Expelled Gay Scout Returns as Leader After 45 Years
A man who sued the Boy Scouts after being kicked out as a teenager for being gay is now serving as an adult leader.
A man who was kicked out of the Boy Scouts of America as a teenager for being gay — and became the first to sue the organization over its ban on gay youth and adult leaders — has returned 45 years later as an assistant scoutmaster.
Tim Curran, a 64-year-old assistant scoutmaster with Manhattan’s Troop 662, told People magazine he always wanted to return to scouting after his expulsion. But his four-decade career as a journalist and documentary filmmaker kept him from committing to a leadership role — even after BSA, now rebranded as “Scouting America,” lifted its ban on openly gay adult leaders in 2015.
After semi-retiring from that fast-paced career, Curran said he was unexpectedly approached and encouraged to join Manhattan’s largest troop as a volunteer leader.
Curran joined his local Boy Scouts of America troop in Berkeley, California, as a 14-year-old and quickly took to the program, earning merit badges and rising through the ranks to become an Eagle Scout — the organization’s highest honor — before his 18th birthday.
At 16, Curran came out to a local gay youth group. Later, he agreed to participate in a story about gay youths in the Oakland Tribune, which quoted him by name and published a photo of him with his male date at his 1980 senior prom.
Curran alerted the troop’s adult leaders before the story was published. “I didn’t want them to find out the hard way,” he told People.
At the time, no one objected, and he continued participating in troop activities. But as a freshman at UCLA, he applied to join the staff of the 1981 National Jamboree — scouting’s largest gathering — and received a letter rejecting his application. “You are hereby removed from Scouting,” it stated.
While the letter gave no explicit reason, Curran assumed it was because he had come out as gay. After appealing his expulsion, he asked his local council executive why he had been dismissed.
“I said, ‘Is this because I’m gay?'” Curran recalled. “He was very evasive and hemmed and hawed, and finally I got him to say, ‘Yes.'”
“I couldn’t really think about the grief and loss of my years-long love affair with scouting that had been torn away from me,” he said. “I couldn’t process it that way at the time. And so it just got turned into a fierce dedication to fixing an injustice.”
Neither Curran’s 1981 lawsuit nor a similar case filed in New Jersey a decade later that reached the Supreme Court reversed the decision — the courts affirmed BSA’s right to choose its members and exclude certain people. But the challenges may have planted the seeds for the organization’s eventual policy changes nearly 30 years later, beginning with lifting the ban on gay youth members and ending with the reversal of its ban on gay adult leaders.
Curran’s experience — and that of 1991 plaintiff and fellow Eagle Scout James Dale — is recounted in the 2025 book Morally Straight: How the Fight for LGBTQ+ Inclusion Changed the Boy Scouts — and America. After attending a panel about the book in Manhattan last year, James Delorey, a former commissioner of Scouting America’s Greater New York Councils who had not previously heard Curran’s story, approached him about reestablishing ties with scouting.
“I was struck by how, even though the national organization had done him wrong, he still felt like Scouting had helped make him the great person that he is,” Delorey told People. “He would’ve been completely within his rights to tell Scouting to take a hike.”
Delorey introduced Curran to Scoutmaster Antonio Del Rosario of Troop 662, who later offered him the chance to become an assistant scoutmaster. Curran has since shared the story of his expulsion with troop members — leaving many of the scouts stunned to learn about the organization’s now-defunct, decades-long ban.
“The kids were just sort of wide-eyed,” Curran recalled, noting that the youths — growing up in a more LGBTQ-friendly society — reacted with surprise. “They don’t live in the world that I was thrown out of.”
“When our kids look at Tim, I want them to see the humanity in him, just like they see the humanity in me and in each other,” Del Rosario told People. “When you see the humanity in somebody else, you see the humanity in you, and you become connected.”
Curran’s return comes as Scouting America faces renewed pressure from the Trump administration, including criticism from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth over the organization’s diversity policies and inclusion of female and transgender members.
The Pentagon and Scouting America recently reached a settlement requiring members to register based on their sex assigned at birth and use corresponding facilities, even as the organization maintains that all youth remain welcome to participate.
Curran said he is “really disappointed” by the policy changes but understands the balancing act.
“Based on my very long experience, I have faith that Scouting will be able to return to growth and progress sometime in the future,” he said.
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