I was the ‘perfect plaintiff,’ but sometimes I’m lucky I can project a ‘passable’ version of myself.

Editor’s note: James Dale is a U.S. gay-rights activist best known for his role in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, the landmark Supreme Court case that challenged the BSA policy of excluding gay scouts from being scout leaders. But he is much more than that activist.

I lived in San Francisco, and David lived in New York. I visited him for Halloween. I suggested he come with me to a midtown party as a Smurf. Since I’d cobbled together that look a few years earlier, I had some expertise to share. This time, I knew how to keep the blue from smudging.

There’s a photo of David, a vision of blue and white: white cap, white shorts, and big white shoes any clown would be proud to wear. He’s smiling ear to ear, showing off a little mirror like Vanity Smurf. I couldn’t tell yet whether this was his usual smile since it was only our second date.

When we stepped out of our cab on 42nd Street, everyone ran up to David. They all wanted a picture with a Smurf. He told me he’d never had so much attention on Halloween or any other day. What I remember most was his wonderment.

“Stick with me,” I said through a laugh. “We’re just getting started.”

Now, eleven years later, once-buttoned-up David is my fiancé.

Okay, here’s my confession. I don’t actually make anyone more gay.

Everyone does that for themselves. I try to give people space to feel more comfortable in their own skin. They don’t have to be gay. Maybe someone will see me go crazy on the dance floor to a Wang Chung or Carly Rae Jepsen song and follow me.

For most of my childhood, I tried to edit out my effeminate side. Now I try to embrace all that flair, relaxing my wrists or crossing one knee over the other without judging or correcting myself. Still, censoring myself sometimes feels so natural, so protective, that I don’t even realize I’m doing it.

As a kid, I loved characters, performance, and wigs.

Costumes let me be different. Like too many, I also learned that some acting was off limits. In fifth grade, my older brother Bobby and I, along with our neighbor’s two kids, put on a show for our parents after a pasta dinner at their house.

“This will look great on you,” my brother goaded, holding up a loud tablecloth. “You’ll be the sailor’s wife.”

Long before that skit, he often encouraged me to try on our mom’s clothes. “Try on these high-heeled shoes. It’ll be fun,” he said before he pushed me out the front door into the February snow.

I love to dress up, but to this day I still despise any form of high heel.

In a dumpy, oversized tablecloth and a matted brunette wig, I looked horrible and far less feminine than I did in any of my perfectly coordinated Garanimals outfits. It may be the most heterosexual drag I’ve ever worn.

When I pranced through the makeshift proscenium arch in our neighbor’s living room, everyone laughed except my mom and dad. They stared motionless. Shortly after our performance, my parents said we had to leave early. The one-block walk home felt long. My mom walked ahead of everyone else, her shoulders up near her ears.

Bobby seemed oblivious to the tension and tried to crack a joke. Dad quickly shut him down. “Bobby, cut it out. Mommy has a migraine.”

That night, and many after, I hid under the covers in my pitch-black bedroom and began my evening prayers. “Now I lay me down to sleep.”

After the final verse, “I pray the Lord my soul to take.” I went on to beg the Lord in a whisper, “What’s wrong with me? Please God, please make me normal.”

When morning returned, so did my optimism. Could I be special, in a good way? Maybe I was a mutant whose powers hadn’t shown up yet, and someday I’d land at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters.

In junior high and high school, I made myself deliberately small to hide.

I didn’t discover my power until my second year at Rutgers.

Sophomore year, everything changed. The parts of myself I was taught to hide gave me power, pleasure, and connection. People looked up to me and admired me.

That last part was a revelation.

Jim Anderson, a dean and my first gay role model, opened his home to me when I fought with my parents as they struggled to accept my sexuality. Being bold is easier when there’s somebody there to catch you.

I stomped around campus in purple Doc Martens, silver hoop earrings, and my QUEER choker. Its pink-and-black beads were my exclamation point: Don’t think I’m straight! Your comfort is not my problem. I wanted to be so out I could never go back in, for fear I might. I took that choice away.

At a National Coming Out Day rally in 1990, I kissed my date, Patrick, on the steps of Brower Commons. It was about a year after I came out, and the kiss was far more than a peck on the cheek. A school photographer snapped our picture and asked whether he could publish it. “Yes,” I said, cutting him off.

My date hesitated.

I was the co-president of the Lesbian and Gay Alliance. How could he falter?

Patrick turned to me, not the photographer. I didn’t say a word. He wanted my approval before he said no. I couldn’t give him that. My look said it all: “Do it.”

Moments later, Patrick gave the photographer his permission and his name.

Four days later, a friend’s early morning call woke me up. “Have you seen The Daily Targum, James? Your picture is on the front page.”

The campus response was immediate. Some students tore up the photograph. Others stapled it to their dorm doors in solidarity. For weeks, letters to the editor, residence hall debates, and rallies filled the campus. Professors even used the picture to spark discussions in lecture halls.

Two guys kissing became a campus-wide controversy.

That controversy came two months after I’d been expelled from the Boy Scouts of America.

My offense: speaking to high school teachers as an openly gay teen at a Rutgers social workers’ conference. Scouting, the focus of my entire childhood, was suddenly ripped away because I said I was gay.

A few close friends knew Scouting had expelled me, but the media hadn’t run the story yet. That photo, that controversy, was an adrenaline shot of activism, masking the pain of rejection for being honest.

All the attention was an exhilarating distraction. Something I’d spent years hiding was front and center. No one could escape it. They could hate it, but they couldn’t ignore it, or me. Instantly, I was the gayest kid on campus.

Patrick and I each faced different kinds of fallout. He lived in my college town but wasn’t a student, and the photo was how his parents found out he was gay. While he dealt with their reaction, I was absorbed in the growing campus controversy and in explaining that kiss to my mom after her best friend showed it to her. Patrick and I never talked about any of it. What could have brought us closer pushed us further apart.

Before the rally, we bonded over dancing. On our second date, Patrick took me to Sound Factory, an after-hours club in New York City. It’s where Madonna first saw people voguing. I had never danced in such a diverse space before, surrounded by hundreds upon hundreds of queer people.

That photo far outlasted our relationship.

Decades later, Patrick barreled toward me on another dance floor at six in the evening. “James!” he shouted, then picked me up and spun me around. It was meant to be fun and flirtatious, but at six foot one, I’m not used to being swept off my feet.

After some small talk, the infamous photo came up.

“Oh, you just liked all the attention,” he said as I cringed. He may have been right, but there was more to it. Patrick wasn’t political. He was just attracted to a guy who happened to be very, very out. I wasn’t about to relitigate the past few decades on a packed dance floor, so I laughed it off.

Then Patrick introduced me to his longtime partner.

Even knowing how difficult the photo had been for Patrick, I probably wouldn’t have done anything differently. That was who I was then. But it was a choice I’d wanted to make. I’m less sure it was his.

I love being the first person on the dance floor who gets others to join in. Dancing always comes easily to me. Singing solo? Now that’s another matter.

I get stage fright. Show me injustice, and something instinctual takes over me. Put me at a piano, and I’m terrified I’ll forget the words.

Once, on a trip to Atlanta, Julie, an ally turned friend, and I found Campagnolo, a restaurant that turned into a piano bar after dinner. I told her I wanted to sing. Then I kept putting it off.

“Come on, do it!” she urged.

When the pianist didn’t know my go-tos, I panicked. I was already standing in front of the room. But after some back-and-forth, we settled on “Dentist!” from Little Shop of Horrors. It was a stretch for him too, but I mistook his uncertainty for a lack of willingness to try harder.

The Southern crowd was far more subdued than at any New York City piano bar. I was being judgy.

Regulars sang. I overacted my way through, the only way I know how.

Julie sat at a table I couldn’t see. I felt like I was bombing as everyone went about their conversations. When I was done, I rushed to our seats and said, “Let’s get out of here.” The next day, I realized I’d left my Visa card there.

So, we went back and stayed for a drink. I wasn’t looking for a second chance. After a few sips, I found my way back to the piano. Even though the pianist wasn’t that familiar with the ABBA song I’d practiced, he gave it a shot. I wonder if he gets stage fright too.

Instead of shouting like Steve Martin’s sadistic dentist, I showed my softer side: Can you hear the drums, Fernando?

After I finished, the owner came up to the piano.

“I know who you are,” he said. “You’re the gay Boy Scout.”

He didn’t know my name. He knew my brand. It felt good and a bit vulnerable. I thought I was just an anonymous guy singing from another state.

“How did you know?”

He smiled. “You just look so familiar.”

Back at the table, Julie confessed that when the owner pressed her, she’d told him about my lawsuit against the Boy Scouts.

Before the night was over, I convinced Julie, a piano-bar virgin, to sing. “Hey, if I can do it, so can you,” I told her. She hedged at first, then asked for Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” It wouldn’t have been my choice. I’d never heard it at a piano bar before, but everyone joined in.

“You did great,” I told her. “Well, it was more of a sing-along than a solo,” she corrected.

When the lights came on, we left on a high. I was totally wrong about that Atlanta restaurant-turned-piano bar.

A lifetime of being visibly gay hasn’t made me immune to stage fright. Sometimes I worry how people will react. Sometimes it takes a friend. Sometimes I need to stay for a drink.

In the ’90s I was the gay Boy Scout, the perfect plaintiff.

I gave them the straight version of myself to negotiate acceptance. If they stopped listening because I was “queer” instead of “gay,” or because my motorcycle jacket and hoop earrings didn’t seem approachable, they would have never heard my argument for fairness and equality.

The censoring happened gradually, bit by bit. With every little edit, I watched their reactions improve. Is passing a gift or a curse? Sometimes I’m lucky because I can present a “passable” version of myself. Other times I fear I’m playing gay on someone else’s terms. Which is really me?

When I hear, “You’re the gay Boy Scout,” it’s as if I’m being forced into a costume I’ve long since outgrown. It’s a sobering spotlight that commands my attention and, without my realizing it, straightens me up.

When I first came out, I forced my flamboyance. I needed to find the boundaries of my femininity, of how comfortable I could be being gay. Some would ask, “Why do you have to act so gay?” Today I’m not forcing it. I’m just trying to accept it, and I love to bring people along.

I don’t always acknowledge that I’m gay. Sometimes it’s easier to let them assume whatever they want. Correcting them and saying I’m gay can bring a moment of vulnerability; other times the fear lasts a bit longer. But life has taught me I can always take more chances than I think I can. At 56, there’s so much more fun in me that I can’t wait to let out.

When I look back at that Halloween photograph of David, I remember the pleasure of sharing something I already loved and watching the person I fell in love with discover it too. I knew how to do the blue. David supplied the wonderment.

People like Julie have given me that feeling, too. They still do.

Okay, I make people more gay. Luckily, people do the same for me.

To the Trans Girl Who Just Lost at the Supreme Court: So Did I 26 Years Ago

Am I that Gay Boy Scout Who Can Make People More Gay? was originally published in Prism & Pen on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The path started at Harmony Elementary and ran along the edge of the woods, past the sports fields where I kept the bench warm and past Thorne Middle School. Even though it was the fastest way home, I rarely took it. The path terrified me. Well, not the path really; it was the woods.

That day, walking to school and Miss Hand’s sixth-grade class, I heard it.

“Hey, dicky boy.”

I knew the voice before I saw the face.

“Today’s the day,” he taunted. “After school. Don’t run. We’ll find you.” Laughter. “We know where you live.”

My heart was ticking like a clock duct-taped to a bundle of dynamite sticks as my feet sped up. Minutes later, I was seated in the front row of Miss Hand’s classroom. Right by her desk was always the safest place to be; my prepubescent sweat stank with fear as anxiety crawled through my bones all day.

By the time the school bell rang at 3 pm, my knapsack was already packed. I ran out the back door, across the dodgeball circles painted on the black asphalt, past the jungle gym made of threadbare tires, and onto the dirt path. I needed to be home fast. I had no idea where they were. Maybe they were hiding in the woods, lurking behind the towering oak trees? All I could remember was moving as fast as I could. I’m not sure when I stopped thinking. There was no thought, just instinct, action, and terror.

There were safe homes. They existed somewhere. My neighborhood had them. I saw those large pieces of colored construction paper visible in their front window with a red handprint on them. Any kid in trouble could knock, and someone would open the door to safety. I saw the signs, but I didn’t trust them. Some belonged to the families of boys who chased me. So, I ran past those houses on my way back to Lisa Lane.

Nobody was home. I reached for my key, but I couldn’t find it in my pocket.

In a frenzied panic, I don’t exactly remember what happened next. I searched for an unlocked door or window, but there were none. Then I saw the basement window at ground level, on the side of my house. I remember a brick and shattered glass, and then my hand going through to open the latch. I pushed open the empty window frame, and jumped down about five feet onto the glass-covered floor.

There I hid, curled in the fetal position on the broken glass, shaking on the concrete floor. I felt safe next to Dad’s Lionel trains and white mold.

I never fessed up to smashing our basement window. My parents thought it was one of the neighborhood bullies. One Mischief Night, neighborhood kids threw a brick through our front window with a smoke bomb taped to it. The carpet in the living room still has a melted burn stain where the fibers caught fire.

My parents never understood the terror of my childhood, and they weren’t great with expressing emotions either.

“Toughen up, Jamie, and fight back like Bobby does.” But he was four years older. He was much taller. I was always the youngest in my grade with my August birthday.

So Mom and Dad signed me up for karate classes at the YMCA and told me to go work out in the gym at the nearby U.S. Racquetball Club. That’s where I discovered Laura Branigan, who sang “Gloria.” So I fell in love with aerobics instead.

Back on Lisa Lane, I hid, but nobody came after me. There was no chase across that path, and nobody followed me through the broken window into my basement. I was just some latchkey kid who forgot his key.

I ran the whole way home from a threat that stayed exactly where I’d left it, back by the woods. I shattered a window with a brick to find safety from a boy and a gang who never followed me. Sometimes the woods were empty; sometimes kids smoked and hung out. I guess the kids didn’t always have the energy to chase me. They just liked to terrorize an 11-year-old in a sadistic way.

Their threats stole part of my childhood and left me living inside my anxiety. That boy in the basement thought he was protecting himself as he tried to survive. Jamie just wanted to be old enough to get away someday, and he did.

I’ve been thinking about that window this past summer, since a child stood in front of a video camera and told the country he was watching Scouting closely.

United States Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth posted a six-minute victory-lap video on Friday, February 27, 2026, announcing that he was forcing Scouting America, formerly the Boy Scouts, to bend the knee and abandon its inclusive policies. Pete was going to purge what he called “an insidious, radical, woke ideology.”

He gave Scouting leadership six months to prove themselves. But in reality, he checked in on them every ninety days, kinda like a mob boss. He closed with a threat that sounded a lot like the one I heard back in sixth grade:

“We’re watching, and we’re watching closely.”

I’ve been watching too, as Scouting evolved and became a better, more inclusive organization after it expelled me.

So, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) for the memorandum of understanding (MOU) that Hegseth kept waving around before the camera. For three months, his Pentagon stonewalled, so I appealed. Then the Department of Defense’s FOIA Division Chief, Virginia Burke, kicked it back to the same office that had stalled, with no deadline. She told me my remedy was suing.

“Thanks, Virginia. That’s just what I’ll do,” I thought.

In the Southern District of New York, I sued in federal court with my badass lawyer, Isaac Park. After battling the Boy Scouts for a decade, I knew exactly how to fight back and how long these fights can take. To my surprise, three weeks later, Hegseth handed over his six-page MOU. I never even set foot in a courtroom this time. His ridiculous Sharpie signature is the largest thing on any page: 3 inches wide.

The tough guy who told America he was watching closely, the Macho Man, couldn’t handle being watched himself, and all it took was three weeks and one lawyer in July.

I’ve thought about the Boy Scout in the basement more than I thought I would this summer. He didn’t know, crouched there shaking on the concrete, that nobody was coming after him. He’d already done the damage: the broken window, a cut hand, his pounding heart, trauma, all of it spent on a chase that existed in his own fear.

I haven’t walked that path since middle school. A few years ago, when I was 51, I went back to that field with a reporter and a gay former Eagle Scout whom I had never met in person. Mike De Socio was writing a book about the evolution of Scouting, and he wanted to revisit the places where my scouting career happened.

I stood on the sidewalk of Murphy Road at the edge of the sports field; there was the worn path I ran home across in terror far too often. The mighty oaks and the maple trees were now dying from some random suburban disease. The woods looked so sparse I couldn’t imagine anyone hiding in them anymore. And still, standing there, the terror came back to me, as well as the sadness for that lonely child running home to an empty house and hiding in the basement.

I didn’t want Mike to see me so vulnerable and insecure. So, I performed The Gay Boy Scout with a stiff upper lip. I stood on the sidewalk while I tucked away whatever feelings I couldn’t bear. Survival all over again, as I learned long ago. Pretending I was straight. Pretending the insults and slights didn’t hurt.

As an adult, I understood my story's power when I shared it. My emotions told America how painful the Scouts' bigotry was. Strategic vulnerability, I’ll call it. Tap into feelings, pain and struggle, and show the world what their prejudice feels like. I inspired Americans to expect more from their institutions, whether the White House, the judicial system, or the Boy Scouts of America.

But with Mike that day, looking across the sports field, things felt too raw and fresh to share with a stranger writing about 30 years of my life.

I hadn’t worked through the emotions enough yet. But recently I shared this story with him. Morally Straight: How the Fight for LGBTQ+ Inclusion Changed the Boy Scouts—and America is an amazing book. Mike did justice to the fight and my part in it. Today he’s a friend living his best life in Italy and publishing his adventures here.

I hadn’t told a soul the truth about that basement window until the other day. I called my Mom when she was at Lidl shopping for discount groceries. I made my 45-year-old confession about the basement window.

“I’ve crawled through basement windows too,” Mom said, laughing it off. It took me decades to realize my parents are good people. They did the best they could.

Some scars never really leave you. Terror can be permanently etched into your DNA. That’s why I refuse to let Pete Hegseth bully kids in Scouting.

Back in March, I urged the leadership of Scouting America to use my lawsuit, their victory, and my devastating loss to stop the Department of Defense pressure campaign. They didn’t say anything, but slowly, everything DEI-related started to disappear.

Scouting is a values-based organization. Their 1990 values expelled me, and a decade later the Supreme Court agreed, as Scouting leadership cheered.

Wake up, Scouting America. This is 2026. What happened to those values? Show America you really have changed. Let us know that you will protect Scouts regardless of whether they are queer, girls, or kids of color.

I refuse to run from little boys like Pete Hegseth. I’m done pretending these people are anything more than sick charlatans and showmen.

Cage fights on the White House lawn? Seriously. These people have access to our missiles and nuclear codes?

Stare them down. Look right in their eyes and see what happens. In my experience, they’re usually already backing away, hoping you won’t turn around.

And Petie, if you do decide to run for president, look for me on the campaign trail too, sweetie. I’m not going to let you screw up what I’ve spent my whole life fixing.

Thanks for reading. If you liked what you read here, I hope you subscribe to my Medium or follow me at jamesrdale.com.

I Beat Pete Hegseth in Three Weeks was originally published in Prism & Pen on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The New York Times ran my letter last Sunday. You can read the full 200 words below. Getting there took a few days, and almost all of it I spent editing things away.

Here is what happened. On June 30, the Times published a guest essay by Matthew Vines called “I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters.” It ran the same day Becky Pepper-Jackson, a 16-year-old transgender girl from West Virginia, lost at the United States Supreme Court. Six justices held that her school could keep her off the girls’ track team. I read the headline, and I remembered exactly how it felt to lose before that same Court, twenty-six years ago. (That’s here.)

Vines is a gay Christian man who argued his way through Scripture toward his own life, and he even got married in a Baptist church in Texas. That’s hard work, and we’re on the same side. My Lutheran religion was essential to me growing up. I want to say that at the top and I mean it, because what follows is a disagreement I don’t want anyone reading as an attack.

His argument is that the word “queer” is costing us. That it carries an adversarial charge, that its elasticity has muddied a message that used to be clear, and that in a moment of backlash we can’t afford the confusion. He wants us to return to the simple thing: being gay isn’t chosen, and gay people deserve what everyone else has.

I wish the word “gay” worked for everyone. It doesn’t. It works for gay white cisgender men who fought for it, claimed it, and owned it, sometimes at the expense of everyone else in the community.

I read his essay and I was furious. Not at him, but at what I felt.

Then I sat down to write 150 to 175 words, and I found out how little anger you can actually fit into so few words. Then also remembered: anger never wins. Here is what ended up on the floor, and why the cuts turned out to be powerful.

What the argument does

Everything I cut kept circling back to one thing, so let me start there.

The single most reliable way to destroy a coalition is to convince it that it isn’t one.

In February 2025, the National Park Service stripped the words “transgender” and “queer” out of the Stonewall National Monument’s website, cutting the T ands Q off LGBTQ. The Park Service erased Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera from the riot they helped start.

That same winter, an openly gay man sat in the Cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury. That August, Florida sent its transportation department to paint over the rainbow crosswalk outside the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, where forty-nine people were murdered in 2016, under a new law banning street art with “social, political or ideological messages.”

We had a seat at the table. And by “we,” I mean a gay white man.

And notice which words the government reached for first. Vines argues we should retire “queer.” The Park Service had already deleted it. It’s like the tail wagging the dog.

You can’t easily defeat a diverse coalition by pitting them against each other. They tell us the respectable, normal ones are being dragged down by the loud, pushy ones. That if a few people were quieter or less visible, the rest could finally be left alone.

Don’t take the bait.

There is always some short-term arithmetic where it looks true. This isn’t about intent. I believe Vines is a person in a red state and a religious community, watching the ground shift under his new marriage, trying in good faith to find the argument that holds. I too have had that impulse. Then somebody ends up outside. Today, it’s “them.” Who do you think it’ll be tomorrow?

What the 1990s were for me

Vines quotes the Queer Nation manifesto. I was in Queer Nation. I was around nineteen, taking the train into New York from Rutgers. Sometimes frequently, sometimes occasionally, I was in the room.

What he describes as a posture, an us-versus-them stance that outlived its moment, I experienced as oxygen and adrenaline. I had just been thrown out of the Boy Scouts of America for being gay. I had built my entire adolescent self inside an institution that decided, in a single letter, that I was unfit after they saw who I always was.

The people who taught me were the loud ones: the rebels, the queers, and the faggots. The ones with the placards and the chants and the anger that made respectable gay men wince. They told me I had nothing to be ashamed of, and they told me at a volume I could hear over all the lies about being gay.

They gave me the strength to sue the Boy Scouts of America. I spent a decade in and out of court asking to be readmitted to the most iconic youth movement in the world.

The radicals didn’t make me want to burn anything down. They made me feel worthy of belonging. That is what I couldn’t fit my 217-word letter.

My Q-U-E-E-R choker

I found some round wooden beads and a few letters in some bins at JoAnn’s Fabrics, where every one of my mother’s crafting projects began. I strung them on clear monofilament wire the way you string popcorn garland at Christmas, and I fashioned a clasp and a hook on opposite ends. Five bright fuchsia letters, Q-U-E-E-R, sitting in the hollow of my throat between my Adam’s apple and my clavicle.

I knew how to do it because the Scouts taught me. Leatherwork. Knot tying. Basket weaving. Weeks away at summer camp learning to make things with my hands. The same hands that pounded my troop’s insignia into a leather hide strung the word Q-U-E-E-R onto a wire. The institution that expelled me gave me the skills to be proud.

Then I sued to get back in. My attorney was Evan Wolfson, who later founded Freedom to Marry and became the architect of the marriage equality movement that changed Matthew Vines’s life. Evan coached me to lead with pain, not the anger. Was I a lifelong Scout seeking reinstatement, or an activist trying to change the Boy Scouts of America?

The honest answer was both.

In a courtroom, you wear the tie and you make the reasonable case; and I did, for eight years, and I don’t regret it. It was code switching before we had the phrase. Taking the choker off in that room was never a betrayal. It was knowing which room I was in.

Here is what I did not understand until much later.

On April 26, 2000, I sat in the Supreme Court of the United States and listened to the Boy Scouts’ attorney, George A. Davidson of Hughes Hubbard & Reed, explain to nine justices what I had done to myself.

Justice Souter had just made the point in my favor. Mr. Dale, he said, has not asked to carry a banner in Scout troop meetings. He’s saying, I’m not going to carry a banner in Scouting, I’m not going to get into it.

Davidson answered: “he put a banner around his neck when he put, got himself into the newspaper and Scout leaders throughout Monmouth Council sent the article in to headquarters. He created a reputation.” And then: “He can’t take that banner off. He put it on himself and, indeed, he has continued to put it on himself in this week’s Time Magazine, the Out 100, the New York Times.”

Wow, a banner around my neck?

I bet Davidson had no idea the choker existed. It never came up, not in the briefs, not in the record, not once in ten years of litigation. He was describing a newspaper article, and he reached, without knowing it, for the exact object I had made with gay Boy Scout hands.

But here’s what he said. I got myself into the newspaper. Then Scout leaders throughout Monmouth Council clipped the article and mailed it to headquarters. The banner, in his own telling, was assembled by other people and hung on me by circulation.

The Scouts expelled me in July 1990, weeks after the Newark Star-Ledger printed that I was gay. Someone printed a fact about me, and my own Scout leaders forwarded it. The pink triangle I wore on my chest ran in the New York Times on August 5, 1992, when I filed suit, two years after they had already thrown me out. The choker was made by a college kid who had nothing left to protect. Every banner Davidson listed came after the punishment.

So the offense was never my vocabulary. Justice Scalia said it that morning, asking Evan about a man who is publicly known to be a contradiction of the Scouts’ message, “whether the person wears a sign or not.” The sign was never the problem. You could have swapped “gay” for “queer” in every interview I ever gave, and it would not have changed one word of my expulsion. What they could not tolerate was that anyone knew at all.

I can moderate what I say, but I cannot contort myself into acceptance. If they ask you to, it’s a trap.

Evan understood this better than anyone in the room. Pressed by Scalia on whether my simple presence was a message the Scouts should be forced to carry, he answered that a human being such as Mr. Dale is not speech. “A human being is certainly not speech as to a view, or as to a message, other than perhaps the message, I am who I am, I am here…”

The Court ruled against us anyway, and in the opinion I became a “gay rights activist,” as if those three words defined my entire being. They never said “queer,” and their decision still hurt like hell for decades. But they were right about my passion and wrong about everything else.

Being the calm one was never the opposite of being the activist.

The necktie and the choker were never opposites. They were two things I did, sometimes an hour apart, walking from Evan’s Lambda Legal office to an ACT UP meeting across the park. Both kept me alive. Neither one was the real me while the other was a costume.

So I won’t do it, and I won’t let the fear do it either. At 55, I will be a whole person.

The direction of the reaching

Queers like me fought back. We screamed for access to AIDS drugs, turned losses into victories, got marriage equality, sitcoms, mortgages, divorces with nasty custody battles. It took decades and it cost lives and we earned it.

But we climbed a ladder other people are still on. Trans kids are lower on it than anyone, and what we are doing to them right now is child abuse. Every gain I have in my life came from somebody above me on that ladder deciding to reach down to grab my hand reaching up. That is the only thing that has ever worked.

I was lucky to survive. Many people I loved did not. Queers Read This, the manifesto Vines quotes, was written by people watching their friends die while the country looked away. He calls that resonance understandable, then says it has outlived the crisis.

I disagree. The reason I still carry the word isn’t nostalgia. Those people are my community. We are one.

The Letters to the Editor page

My letter ran first. I keep looking at that, because I know what I cut, and they put the quiet one at the top.

Then I read the rest of the page, and something happened I didn’t expect. The arguments I’d thrown away were all there. Not in my words, but in everyone else’s.

I cut the point that they were coming for us before we said “queer.” Garrick Spears, in Canaan, said it plainly: they would come for us however polished and restrained we made ourselves. I cut the ladder, the idea that we owe the reach downward. Shannon Brennan, in Milwaukee, wrote that our responsibility is to those who lack power, not those who hold it.

I never had to carry all of it. Other people were holding the parts I had edited out.

That is precisely the thing Vines says we aren’t: a posture, an us-against-them reflex that outlived its reason. Look at what that actually did on one page of the New York Times. We’re a community.

What I actually want to say

Matthew Vines and I want the same things: to keep marriage equality, and for the kid in Wichita and the kid in Monmouth County to grow up without being taught they’re damaged. On the substance, we are not far apart at all.

But the people organizing against us aren’t confused about our vocabulary.

They were coming for us in 1990 when the word “queer” had barely traveled out of New York City. They will come for the married Baptist in Texas and the drag queen in Ohio with the same bill, on the same afternoon, and they will not check which word either of us prefers.

So the question isn’t which label polls better. It’s whether we intend to be a community or a set of constituencies negotiating separately. In 1990, people who had every reason to be busy with their own survival made room for a nineteen-year-old they’d never met, and that room is the reason I had a life. I’ve spent every year since trying to make that room for somebody else.

We don’t win by figuring out who to leave outside. We only win we when we stand as one.

My letter as published in the Times:

To the Editor:

Re “I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters,” by Matthew Vines (Opinion guest essay, July 2):

In 1990, the year Queer Nation published the manifesto that Mr. Vines quotes in his essay, I was one of that group’s members. I was 19. That same year, the Boy Scouts of America expelled me for being gay, and two years later, I sued.

The case took eight years to reach the Supreme Court, which in 2000 ruled in favor of the Boy Scouts. My Lambda Legal attorney at the time, Evan Wolfson, went on to become a leader in the marriage equality movement that Mr. Vines credits with changing his life.

In his essay, Mr. Vines presents queer confrontation and mainstream acceptance as opposing forces. My life tells a different story. The welcome I found among queer radicals gave me the courage to fight for a place in the most wholesome institution in America. The people in the streets and the people in the courtrooms were the same movement. Often the same people.

I am 55. I survived the AIDS crisis and buried many friends. I have been queer all my life, in the streets and in the courtroom, and I never found those two fights as far apart as Mr. Vines suggests.

Originally published by the New York Times on July 18, 2026.

To the Trans Girl Who Just Lost at the Supreme Court: So Did I 26 Years Ago

Here’s What I Cut from My NY Times Letter on Queer v. Gay was originally published in Prism & Pen on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

June 30, 2026

Today, the United States Supreme Court ruled against a sixteen-year-old girl named Becky Pepper-Jackson. She spent five years fighting for the right to compete on her school’s girls’ track team as a transgender athlete. Six justices said no. I lost at that same court twenty-six years ago, in a gay rights case I brought against the Boy Scouts after they expelled me.

I have something to tell her.

Dear Becky,

Three weeks ago, I watched you walk off a stage at the Lambda Legal National Liberty Awards, and I thought: she already knows who she is. That’s the hardest thing. Most people spend their whole lives trying to figure it out. You’re sixteen, and you’ve got it.

I introduced myself to you and your mom outside afterward. I told you I was proud of you and that I believed in you. I meant it then. I mean it more today.

I don’t know what it’s like to be transgender. I don’t know what it’s like to be as young as you are right now, fighting something this big in front of the whole country.

What I do know is what it feels like to lose at the Supreme Court, because I lived it. On June 28, 2000, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled against me in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale. Five justices said yes to discrimination. Four said no. Lambda Legal had fought alongside me for ten years, all the way to that building, and then we lost. They’re in your corner today, too.

The sympathy comes fast. It always does. But the loss stays.

Mine has stayed for twenty-six years. Then I remember the silence after. The world kept moving as if nothing had happened, while something enormous had happened to me.

So I’m not going to tell you it doesn’t hurt. It does. It will for a while. But it’ll also make you stronger.

What I want to tell you is this: if you need to step away and breathe, please do. You have your whole life ahead of you. You have done more than enough for your community and your country. You were eleven years old when this started. You didn’t ask to be a test case for anybody. You just wanted to play sports with your teammates.

And instead of quietly disappearing the way they hoped you would, you fought, for five years, all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Standing up to bigotry in the first place was winning. Six justices ruled against you. The other three said the Court was moving too fast, deciding your case before anyone had fully heard your story. That doesn’t undo what you already won just by standing up. You also went on to win the West Virginia state championship in shot put while maintaining a 4.0 GPA as your legal fate was still being decided, which might be the most athlete thing I’ve ever heard of. You have earned rest. Take it if you need it.

I needed it after my case. I ran, and I hid. I needed time away from all of it. That’s not quitting. That’s surviving.

I want to tell you what I heard when you said this from that stage three weeks ago: you don’t quit. You show up. You trust the process, and you come back stronger. You were talking about sports. But you were also describing exactly how change actually happens in this country. It’s slow, and it’s messy. And it usually takes way longer than it should. And then, eventually, it happens anyway.

I came back. Not out of obligation, but because a specific fight came along that I knew I could help with. The Department of Defense has been threatening to push transgender kids and girls out of Scouting America, the same organization that fought for the right to expel me twenty-six years ago.

That organization has changed since then. Gay scouts, gay leaders, girls, trans kids, they’re part of it now. Not perfectly. Scouting America has a long way to go. But the door opened. And now somebody is trying to close it again. That’s a fight I understood. So I got back in the ring.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about these long fights. The arc doesn’t move in a straight line. The Boy Scouts changed, not because any court told them to, but because people came to understand how wrong it was to exclude a kid for who he was. That understanding built slowly, over the years, because people like you refused to disappear. Someday, I believe, America will understand with the same clarity why excluding transgender kids is wrong. When that day comes, it will be because of what you built. The record you made. The five years you actually competed and showed everyone watching that the sky did not fall.

Today’s ruling will never erase that.

I don’t know exactly when the next one will come. I waited longer than anyone should have to wait, and you deserve better than that. Every transgender kid in this country deserves better. But I’ve watched this country learn things slowly, painfully, things it should have known all along. We keep learning. I believe that, even today.

You don’t quit. You show up.

With so much admiration and love,

James Dale

For more reflections and updates on civil rights advocacy, visit my personal website at JamesRDale.com

To the Trans Girl Who Just Lost at the Supreme Court: So Did I 26 Years Ago was originally published in Prism & Pen on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I.

Last year, my friend Tom Prol called to tell me my case was being used to protect the New Jersey State Bar Association’s diversity program. Tom, a past president of the Bar and its first openly gay leader, had become a friend through years of queer activism. So, when he called, I listened.

Then this week, he forwarded me an article from Law.com. The Supreme Court is now considering whether to take up a challenge to that same program. And the Bar, represented by lead attorney Larry Lustberg of Gibbons PC, is defending itself by citing Boy Scouts of America v. Dale.

In April 2025, Tom arranged lunch at Fornos of Spain on Ferry Street in Newark’s Ironbound neighborhood, just the three of us: Tom, Larry, and me. Larry had won at the appellate level a few months earlier, in December 2024, arguing that the Bar’s diversity program was protected under the First Amendment using my case.

We were there to celebrate. Larry signed the appellate brief first, then slid it across the table and asked me to sign it too. Tom took a picture.

I held the pen and didn’t quite know what to say.

He was returning what the Supreme Court had tried to take away. My pride.

So much of the world right now feels backward, upside down, like a dream where the rules keep changing and nobody tells you. But this felt different. This felt like someone had taken my name back.

I was 19 years old when I set all of this in motion. I had no idea what I was starting. I just knew I’d been expelled from the organization I loved, that I was gay, and that it was wrong. Lambda Legal took my case. We fought for ten years. We lost, five to four. Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote the majority opinion. And then my name became a citation. A precedent. A legal shorthand that other people’s lawyers would invoke in rooms I’d never enter, for arguments I’d never approve, for outcomes I couldn’t control.

I thought the Supreme Court had the last word. They don’t.

II.

I knew it had to be that Wednesday. The Supreme Court always releases its final decisions on the last day of the term, and June 28, 2000, was that day. I called in to work and made my way to Lambda Legal’s headquarters near Wall Street.

I was optimistic. I had no right to be. This was a Republican court, a conservative court, and everyone around me had been managing my expectations for months. They were appealing a unanimous decision from the New Jersey Supreme Court.

“James, this doesn’t look good.”

“Be realistic.”

I knew that. I wasn’t naive.

But I could not stop believing.

Growing up in the suburbs of New Jersey, I felt trapped. Trapped by expectations I couldn’t live up to and didn’t want. Trapped by a version of myself that didn’t fit anywhere I looked. Scouting was the one place that felt different. The one place where I could be more of myself than anywhere else. I was celebrated instead of mocked. I earned awards. I was put on a stage. It gave me a community I couldn’t find anywhere else. So when that letter arrived telling me I was no longer welcome, it felt so fundamentally wrong, so contrary to every value Scouting had instilled in me since I was eight years old, that I simply could not accept that the system would ultimately fail me. I believed in American institutions. I believed the truth would win.

The decision came down at 10:10 in the morning. We weren’t even looking in the right place. Someone else heard it on 1010 WINS radio first. Five to four. Rehnquist was writing for the majority.

Nobody looked at me. They were too upset, too afraid of making me feel even worse. The silence was its own kind of answer.

I felt crushed by democracy. By the American values I had believed in so completely that I had given ten years of my life to them. And then I thought about my name. James Dale. The name I had chosen. The name of my liberation, the openly gay version of me I had fought so hard to become. Now it was Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, above the fold, in every newspaper in the country. I didn’t know I was gay. I didn’t want to be gay. But I had chosen this name, this identity, and now I felt like a child again, trapped with something I couldn’t outrun. Afraid I would never get out of that moment.

It wasn’t the ending. It was only the beginning of something I couldn’t yet see.

III.

Almost immediately, the backlash began. Cities pulled Scouting’s access to public facilities. Corporate sponsors withdrew. United Way chapters across the country cut their funding. The organization that had fought so hard to keep me out watched America walk away, from PTAs to churches to corporations. The Scouts had destroyed themselves defending discrimination.

And I couldn’t feel any of it.

The depression was still there, heavy and close, and I couldn’t shake it. But I had learned something from years of watching ACT UP, from sitting in those meetings where people who had every reason to despair chose fury and hope instead. I knew how to perform optimism even when I couldn’t feel it. Every article, every letter, every phone call became a tiny brick. I was laying them one at a time, trying to rebuild something: my belief that the fight had meant something. I was doing it for the movement, for the people who still cared, trying to inspire them to keep going.

But I was also doing it for myself. Trying to convince James Dale on the inside that it wasn’t over.

IV.

The backlash worked. Slowly, the organization changed.

Gay youth were allowed in 2013. The ban on gay adult leaders was lifted in 2015. Each step felt like a small brick landing, another piece of something being rebuilt. But the moment that stopped me was 2017, when an eight-year-old transgender boy in New Jersey was asked to leave his Cub Scout troop. The Boy Scouts of America reversed their policy almost immediately. No years of litigation. No decade of public pressure. They had learned their lesson, and this time they didn’t need to be dragged.

They led.

They were embracing the most vulnerable kids at the exact moment much of the rest of society was still debating whether those kids were liars or criminals.

I thought about myself at eight years old. I didn’t know I was gay. I didn’t want to be gay. But Scouting was the one place I felt celebrated rather than mocked, seen rather than erased. It was a safe space for a kid who didn’t yet know what he needed to be safe from.

Whether they knew it or not, they were doing that again. For kids who knew exactly who they were.

V.

First, there was Masterpiece Cakeshop, a Colorado baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. My name wasn’t in that one, but I was watching. I could see where this was going.

The right saw Masterpiece as unfinished business. So, they built 303 Creative. It was a case about a woman in Colorado who designed websites and wanted to ensure she could never be forced to make one for a gay couple. She hadn’t refused anyone yet. She might never have to. A request that appeared on her website turned out to have been submitted in the name of a man who said he never sent it, a straight man, married to a woman. The Supreme Court of the United States took up a hypothetical built on what appeared to be a fiction.

I really got those letters. I really joined Cub Scouts when I was eight years old. I really spent ten years of my life fighting. That was real. That was what Supreme Court cases were supposed to be about.

When the 303 Creative decision came down in June 2023, and I saw my case cited in the majority opinion, I wasn’t just heartbroken for myself. I thought about every gay couple who would now be turned away by someone hiding behind the First Amendment. Behind my name. The case law I had put in motion at 19, the thing I had set spinning without fully understanding where it would go, was now being used to hurt people I would never meet.

That saddens my soul. Even now, saying it out loud, I feel it. That’s not what I wanted. That’s not what I meant. That’s not right.

Legal scholars were tracking what I was feeling from the outside. In a 2024 law review article titled “ The Return of Boy Scouts of America v. Dale,” University of Texas law professor Elizabeth Sepper mapped how courts had begun reading my case as broadly as anyone once feared, extending the right to discriminate to employers, for-profit businesses, and social service providers, well beyond the membership of nonprofit organizations it was meant to address.

VI.

Earlier this year, when Pete Hegseth announced that Scouting America was too woke, that trans kids would have to go, I was furious. But then something shifted.

I thought about that eight-year-old trans boy in New Jersey. I thought about everything Scouting had risked to include him. And then I thought about the decision I had spent twenty-five years trying to make peace with.

Wait.

The Scouts chose on their own to include trans kids. No court ordered them to. No law required it. They did it because they had learned, the hard way, what exclusion costs. And now the federal government was threatening to punish them for that choice, dangling military base access and Jamboree support like a weapon.

But the Supreme Court had already answered this question. In my case. The government cannot force a private organization to change its membership. That was the whole point of Boy Scouts of America v. Dale. The ruling I lost. The ruling I had hated for twenty-five years.

Use it, I thought. Use the same decision they fought so hard for to protect the inclusive organization they had chosen to become. The constitutional shield the Court handed them in 2000 to exclude me could now protect their right to include trans kids.

I wrote about it for Time Magazine in March 2026. I had waited twenty-five years to write that piece.

VII.

The depression that followed my loss in 2000 never fully disappeared. The trauma of that fight, a decade of my life, my name becoming something I couldn’t control, doesn’t just go away. But sitting at that table in the Ironbound, holding that pen, something shifted. My name was being used for something I believed in. The 19-year-old version of me, the one who had set all of this in motion without understanding where it would go, felt seen and protected.

This week, Tom forwarded me a Law.com article. The Supreme Court is now considering whether to take up the challenge to the Bar’s diversity program. My case is back before the highest court in the land, this time on the right side of history.

I don’t know how the Court will rule. You never do. But I know something now that I couldn’t have known standing in that room on Wall Street on June 28, 2000, when nobody would look at me, and the silence said everything.

If I could go back to that 19-year-old, and to the 29-year-old who had just been crushed by the Supreme Court, I would tell him: You will win. It might take a very long time. It won’t be easy. But you will win. And justice will prevail.

I’m still waiting. But for the first time in a long time, I have hope.

JamesRDale.com

Originally published at https://jamesrdale.substack.com.

My (Gay) Name Became a Legal Weapon To Exclude LGBTQ People was originally published in Prism & Pen on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’m James Dale, of Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, a landmark Supreme Court case

When I saw the Forestburg Playhouse, I knew I was almost there. The theater’s wooden sign was painted brick red. The same shade as the signs at camp.

I had this passing thought: Would the Playhouse have been a safer place for someone like me?

I found out that actors can be gay, but Boy Scouts can’t.

It was seventy degrees and climbing on a sunny May morning, thirty-three years since my expulsion letter. I remember standing there, stunned, in my friend’s kitchen. Scouting had spent years teaching me to be honest, loyal, and brave. Now honesty was my crime. What had I done? Because I was an “avowed homosexual,” I was no longer welcome in the Boy Scouts.

I was heading to Darlington Falls, a place I remembered as holding a kind of magic, clear water that seemed to stop time, by way of memories I wasn’t sure I was ready to face.

I had made the drive many times, usually cramped in the back of my parents’ 1981 Dodge Colt, for a week of summer camp or as a staff volunteer. There was always that one frigid winter weekend. The Catskills had a familiar mountain bite. This time, there was a chill, but it came from within me.

I kept telling myself: They’ve changed. They’re different now. But as much as I yearned to go, I was terrified of being rejected all over again.

The remains of my once-celebrated Scouting career had sat in a storage unit, in a chipped brown box with a wooden lid that slid shut and had followed me from New York to California and back again. Inside: my Eagle Scout award, my merit badge sash, neckerchiefs, and the sacred scripts of Scouting’s honor society, the Order of the Arrow, ceremonies. Another life packed away.

When my dad was unemployed, my parents struggled to pay for summer camp. They fought over finances when I ate free school lunches. But they always found money for summer camp.

I’d wanted to torch it all, throw it in the trash. Thousands of other Eagle Scouts mailed back their badges to protest their anti-gay policy. I didn’t. For more than thirty years, a monthly storage bill arrived as a painful reminder of everything unresolved.

Two hours later, I drove by Port Jervis Lanes and pulled over by the empty curb. I remember summer Saturdays. All the campers were gone, and the place was packed with staff. We’d all laugh over soda and pizza. I felt like I belonged. That morning, the air was thick with the smell of mechanical oil. The empty alleys sparkled. Every racked ball wore the same slippery sheen, dull and still.

Back in the car, I continued north.

The barricade and stockade fence were painted that same red. Round timbers stacked like Lincoln Logs formed a watchtower lined with narrow loopholes for rifles and arrows. In the middle of the fence was an Indian war bonnet, the insignia of Monmouth County Council, the same patch I once wore on my left shoulder. The feathered headdress, a Plains Indian tradition, was appropriated without a second thought. Looking at it now, I feel ashamed to have been a part of fetishizing and trivializing an entire culture.

As I drove down the gravel path, I saw the Welcome Center with a new sign: “Bear’s Den.” I gripped the steering wheel with both hands.

Thomas “Bear” Fraley reigned as Camp Director for seventeen years. He was a gruff old Scouter whom I feared and generally avoided.

Once, in front of a group of Scouting elders, Bear told everyone that I performed the sacred Vigil ceremony better than any Scouter he had ever seen. The group nodded in agreement. I felt an overwhelming sense of pride. I mattered. I was seen by men I respected and who I had assumed never noticed me. As a kid who was more effeminate than others, I was never a great camper. I couldn’t really cook, but somehow, I was being celebrated.

After the 2000 Supreme Court case Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, Bear Fraley said something different. “James Dale will never set foot in this camp again.” And “Over my dead body.” Hundreds of Scouts heard him say it.

It was repeated over the years during the throes of my legal battle.

Other than that, most of what I heard from Scouting was silence, unless it was filtered through a press release or a court filing.

As I stepped out of the car, my beat-up gray On Running shoes crunched against the gravel and crisp, dry leaves. I took a deep breath. I made it. I’m here at Forestburg. The sharp pine smell filled my lungs.

The first thing I saw as I walked into camp was a tin sign with bright yellow letters on a brown background. A Scout is CHEERFUL. Say Hello!

Cheerful was a curious phrase.

Scouting had spent tens of millions of dollars to make sure Bear’s wishes were honored, so that I only returned to read this cheerful sign over his dead body. Bear had passed away six years before I came back. But the ban he was protecting? That died first.

I was hoping to just slip in unnoticed. I walked up to a man patching up a cabin with a hammer and some nails.

“Hi!” I said.

The man looked up at me, stone-faced. His skin was ruddy and dark from hard work and days outside without sunscreen.

“I’m James… I was up here in the area, so I thought I’d stop by.” I paused. “I haven’t been back here since I was a Scout years ago.”

The man didn’t speak as he looked at me with curiosity, as if he were working something out.

“Would you mind if…” Before I could finish, he cut me off. “I know you,” he said.

Fight or flight? I was trespassing. The policy around homosexuality had changed Scouting. But not everyone had been pleased by their “reversal.”

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Instead, I stood in front of someone who knew who I was before I spoke a word.

“We were in the same Jamboree troop in ‘85,” he said.

I tried but couldn’t place his face. My mind went blank as my heart raced. Was this a test? That Jamboree had been nearly forty years ago. Those memories were pushed away or lost to time.

“Nice to see you,” I said, feeling some tension ease from my neck and shoulders. I glanced at my watch and said, “I’d better start walking before it gets too late.”

I still had several miles ahead of me before I reached Darlington Falls.

He didn’t ask why I was back. He knew.

On my right, at the edge of the lake, was the dining hall flanked by two familiar totem poles. The orange and hunter green paint had faded, and they weren’t as big as I remembered.

Inside, Debbie, the former ranger’s wife, was in charge. In a world of rigid masculinity and “toughness,” her kitchen was a bunker of acceptance.

After our shifts in the dining hall, the staff would go back to Debbie’s, the ranger’s house. I remembered it viscerally: the handsome blonde Scout who washed dishes with me, parading around with a cigarette, in a wig, doing Bette Davis impressions in drag. He was a year or two older and carried himself like he didn’t care about the rules. I wanted to be around him. It felt safe. Maybe his confidence would rub off on me. The scent of his illicit cigarettes mingled with burning wood and the forest. A silent rebellion against the camp’s strictures.

As I started to hike around Burnt Hope Lake, I saw another red sign: Darlington Falls. Overhead in the forest canopy, I heard birds cawing and tree limbs groaning against each other. Fields of ferns unfurled as if welcoming spring. In the distance, across the lake, I heard cars on the nearby highway. The real world was closer than I ever imagined as a kid.

I followed a side trail up to the overlook above the campfire ring. From there, rows of weathered benches curved around the fire pit like they were still waiting for Friday night. I headed back down and picked up the main path along the stream. As I got closer to the falls, the static began to build. With each step, it grew to a roar.

As I made the last turn down the steep decline that was barely a path, I saw the pool of water that was the basin of Darlington Falls. I looked up at ninety feet of water cascading down tiered, weathered shale.

Those falls ran clear, their power rising up against the rock face, steadily, stealthily bending that rock to its will.

The Boy Scouts had their policies and lodges, their rituals and awards, all created to elevate or separate. The cool mist of the falls sprayed across my face. They could never own Darlington Falls.

Standing at the falls, I thought the fight was over. The water didn’t care who I was or what the Supreme Court once said. It just poured down. I thought progress worked that way, too.

The Pentagon is now pressuring Scouting America to roll back its inclusive policies or lose military support. The same organization that once argued before the Supreme Court for the right to exclude me is now being told by the government who it may include.

I never thought I’d be the one pointing that out.

James Dale is a writer in New York. In 2000, he was the plaintiff in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, a landmark Supreme Court case on private organizations’ right to exclude gay members. He is an Eagle Scout. jamesrdale.com

He said, “Over my dead body.” I’m the Gay Boy Scout Who Finally Went Back. was originally published in Prism & Pen on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.