Tim Curran, the first gay man to sue Scouting America in 1981, is now a scout leader
He didn’t rejoin to make a point, or tie up some grand story. He became a volunteer because he wants to help local scouts.
About 15 years before I was born, a gay scout named Tim Curran was unceremoniously barred from Scouting for being gay.
He sued—becoming the first person to challenge the organization’s anti-gay discrimination in court. He lost. A couple years later, at the U.S. Supreme Court, so did James Dale, another gay Eagle Scout.
By this point, I was fives year old, just getting ready to dip my toes in Cub Scouts, blissfully unaware.
It wasn’t until much later, as I was becoming an Eagle Scout myself, that a new campaign for gay inclusion emerged and yielded success, in the mid-2010s.
You may remember that I wrote a little book about all of this.
To celebrate said book, I organized an event in New York City, where I sat on a panel with Tim and James, both city residents themselves. At the reception, Curran fell into a conversation with James Delorey, an active NYC scouter, who pitched Curran on the idea of rejoining Scouting, four decades later.
Tim took him up on it and, this fall, became an openly-gay scout leader with a troop near his home in Manhattan. (Sorry, I know I buried the lead).
I find this, to say the least, incredible. A literal lifetime later, the first person to sue Scouting for gay inclusion is now serving proudly as a gay adult leader.
I interviewed Curran about his journey back into Scouting after a lifetime on the sidelines. Today, I published the resulting story in Xtra, a delightfully queer online magazine.
If I can ask you to do one thing, please give it a read.
If I can ask you to do a two things, please share it with someone you know.
Thank you, and see you again soon.
— Mike
