"I'm Gay and I Loved Being a Boy Scout"

J. Bryan Lowder tries to disentangle the Boy Scouts from any notion of sexual orientation:

Being a gay Eagle Scout produces a strange kind of consciousness, a double-vision of objects and traditions and words that other people experience as blissfully uncomplicated. Take a tent, for instance. In Boy Scouts, you learn how to pitch one if you have it or construct one out of found materials if you do not. It is a useful thing; it means shelter. But in the larger debate over gays in scouting, a tent is a thing dewy with erotic charge. Gay non-scouts joke with you about furtive assignations on hot summer nights, while bigots luxuriate in the same fantasies, only in the more strident key of gay panic. Perhaps the gays and the bigots are right to fetishize tents; no doubt they’ve played host to teenage experimentation many times over the past 100 years or so of scouting. But for myself, I cannot speak to the reality of such intrigues—my fondest memories of tents involve helping my dad to spread a crinkled blue tarp under one. Or better yet, the smell of dampened smoke as it drifts through the mesh screen on a chilly spring morning. Those memories, in the end, are what scouting means to me—and they have nothing to do with sexuality, in the abstract or in practice.

While it's okay to sentimentalise the Boy Scouts, an organisation that claims the moral authority to exclude a portion of the public because of their (perfectly acceptable) inborn nature is not — I repeat, not — charming. And even though an end to the ban is being seriously considered, the rationale is largely financial: they're losing sponsorship over this. The Boy Scouts of America cannot maintain such high levels of financial support from big corporations while also endorsing retrograde attitudes towards gays. The sponsors won't wear it. Bigotry, it turns out, simply isn't profitable.