Morally Straight

June 10, 2024
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.