LGBTQ
In ‘Morally Straight,’ Mike De Socio Chronicles the Boy Scouts’ LGBTQ Reckoning
A professional journalist and queer Scout himself, the author’s book debut takes a narrative approach to a key moment in LGBTQ U.S. history.
The Boy Scouts of America — which changed its organization name to “Scouting America” in May 2024 — has had a long history of LGBTQ+ discrimination. A new book aims to capture the political turmoil through both compelling stories and rigorous journalism.
Scouting was one of America’s most popular youth programs for decades, and had over 2 million participants between the ages of 5 and 21 in 2018, down from 3.4 million in 1999. The COVID-19 pandemic devastated enrollment numbers, though they are once again on the rise.
Beginning in the 1970s, pressure campaigns led the BSA to establish overt anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments in its policies, including a directive that scouts aspire to be “morally straight.”
Here’s the BSA in 1991:
“We believe that homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the requirement in the Scout Oath that a Scout be morally straight and in the Scout Law that a Scout be clean in word and deed, and that homosexuals do not provide a desirable role model for Scouts.”
A 2000 Supreme Court decision, Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, further cemented this assertion when it found the BSA had the right to exclude certain members on the grounds that it was a private organization.
But the continued amount of protest, litigation and public outcry both for and against the BSA’s policies from 2000 to 2014 was prolific, to the point that the controversies have their own Wikipedia page. The BSA eventually found itself embroiled in a deluge of sexual abuse coverup allegations, which led to the organization filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2020; it’s now in the process of paying out $2.4 billion to sex abuse survivors.
Behind all of this debate, there are tens of thousands of queer scouts, past and present, who have stories to tell. In “Morally Straight: How the Fight for LGBTQ+ Inclusion Changed the Boy Scouts — and America,” professional journalist and queer Scout Mike De Socio explores these testimonies in detail. His reportage on one of the most important fights for LGBTQ+ acceptance in our lifetimes gives us a blueprint for how to navigate the current political landscape.
I sat down with De Socio to discuss what he learned in writing and reporting “Morally Straight,” which became available for purchase on Tuesday after two years of research, writing and editing.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity, and was recorded in April 2024, prior to the BSA rebranding itself to Scouting America.
NW: Let’s break the ice. What inspired you to write this book?
MDS: As a Scout, I’ve always been fascinated by the topic. I learned about the whole anti-gay policy mess a bit late in the game — not until after I became an Eagle Scout, actually — which really surprised me. And ever since I knew this policy existed, I wanted to understand where it came from and how we got here. I picked [the topic] up a few times over the years, and actually started writing about it for my high school newspaper. Recently I looked at those articles, which were really bad, but they got better along the way.
Around 2019, a friend encouraged me to think about a book in general. My first reaction was like “Well, what, what would I write about?” And the more I thought about it, the more I realized it had to be this story that I keep picking up because I can’t put it down. I realized that, although it had been covered really heavily in the media as it happened, no one had really taken that step to dig deeper and tell this narrative account of what happened. I figured that, as both a queer Scout and a journalist, I was the perfect person to do that.
NW: To bring us all on the same page, can you give a rundown of the BSA’s policy history?
MDS: So the Scouts, which were founded in 1910, did not have any kind of policy about sexual orientation until 1978. It really surprised me when I learned that almost 70 years went by before they decided to say anything about it.
What they said in 1978 was that gay people were not allowed in any capacity: as a youth, as an adult volunteer or as an employee. That policy was a bit stealthy at first, and they really didn’t announce it to membership — it only came to light in the eighties and nineties, when gay Scouters began to challenge it in court. Folks like Tim Curran and James Dale ended up being pretty high-profile court cases.
James Dale went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States in the year 2000, and unfortunately he lost, so the Scouts retained the policy and the debate kind of went dormant for about a decade. The most recent wave to finally elicit change was more of a grassroots media campaign, because the legal path had already been closed off. It led to a cascade of policy changes. In 2013, they allowed gay youth; in 2015, gay adults; and in 2017, trans boys. And then in 2018, they said “You know what? Girls can come in, too.” So now the Boy Scouts is open to kids of all genders and sexual orientations.
NW: 1978 was around the time of the “Save the Children” messaging. Was that an influence in the initial policy decision? Or were there other factors?
MDS: I can only imagine that the cultural atmosphere contributed pretty heavily. It’s very similar to what we’re seeing now levied against trans folks. A lot of those same arguments were being used against just gay men at the time — that they were a threat to children, that they were unnatural, immoral, all of those things — and that was a backlash to some of the wins that the gay community had been able to achieve earlier in the 1970s.
NW: Talk us through your process. When you take on the definitive retelling of a piece of American history like this, how do you start? How did you organize your thoughts, ideas and reporting?
MDS: I think what felt natural to me was to move chronologically, although the timeline did shift once I got into it.
I thought the beginning was James Dale, that Supreme Court case that I mentioned, and I also had a personal connection in a way to James; we grew up in the same hometown in New Jersey, though he’s 30 years older than me. We didn’t really know each other at that time, but I just felt this kind of connection to that part of the story. I interviewed him and wrote some sample chapters around his court journey. I felt like it was going to be the beginning of the book.
What I later realized, as we just talked about, as I went further back into the 1970s, was that there really was enough here for a book and to have a proof of concept. Without getting too much into the weeds of how publishing works, it wasn’t until after I got the contract that I actually was able to execute the rest of it. Again, I kind of just moved chronologically, because I thought that made the most sense.
I also got this really good piece of advice from a mentor, who told me to start with the parts of the history that are the furthest back, because that’s slipping away the fastest. Those people are dying, or their memories are fading.
NW: What surprised you in this process?
MDS: I was really surprised to learn that my experience actually had a lot of parallels to people who grew up several decades before I did, because something that was pretty much universal in everyone’s story was that they found Scouting to be a refuge. It’s a little counterintuitive, right? [The BSA is] this organization that seems conservative, they had this anti-gay policy. Whether people knew about it or not, they still had it. And yet James Dale, who grew up
Scouting in the eighties, and Tim Curran a little bit before that, these were people who found Scouting to be more gentle than school or sports or other environments that they had access to. They found this unspoken level of acceptance, where maybe they weren’t coming out as gay, but they felt more of an expansive sense of self than they did in other environments. So they really clung on to that.
You know, I found myself as a youth in the early 2000s having a very similar experience. I couldn’t name my own queerness at the time, but I felt like I was a bit different, not popular in school, and not good at sports. Scouting was that place where I thrived. I found it really cool that I had that parallel experience to people from 30 or 40 years ago.
NW: It feels like people who were Scouts often gush about it like this. What is it about Scouting in particular?
MDS: Yeah, I think it does something different than a lot of other youth activities. It provides a moral foundation. You can do activities in a lot of different ways, and Scouting day-to-day is activities — camping, et cetera — but there’s this deep, values-based mission woven into everything that can be really endearing and safe for folks in the hands of the right troop.
I say “in the hands of the right troop“ because those morals have also been weaponized by some, obviously, and there are certainly a lot of people who didn’t have that kind of positive experience. Speaking from my own experience, I had an incredible array of leaders in my troop who cared about our personal development really deeply. And I didn’t find that anywhere else as a kid.
The other part of it is, again, the stealthiness of the policy against gay people, because so many folks were able to go through it and either not realize that that conflict existed or maybe joined before they even had a conception of their own sexuality. It stood out from the other things that people had access to in their lives at the time.
I think Scouting, especially post-2020, has embraced a mission of inclusion to a surprising degree. It’s always been a delicate dance for them. I think they’re still trying to do right by queer and trans kids, while at the same time not pushing too hard to scare away certain members. I think they’re always dealing with that tension. But it has changed Scouting a lot. I mean, over the past few years, especially at national events, they’ve invested really heavily in explicit spaces for these historically excluded communities. So not only LGBTQ scouts, but women in Scouting, girls in Scouting, Scouts of color, they have all these programs built around these communities. I think the challenge still lies in making sure that that type of programming is in every troop, and that you don’t have to go to a national event to experience that kind of thing.
I talk to Scouters all the time who are trying to make their troops look like that and feel like that for queer and trans kids. And when it works, at this time in our political landscape, it’s really kind of a life-saving force for kids. There’s a really interesting stat I found the other day that only 43% of queer kids feel safe and affirmed in their own home, which is really just astonishing. If you’re in that environment, and you happen to have a Scout troop nearby that does affirm you and accept you, and isn’t hostile towards you, that’s really powerful. I’ve had a lot of youth literally tell me that Scouting saved their lives. Even as the national organization struggles to find their political footing, it’s still really important for kids and communities.
NW: What stories didn’t make it into the book?
MDS: My favorite story that didn’t make it in was this Scouter named David Knapp. I had the real pleasure of getting to know David in his late nineties, just before he passed last year, and David is kind of a legend in this space. He grew up Scouting in the 1930s, and didn’t realize he was gay until about age 60. He started volunteering with Scouting again, and did so without issue for a long time until his council found out that he was gay, a familiar story. He was kicked out.
David spent like 30 years doing this small, quiet activism in his little corner of Connecticut. Stuff like going to Pride parades, marching at New York City Pride in a Scout uniform. For 30 years. He really was an incredible guy. I wasn’t able to include his whole narrative in the book, but I was able to spend a couple of days with him at his home in 2021, and was just blown away by his commitment to this and his sincerity. It’s a huge loss that he’s no wonder with us. I published a very long obituary for him last year.
NW: Do you think there’s an appetite from today’s queer people, young queer people to learn about their elders to learn about?
MDS: I hope they have the appetite! Because I think there’s so much to learn here.
When I look at what’s happening politically right now. I see so many parallels to the history that I wrote about going back many decades. The people who were fighting this in the 1970s and 1980s were fighting almost the exact same set of obstacles that we’re fighting right now. There was like this ascendant right wing politically, and there was this huge culture war happening. There were legal battles happening. I mean, every one of these things was happening in the seventies and eighties.
There are so many lessons on the legal strategy that was involved when it became a grassroots campaign, like the things that were most effective in moving the needle and changing hearts and minds. I hope that instead of despairing, young people pick up LGBTQ history and are like “Hey, wait, these people 30–40 years ago figured this out? Maybe we should try some of those same things.”
NW: This was your first book, and you took the traditional publishing route. How was it?
MDS: I think there were two distinct experiences: the writing and reporting experience, and the publishing experience.
Writing and reporting was really a blast for me. It kind of felt like a treasure hunt, especially with the historical nature of the book. I was constantly revising my own theories, finding things that surprised me and getting to talk to so many incredible people. That was the coolest part. I got to travel to meet people in person when I could, and that was really fun. Some of my favorite parts of the book are where I was able to observe and describe things I saw in person. So yeah, 10/10 for that piece of it.
Publishing, on the other hand, was really challenging. Just getting to the book deal was hard, as I’m sure you’ve heard. Getting an agent took forever. Once we got the publishing contract, I took a sigh of relief. My publisher has been really great, my editor understood what I was trying to do and that has held true throughout the editing process. The challenge was more at the front end.
And then the last few months here have been a little nerve-racking for me as we go through fact checking and editing. I think every writer has a hard time with all that red ink. In my case, the copy editor had 12,000 track changes. And now that it’s totally put to bed, and it’s at the printer, it’s like “Wow, I really can’t make any changes, it’s done.” That’s a little terrifying to me.
NW: What are you most hopeful for?
MDS: I’ve been trying to set a goal for myself that is not tied to sales. So I think what I really would love is just to be able to connect with people who are impacted by this story.
I’ve gotten a little bit of it even already, like people who’ve kind of found bits and pieces of it through my newsletter, and I’m always really moved when someone finds it helpful or finds it illuminating in some way. I can’t wait to meet people at book events or just get messages from folks who have read it. I think that’s what it’s really all about. I wanted this book. And now I made it, and I hope other people find it valuable and affirming.
I dedicated the book to queer Scouts, and I hope it finds them and that they feel seen by it. ◆
“Morally Straight: How the Fight for LGBTQ+ Inclusion Changed the Boy Scouts — and America” is available for purchase now.
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