The Boy Scouts of America continue to dwell somewhere around the turn of the century -- the last century, of course. The BSA recently reaffirmed its policy of not allowing "open or avowed homosexuals" to join a troop or participate in any way in the organization. (The rather more enlightened Girl Scouts have no such policy nonsense.)
The irony of this position is delightfully rich: There is much evidence to suggest that Lord Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scout movement, was himself a repressed gay man with pedophilic tendencies, a man who fantasized endlessly about boys and whose closest friend in life was a younger man named Ken.
(The painting below, untitled by Henry Scott Tuke, once hung in the Baden-Powell House in England, headquarters of the Boy Scouts.)
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