I've got a good friend, who is gay (and, also a XJW) and was a scout before the JWs. In fact, he told me yesterday that he was late for the first public talk he ever went to, because he'd been sailing with the scouts in the morning and left it a bit late to go home and change. He said yesterday if he'd known the change his life would take after the jws, he'd have jumped overboard and drowned himself.
So I asked him about this topic and to stay serious. He claims, that when he was younger, he never saw any m2m activity, but he saw plenty of self-pleasuring. He claims that was almost routine, that when they went to scout camps etc, lots of guys would roll out their sleeping bags and start on themselves. He laughed as he recalled one guy, who used to be able to hit the tin roof of the scout hut from the top bunk of the hut. (about a metre away). So, I asked, did that make him (my friend) gay? He laughed again, and said in that in those days, he would've been dead meat if he'd said he was gay.
I was in the scouts also, (different time and different place) and I had a bloody good time. (But then I've even had a good time as a JW. Never went through any rough stuff as others here describe, not until the end anyway). Was there m2m sex in the scouts. I can only say yes! - one case of paedophilia, when a man started coming along to bushwalks and started taking one of the younger kids away by themselves. I was a patrol leader and told the scoutmaster, and he took some kind of action, never saw the guy again, and the kid stopped coming to the scouts also. Another time, when camping with another group of scouts, their scoutmaster wanted me to sleep in his tent. I refused. And btw, my gayXJW friend said that when he was a senior scout (aged 16 and over), two of the guys seemed to be getting fond of each other, but he never knew anything definite.
So, I think it can be assumed that young boys (scouts used to be aged from 11 to 15), going through puberty are not going to remain sexually innocent.
Apparently, its only in the USA that the scouting organisation has tried to make normal sexuality an issue. Maybe that says something about the USA (grin).
But to come to the point of my post (the reason, I decided to say something). The scouting organisation was the brainchild of Lord (as he was later honored) Baden Powell, and his book "Scouting for Boys," (which you used to have to memorise) plainly reveals BP's view of the world. Masturbation was a big NoNo! ( it'll send you insane, or something), as was something called 'beastliness,' which I could never find out exactly what it meant, but with the wisdom of age, probably meant m2m sex.
So did this reveal something about BP?
Probably! BP had a secret. He liked to look at young boys naked. That is clear and incontravertible. Did that mean he was a secret paedophile? I want to emphasise, not neccesarily. As my Ancient History lecturers keep saying, "The past is a another country - they do things differently there." There is absolutely no 'found' evidence that Baden-powell ever had sex with another man or boy. And, perhaps nakedness was less problematical then than now. As kids we often swam naked (even post-puberty) at quieter beaches. (Anyway, to this day, nakedness is legal at certain designated beaches in Sydney).
So what's the evidence that BP liked seeing boys naked?
His biographer states (Jeal, Tim. Baden-Powell. Hutchinson. London, 1989.):
[Page 92]
"At Gilwell Park, the Scouts' camping ground in Epping Forest, he always enjoyed watching the boys swimming naked, and would sometimes chat with them after they had 'just stripped off'. When public censoriousness finally turned against male nudity, treating it in the same way as female nudity, Baden-Powell was appalled."
"Although Baden-Powell publicly stated that flogging might be a deterrent to Scouters [Scout Masters] who abused the trust placed in them, he allowed Patterson and Byrne [of Gilwell Park] to escape unscathed. Headquarters evidently preffered not to let it be known that for almost fifteen years the one job in the Movement requiring men of unimpeachable integrity had been occupied by a succession of active paederasts."
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[Pages 92-94]
"Another incident illustrative of Baden-Powell's appreciation of naked boys occurred at Charterhouse, when he was staying overnight at the school with his old friend A. H. Tod, who had been in the Rifle Corps and in the football 1st XI with him. In November 1919 Tod was over the retirement age but still teaching because it was wartime and all the younger staff had joined up. 'Stayed with Tod,' Stephe wrote in his diary. 'Tod's photos of naked boys and trees etc. Excellent.'. That a bachelor housemaster should have taken large numbers of nude photographs of his boys evidently did not strike Baden-Powell as undesirable. A few days later he wrote to Tod about starting a Scout troop at the school and added that he would soon be visiting Charterhouse again, 'which will give me the opportunity of seeing the football; and possibly I might get a further look at those wonderful photographs of yours!'
This album of 'figure studies', as Tod described it, was still in the library at Charterhouse in the mid-1960s, but by the end of that permissive decade had been destroyed. This appalling act was undertaken 'to protect Tod's reputation' and out of deference to the feelings of the sons and grandsons of the boys depicted. Fortunately the rest of Tod's albums were spared and they comprise what must be finest single photographic record in existence of public school life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So what were the missing albums' contents' ?
According to one source the nude figures were 'contrived and artificial as regards poses', which makes them sound like those late Victorian pseudo-classical nude photographs which were really pornography but were sold under the guise of art. In the same way as an artistic publication like 'The Artist and Journal of Home Culture' appealed to homosexuals with its illustrations and its homoerotic poetry. [...] There is little doubt that Tod was a repressed homosexual; as indeed were many public school masters. The majority managed to follow Plato's prescription glorifying the love of man for man, or man for boy, while remaining physically chaste."
The above information came from this web-site: http://www.glgarden.org/ocg/archive1/baden.html
There are other claims about Baden-Powell, one being that he had a long relationship with his Army batman (servant), but as far as I have read, which is admittedly not very deeply, no-one has ever come forward to claim that BP had sex with them. There is much more evidence that that other famous GAY XJW, Michael Jackson, was an active paedophile, than Lord Baden-Powell. But I think that this information re-casts the discussion with a different (new? haha) light.
Attraction to the same sex is (I have come to realise) an entirely natural feature of human sexuality. Sexual desire is genetically based (i.e. we want sex because our genes make us want sex) but sometimes our culture governs the way we express that desire. In Tokugawa Japan, Professor Gary Leupp, believes and writes that male to male sex was normative. I read the word 'normative' to mean that it was normal, nearly every man may have sex with another man at some point in his life. Obviously, there was no stigma attached to a man having sex with another man as well as having sex with women. But some men back there insisted they were 'women-haters' that is they did not want to have sex with women. These men, I suggest, are the ones who today call themselves gay.
