGBTQ+ community is up against a lot of challenges right now: Ever-accelerating legal attacks, an ascendant right wing and a red-hot culture war over its very existence.

It’s easy to despair about this moment and its dire consequences for queer and trans people. But it’s important to remember that we’ve been here before, and there are lessons we can learn from activists of the past.

The fight for LGBTQ+ inclusion in the Boy Scouts of America, which began in 1981, had many of the same hallmarks of today’s battles: legal obstacles, cultural debates, and powerful politics. But the activists who fought for LGBTQ+ inclusion in this singular American institution overcame all of that and, though they endured losses along the way, ultimately won their campaign. Their experience holds many lessons—and reasons for hope—that are essential to remember today.

The image of a gay Eagle Scout…shifted the way Americans thought of gay people at the time.

Fresh off the heels of the Stonewall uprising in 1969, gay activists in the 70s started to make some real political and legal progress, and gained nationwide momentum. Just one example: Nearly half of the states in the country ended criminal prosecution of homosexuality in the first years of the decade.

But just as the ink was drying, a political backlash was brewing. In 1978, the cities of St. Paul, Minnesota; Wichita, Kansas; and Eugene, Oregon, repealed gay rights laws. It was a sign that the gay rights movement, newly in the national spotlight, had begun to inspire some real fear among the more conservative, religious bastions of American society.

Much like we are seeing today, the tangible progress for LGBTQ+ people in the 1970s had, by the end of the decade, kicked off an intense pushback. The Boy Scouts of America was no exception. The traditionally conservative organization first instituted a formal policy banning gay people from the ranks in 1978, at the height of this new culture war.

But this tide of resistance did not deter gay men within Scouting from fighting back. In the 1980s, the first legal challenger to the Boy Scouts’ policy emerged: Tim Curran. He was an Eagle Scout from the San Francisco Bay area who was denied membership as an adult volunteer after his local Scouting council found out that he was gay.

In 1981, Curran filed suit against the Scouts, contending that the anti-gay policy violated a civil rights law in California. His legal battle would end up lasting nearly two decades. Although he eventually lost in the California Supreme Court in 1998, his court case catalyzed an important national conversation about inclusion in the Scouts. And by then he was no longer the only gay man fighting this battle.

Another Eagle Scout, James Dale, had sued the Scouts in the early 90s, making a similar claim: that the anti-gay policy violated New Jersey’s Law Against Discrimination. He notched several energizing victories, including a unanimous one in New Jersey’s Supreme Court, which held that the Boy Scouts of America’s policy did, in fact, violate civil rights protections for gay people in the state.

Dale’s case then ascended to the nation’s highest court, at which point his story became an obsession of national media—and of the country at large. All sorts of organizations, from churches to civic groups, were taking sides and filing amicus briefs. In the end, Dale lost at the Supreme Court of the United States in 2000, in a 5-4 decision that cemented the BSA’s constitutional right to choose its own membership as a private organization.

But I said this was a hopeful story, and you’re probably wondering where, exactly, there’s hope in two big legal losses.

For one thing, it’s inspiring that Dale, Curran, and their legal teams spent decades laboring for inclusion in an iconic American institution. And even though they did not change policy, they won in a different way: They showed the country that it was possible to be both gay and moral. The image of a gay Eagle Scout—someone who was simultaneously queer and an embodiment of American ideals—shifted the way Americans thought of gay people at the time.

The Boy Scouts of America did not end up changing its policies to allow gay youth and adults until 2013 and 2015, respectively. But here, too, there are lessons to learn.

With the legal path closed off by the Supreme Court in 2000, the wave of activism that re-emerged in 2012 took a different shape: Grassroots media campaigns. In the age of social media and online petitions, a new organization dubbed Scouts for Equality executed a strategy that swiftly pushed the BSA to reconsider and ultimately end its discriminatory policies toward queer people.

That’s the other thing we must learn from our history: This too shall pass.

They did this by leveraging the powerful, personal stories of queer Scouts who had been kicked out, denied or otherwise harmed by the organization. These stories—like those of Ry Andresen, a 17-year-old denied the rank of Eagle Scout, or Jennifer Tyrrell, a Cub Scout den mother barred from her son’s pack—all demonstrated the clear problems with the BSA’s policy. They also captured media attention, and once again built outrage and public pressure to change the policy.

It was especially critical that these stories came from insiders, not outsiders. It was Scouts themselves who were being harmed and speaking out. It was Scouting volunteers calling on the BSA to change. In other words: The BSA’s own members were calling on the organization to live up to its own values.

This powerful storytelling campaign that activated insider pressure is what ultimately led to a cascade of policy changes that allowed gay boys and men into the ranks.

Those changes, it’s worth noting, have endured yet another backlash to LGBTQ+ progress: our current one. As lawmakers have tried to pull back our rights in the 2020s, the Boy Scouts of America has steadfastly, if a bit quietly, stood by its queer and trans members. Just last year, at the organization’s national Jamboree, the BSA created a first-ever affinity space for LGBTQ+ Scouts and allies, and will be doing the same at this summer’s national event. And in May, the organization announced it will be renaming itself as Scouting America, to reflect this new era of inclusivity.

When I look back at this history, which I chronicled in my new book, Morally Straight: How the Fight for LGBTQ+ Inclusion Changed the Boy Scouts—and America, I see many reasons for hope. I see the resilience and ingenuity of queer people who are dedicated to defending their rights. I see the creativity of a community who will figure out how to gain their place, even when the highest court in the land has denied it. I see a commitment to inclusion that can outlast the cyclical nature of America’s attitudes.

And that’s the other thing we must learn from our history: This too shall pass. The annual surge of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation is already starting to lose traction. In Georgia, all 20 anti-LGBTQ bills failed to advance this year; in Florida, only one of more than 20 such bills passed the state legislature.

Of course, many LGBTQ+ people (especially youth) remain unsafe in many parts of this country. We can—and must—keep fighting for them. But we must do so while remembering that, just as the generations before us did, we can win.

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