Morally straight How the fight for LGBTQ+ inclusion changed the Boy Scouts--and America

In this uplifting debut, journalist De Socio recaps the decades-long battle to lift the Boy Scouts' ban on openly gay members. The organization banned gay membership in 1978, when two scouts were kicked out of their troop in Mankato, Minn., after coming out. De Socio theorizes that this sudden ban--which surprised many Boy Scouts insiders, in his telling--was an attempt to scapegoat gay members for the organization's burgeoning sexual abuse scandal (the first public news of which had broken in the mid-1970s, and which would eventually bankrupt the organization in 2020). This hypothesis frames the rest of De Socio's narrative, as he shows how the activists who fought for LGBTQ inclusion had to push back against the insidious notion that queer people were not "morally straight" (a phrase in the Boy Scout oath)--an argument the organization began explicitly peddling in the early 1990s during civil cases brought by expelled gay scouts and troop leaders, several of whom De Socio profiles. He also movingly explains how, as someone with a lifelong involvement with the Scouts, his own coming-out was hampered by the organization's ban on gay adult volunteers (lifted in 2015, along with the ban on gay youth). It's a poignant account of an institution's worst impulses being overcome by members dedicated to its ideals. (June)

A former Boy Scout analyzes how the group has evolved across tumultuous decades of LGBTQ+ exclusion. "I was not athletic or popular in school," writes journalist De Socio. "I was a nerdy, artistic kid who struggled mightily to fit in with my male peers, especially." The Boy Scouts of America, he notes, became his "refuge." He channels the significance of those boyhood experiences in a series of notable profiles and interviews with queer community members who found solidarity and belonging in the BSA. Unfortunately, some Boy Scouts, like De Socio, who achieved Eagle Scout status in 2011, discovered the group's ban on gay members after they'd already become well established within the organization. Among the more illuminating interviews are those with John Halsey and Neil Lupton, lifelong BSA members who voted down the controversial policy at the group's national meeting in 2013 and believed the ban should never have existed. The discussion delves into BSA's earlier days, when it failed to address a rampant "pedophile problem," and instead moved to prohibit queer members in writing in 1978. The author's analysis dramatically covers how gay rights lawyers, employed by callously expelled gay scout James Dale, took the BSA membership discrimination fight to the Supreme Court. He also spotlights other cases of equality activism, including the plight of a lesbian den mother and how scout Steven Cozza's grassroots initiative, "Scouting for All," changed the face of queer scouting. The author combines his journalistic work with an interior perspective as a young Boy Scout "simultaneously observing and living through the gay membership debate," and he concludes with upbeat coverage of "ArrowPride," the "first official LGBTQ+ affinity space" in scouting, and a significant queer presence at the BSA's 2023 National Jamboree. An inspiring report on how a quintessentially American youth organization finally exercised queer inclusivity. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.