Gay Boy Scouts in the 1970s - Video

Last week, for the first time in its century-long history, the Boy Scouts of America officially admitted openly gay boys into its membership rolls.

As of January 1, 2014, gay teenagers can now participate in BSA activities until they are 17 years, 364 days, 23 hours, and 59 minutes old.  One minute later, they become ineligible in a bifurcated policy that permits gay Scouts but not gay Scouters (the term of art the international Scouting movement uses to refer to adult leaders).

When the policy's implementation made headlines on the cusp of the new year, I reached back into my own archives, discovering some home movies from a Boy Scout summer camp in 1971.

I was a member of Troop 72 of the Potawatomi Area Council at the time. Troop 72 was sponsored by St. Agnes Parish in Butler, Wisconsin, where I attended elementary school. I joined the troop in the fall of 1970 and went on probably a dozen camping trips over the following two years, including two week-long sojourns during the summer at Camp Long Lake in the Kettle Moraine State Forest in Sheboygan County.

That first summer, my father brought along a Super-8mm movie camera to record some of the frolicking Scouts as they assembled for a flag-raising, took their swimming tests, participated in fire-building, gathered at the mess hall for dinner, and worked toward getting merit badges in archery, canoeing, and other activities.

This silent film -- characterized by overcast skies in what was apparently a chilly summer of 1971 -- lasts for just over seven and a half minutes.

(Before clicking on this video, let this be fair warning to anyone offended by images of shirtless teenage boys romping around in skimpy swimwear, or by classic gas-guzzling American automobiles of late 1960s and early 1970s vintage. You'll see all those things and more. By the way, if you recognize yourself in this home movie from 1971, or if you have ever been a member of Troop 72 at St. Agnes School, please note it in the comments section, below. It will be fun to reconnect with old friends.)

It's possible, but not likely, that I was the only gay Scout featured in this video. Of course, at 12 years of age, I wasn't openly gay like Maryland's Pascal Tessier, who hopes to become the first Scout to earn his Eagle rank while being openly gay. (There are many other gay Eagle Scouts who came out subsequent to their achievement.)

The Boy Scouts' new policy was approved last year and there was some trepidation that the transition might be bumpy.

According to news reports, however, whatever fears there might have been dissipated quickly once the policy was implemented.

For instance, according to a story in the Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune, local Scout council leader Doug Callahan said he had not observed much of an effect since the policy change.

Overall, he said, the feedback he has received about the change has been "mostly positive."

"Some folks didn't think it went far enough, and some folks didn't like any change, but the vast majority of our supporters and members are OK with the change because they realize our focus is on serving youth and delivering a quality scouting program," he said. "This issue isn't really an important part of our core mission."

Callahan said the Great Rivers Council, which oversees about 8,000 Scouts in northern and Central Missouri, has gotten a few letters from parents that said they will pull their sons out of the Scouts and some letters from people ending financial support. But others have increased their donations because of the change, Callahan said.

"Financially, it's pretty much a break even," he said.

Elsewhere, Alex J. Davidson and Trudy Ring reported in The Advocate,

... so far there has been little blowback as a result of the new policy.

Although about 70 percent of scout troops are affiliated with churches, not all of them LGBT-friendly, very few churches have ended their sponsorship over the gay-inclusive stance, NBC News reports. BSA spokesman Deron Smith told NBC that fewer than 2 percent of the nation’s 116,000 scouting units were dropped by their sponsors between May 23, when the new policy was approved, and Wednesday, when it went into effect.

In an additional statement to The Advocate, he said BSA volunteers and staff were "prepared to implement the new policy with no major changes to the delivery of the scouting program."

The Advocate further reported that BSA spokesman Deron Smith had said in a written statement:

"While people have different opinions about this policy, we can all agree that kids are better off when they are in scouting. We're pleased that the overwhelming majority of our members, families, and chartered organizations remain committed to the Boy Scouts of America. America's youth need scouting, and by focusing on the goals that unite us, we can continue to accomplish incredible things for young people and the communities we serve."

Years after my own, brief Scouting experience, I mentioned my participation in Troop 72 in the first commentary piece I wrote for The Wall Street Journal, in which I argued that, although the Boy Scouts' policy at the time -- to exclude completely any openly-gay boys or leaders -- was wrongheaded and cruel, it was the BSA's right as an organization to maintain that policy.

Later, Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty (GLIL) made a similar but expanded argument in an amicus curiae brief presented to the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of BSA v. Dale. The court alluded to our brief in its decision favoring the Scouts' right to freedom of association.

GLIL had argued that public pressure, rather than government coercion, was a better way to get the Boy Scouts to change theiranti-gay policies.  As I noted in my WSJ article in August 1999:

a self-contradictory and wrong-headed policy does not require (nor deserve) the action of the state to correct it. Many commentators have noted that the Girl Scouts have chosen to practice non-discrimination in regard to sexual orientation. Lesbians are free to participate in Girl Scout programs. Yet no government action compelled this change in policy. The Girl Scouts' leadership acted on its own.

That is why we should encourage the efforts of those individuals and groups, such as gay former Scouts, who are trying to persuade the BSA to change its membership requirements voluntarily. Their attempts at moral suasion deserve commendation and support.

Moral suasion is indeed what turned out to be successful. Eagle Scout Zach Wahls, a co-founder of Scouts for Equality described that process in an article in The Miami Herald on January 3:

“We began an 18-month campaign that less than a year later culminated in the Boy Scouts voting this past May to end their ban on gay youth,” said Wahls, 22, who is spending his New Year’s holiday in Miami Beach. “While in some sense this is a big step forward and we need to recognize that, on the other hand you’re still going to be kicked out of the program the day you turn 18.”

The transition is not complete, as noted by Eagle Scout Eston "Dusty" Melton (also the father and son of Eagle Scouts) in the same article, written by Steve Rothaus. Changing the policy on gay youth members, Melton said, "was the correct first step for the Boy Scouts as an organization, but the effort will not be completed successfully until every aspect of discrimination is eliminated from the BSA’s official policies.”

More public pressure is undoubtedly needed to prod the BSA toward more thorough reforms of its policies.  As we have seen from what has happened so far, however, patience pays off and persuasion is better than coercion.

Waiting for the Rapture? May 21 Is Just Days Away

The unusually wet and rainy May weather has a lot of us feeling chilly this week.

A good number of our fellow humans are, at the same time, feeling a bit chiliastic, because they have accepted the prediction of radio preacher Harold Camping that the Rapture will begin this Saturday, May 21, with the world itself coming to an end five months later.

Camper is the owner of a network of religious radio stations called Family Radio, based in Oakland, California. As Stephen Cox noted in Liberty magazine in December 2010 (PDF; pp. 19ff), the network has some 100 stations in the United States and an unknown number of other stations elsewhere. He also points out that Camper predicted the world would end in 1994, but turned out to be wrong.

Not that Camper is alone. He's just the latest in a long line of false soothsayers whose predictions prove groundless. (I won't misuse the word "prophet" to describe Harold Camper. In a theological sense, prophecy has nothing to do with predicting future events. It's much more about speaking truth to power, as Nathan did with King David.) In fact, beginning with the Millerites in the 19th century, predicting the end-times has become something of an American religious tradition.

This sort of fascination with the end-times is, in fact, a fairly recent phenomenon. While the early Christians seemed to accept the idea of an imminent return of Jesus Christ, that belief dissipated rather quickly.

E. Ann Matter, a professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in an essay called "Exegesis of the Apocalypse in the Early Middle Ages" (found in The Year 1000: Religious and Social Response to the Turning of the First Millennium, edited by Michael Frassetto):

The last book of Christian Scripture, with its vivid imagery and sweeping promises of the triumph of the faithful over the persecutions of Antichrist, has always captured the imagination of Christians. Some contemporary groups fully expect to see the Last Days soon, and they offer exacting interpretations of the clues hidden in the last book of the New Testament for how this could happen. Sometimes these interpretations take the form of fiction [citing Tim LaHaye's and Jerry B. Jenkins' Left Behind series]. This is a long tradition. In fact, the Apocalypse was among the first biblical texts to be systematically explicated in Latin, even as it was one of the last to be accepted into the canon of the New Testament and given a liturgical role.

That early exegesis was, however, soon rejected by most orthodox Christians, and the Revelation of John took on a more allegorical function, beginning with interpretation of the book by St. Jerome (translator of the Bible into Latin). As Matter notes, "it would seem that at least from the earliest stage, the book appealed especially to those whose theology deviated from the orthodox consensus" [p. 29].

Several pages later, after reviewing the literature from the third century through the ninth and tenth, Matter goes on to point out:

All the Apocalypse commentaries from the Carolingian world thus show the continuing assumption of the text as an allegory of the Church, and a continuing process of filtering specific interpretations from earlier commentaries to support that assumption. There is little in these texts that shares the radical assumption of the imminent end evident in the Apocalypse which was such a subject of fascination to the earliest Christians and now again attracts a following. Instead, early medieval exegesis presents the Apocalypse as a book about the integrity and purity of the Church on earth [p. 36].

Last year, I interviewed Charlottesville writer Kristin Swenson about her widely-reviewed book, Bible Babel: Making Sense of the Most Talked About Book of All Time.

She explained what the book is about in just a few words:

The book is for general readers. It does not take a particular religious perspective. It’s also not dismissive of persons of faith but provides background information about the Bible: what is the Bible, where does it come from, [and] what’s in it, so that folks can make sense of the way the Bible shows up in contemporary culture.

In Bible Babel, Swenson takes a couple of pages to discuss end-times theology and how different branches of Christianity -- not to mention Judaism -- hold very different views on the Rapture and the Second Coming. Let me quote her at length:

The idea that Jesus will return and take the faithful up into heaven at some dramatic moment in the world's last days has captured the imagination of thousands of fundamentalist, evangelical, and nondenominational Christians. "Rapture," the term used to describe this event, is not actually in the Bible. Bible-based Jews, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and many other Christian denominations do not accept the premise, yet Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins's creative depiction of the rapture in the Left Behind series has clearly struck a chord. Tens of millions of these books have sold since the first was released in 1995, and several have become popular movies.

Ironically, it's the faithful who are described by the term "left behind," in the rapture proponents' central biblical text -- 1 Thess 4:16-17. Paul wrote that passage to assure people that their loved ones who had died before Jesus' return would not be overlooked. Those who were dead, Paul wrote, will rise first, and then the living (the ones who were left behind) will join them, "caught up in the clouds ... to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever." The Greek word arpazo, translated "caught up," is raptus in Latin -- the basis for the English "rapture." Of course, what LaHaye and others mean by the people "left behind" is those who are not caught up at all.

Although the rapture as it's popularly understood has little biblical support, the idea that Jesus will return is prominently represented. Sometimes called the Parousia (reflecting its Greek root in "presence, coming"), the expectation of Jesus' returning to earth to initiate a new age permeates the New Testament, and it is a central feature of Christian doctrine and theology today. Even though the Bible strongly maintains that people cannot predict exactly when Jesus will return, people try anyway. Hal Lindsey wrote The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), fairly certain that his was the end-time (specifically, the 1980s). Not everyone who believes in a coming rapture agrees about its chronological relationship to other end-time events, but they share the certainty that it will happen. Then, as a popular bumper sticker warns, "In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned" -- to which unbelieving humorists respond with the bumper sticker, "Come the rapture, can I have your car?" In a curious twist, the Rapture Ready Index recommends that you "fasten your seatbelts" when the number measuring end-time-like world events indicates the speady approach of the rapture [pp. 215-16].

Stephen Cox concludes his December 2010 Liberty article [PDF; p. 22]:

What will happen next?

One thing is certain: the Rapture will not take place on May 21. Nor will the total destruction of the physical universe occur on the following October 21. But what will happen to Family Radio?

Will the Depart Out movement collapse, like the Millerites? Will the Campingites try to reinterpret their message, as they did after the disappointment of 1994? Will they succeed? Or will there be a palace revolution?

I believe that the last is likeliest. People who have invested their careers in an organization are reluctant to part from it, no matter what happens, and in this instance there has been good reason for dissenters to stay and bide their time. Camping is the sole source of the sect’s peculiar theology, and he is 89 years old. (Not that he is senile — he isn’t. His method of argument is the same that it was 25 years ago, when I first found him on the dial.) It is difficult to imagine that Family Radio’s internal proletariat hasn’t made plans for what happens after his death — or even before it, when May 21 fails to justify his teachings. I look for a battle at Family Radio; and with luck, the battle will be public.

In any case, we are unlikely to see a more informative experiment in what happens when prophecy — definite, ceaselessly emphasized, widely disseminated prophecy — unmistakably and climactically fails. Every student of American civilizationshould plan to tune in to Family Radio on May 21 — not with the possibility of being caught up to heaven, but with the certainty of being caught up in a fascinating event.

In an update ("The End Is Nigh") published on the Liberty web site on May 3 (the magazine converted to web-only earlier this year), Cox makes a suggestion that could make this coming weekend highly entertaining:

Harold Camping is not a politician or a professor of environmentalism, whose prophecies can never be proven wrong because they’re ridiculously non-specific. No, he has said exactly what he means by the end of the world, and he has said exactly when the end of the world will happen. You can check it. I hope you do. Go to Family Radio’s website, find out where its nearest radio station is, and tune in during the evening of May 20 (US time), when, Camping believes, Judgment Day will begin in the Fiji Islands. Then listen through the next few days, as Family Radio responds to the disconfirmation of its prophecies. Or does not respond — until it figures out how to do so (and that should be interesting also).

As for myself, after 16 years of Catholic education (and thus holding a fundamental rejection of newfangled fundamentalism), I think the best way to spend May 21 will be to party like it's 1999 -- perhaps listening to Blondie's classic recording, "Rapture."

Then, we can listen to Harold Camping's explanation for his mistaken calculations.  I have a hint for him:  he forgot to count leap-year days in his meticulous enumeration of the number of days from the Crucifixion to May 21, 2011.


Readers of this blog post may also like:  As the Millennium Turns (Revisited) from December 31, 2004.

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