Boy Scouts decision: half a loaf is better than none

The decision of the Boy Scouts of America to allow gay boys to join its ranks is heartening, even though it is at least a decade late. The decision to keep outlawing gay men as leaders is not heartening, and shows once again that the organization is way behind the nation as a whole on the gay rights issue.

I became a Cub Scout in 1947, at age 8. My father was both a troop and district leader, while my mother served as a den mother. There was never a question of my not becoming a scout. It was in my genes.

I spent every summer between 1949 and 1958 at Ten Mile River Scout Camp in the Catskills. I attended two national jamborees — in Valley Forge, Pa., in 1950, and Irvine Ranch, Calif., in 1953. I also spent a summer at the Philmont Scout Ranch in Cimarron, N.M.

All those summers at Ten Mile River and traveling with Troop 128 in Rockaway were a great experience. The question of gay scouts, of course, never came up in those days, but I’m not naïve enough to believe that there weren’t any gay scouts at camp or at any of the other scouting events — camporees, jamborees, campouts, etc. — that I attended.

In addition, I lived in a large publicly financed middle-income housing development, Wavecrest Gardens in Rockaway, and there were hundreds of kids living there. There was never a thought about whether anybody was straight or gay, although we probably would have used a less friendly word to describe the latter. It was a different era, and perhaps we were better off for it.

The Navy was another story. Long before “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” the way of thinking was to get homosexuals out of the Navy.

Unfortunately, it was my job to get rid of them.

I was a court reporter, and worked in the legal office on board the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt. My first experience with “the homo problem,” as it was called, came when the ship was on an operational readiness inspection in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 1963. At the time, Gitmo was the only base in the world where enlisted men could legally buy alcoholic beverages other than beer, and that was because they were restricted to the base due to the hostility toward the U.S. by the regime of Fidel Castro, who had recently taken power.

Two sailors had gotten drunk, and were found on one of the sponson decks — small decks outside the ship’s hull — fondling each other. The master-at-arms woke me at 3 a.m. and told me that the legal officer wanted me in his office. I groggily complied, dressing quickly and reporting to the office, where I found the legal officer in his bathrobe and the two petty officers sitting at desks, looking downtrodden.

The legal officer, a lieutenant and an attorney, briefed me. I remember it like it was this morning, even though it was 50 years ago. “OK, Schwach,” he said. “Your job is to get these guys to agree to be off the ship and out of the Navy by tomorrow morning. There’s no room for queers. Tell them that they have two choices: to agree right now to an undesirable discharge, or to face courts-martial and two years in the brig at hard labor.”

I spent the rest of the night explaining those options to the men, both of whom had been in the Navy for more than five years. Both signed the forms for their “confession” and their quick discharge, and were on the first plane off the ship in the morning, never to been seen by any of us again.

That was the first time I had to cajole homosexuals to take a discharge and leave quickly and quietly. It wasn’t the last. During my two years in the legal office of the FDR, I dealt with more than 35 gay men. Not one took the court-martial option.

By the time I left the ship, I was incensed by the way the Navy handled the “homosexual problem.” I wrote a letter to Bobby Kennedy, who was then a senator from New York. I got a nice letter from him that still hangs on the wall in my son’s apartment. I complained about the way homosexuality was handled, and Kennedy wrote back that he would look into it, but nothing ever happened.

When same-sex marriage became an issue, I came to believe that the law should allow for same-sex unions. When it became an issue with the Boy Scouts, I was way past worrying about homosexuals dealing with children or teens.

I understand the problem the Boy Scouts face. The large majority of its sponsors are religious institutions, and will leave the organization once homosexual boys are allowed. But that doesn’t mean that it’s right to keep them out.

The scouting experience is often a seminal one for young men — and for their leaders as well. The scouts were right in taking the step they took. Now it’s time for the organization to take the next step, and allow gay leaders as well.