Scouts kicked him out for being gay. He’s back 45 years later as scoutmaster
Tim Curran has returned to the scouts as a leader (Facebook/Tim Curran)
A former boy scout who was kicked out of the group for being gay when he was 18 years old is now working as a scoutmaster 45 years later.
Tim Curran told his story to People on 29 March. “When I was a kid, Scouting felt like getting ready for a mission or an expedition,” he said. “Now, as a 64-year-old adult leader, donning the uniform felt like preparation for a calling.”
Curran first joined the Boy Scouts, now named Scouting America, in Berkeley, California when he was 14 years old, and worked his way up to Eagle rank over the next four years. One of his greatest achievements in that time was founding a troop for deaf Scouts.
Why was Tim removed from Scouts?
When he was 16, Curran came out as gay to a local gay youth group, and was even featured in a news story for the Oakland Tribute with his male senior prom date. He alerted his troop leaders before the story was published. “I didn’t want them to find out the hard way,” he said.
At first, no one in the Scouts objected to his coming out, but that all changed when he applied to join the staff of the 1981 National Jamboree while he was in his freshman year at UCLA. Curran shared that he received a letter rejecting his application and telling him “you are hereby removed from Scouting.”
Following an appeal to his local council executive it was revealed that he was rejected because he was gay. Curran took his case to the American Civil Liberties Union, who helped him sue the Scouts. The 1981 case became the first legal challenge to expose the Scouts’ ban on out gay youth and adult leaders.
“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.”
Another case that was brought against the Scouts 10 years later was argued all the way to the US Supreme Court. In 2013, the organisation finally welcomed in its first out gay youths, and then out gay adult leaders two years later.
When did Tim return as a scoutmaster?
Curran originally thought he could never return to the Scouts after what we went through, but in 2025 he was approached by Manhattan’s largest troop and encouraged to become a volunteer leader.
He said that “returning to Scouting after all these years is still just a personal joy and blessing.”
In January this year, Curran told his story during a fireside chat to Manhattan’s Troop 662, and said he “kind of got choked up several times telling the story because I had not realized how traumatic the whole experience had been.”
He continued: “And then, really much more importantly, the kids were just sort of wide-eyed. They don’t live in the world that I was thrown out
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