I'm definitely going to support people's efforts because I think it is an important fight. What I find really important is that this case highlighted gay youth. When I was a gay kid growing up in suburban New Jersey, the Boy Scouts made me feel good about myself. They taught me to have self-respect and how to be a leader. The light should now shine on how America is dealing with gay youth, and what resources are there for them.

Now that the Boy Scouts have turned their back on gay kids, there has to be some other way to pick up the slack. Let's face it: I'm an adult. It was a defeat, but I'll survive. I'm more concerned about the kids in the program, where we're going as a community and where gay youth fit into that picture.

The Girl Scouts don't have an anti-gay policy, and filed a brief with the Supreme Court on your behalf. Does that give you hope? Or does that just make you more frustrated with the Boy Scouts?

The Boy Scouts were founded in England roughly 100 years ago, and England dropped their policy of banning gays about four or five years ago to make themselves relevant to the next generation of youth. The Boy Scouts of America have made a foothold in bigotry and discrimination and they are really rendering themselves obsolete for today's youth. That's a sad thing because there was so much potential there.

I see letters to the editors in papers across this country, having conversations about sexual orientation, and it is that conversation that is really the key, so I'm not totally disheartened because I believe as long as that conversation is still taking place, there will be less room for discrimination.

Kids today are coming out, and reading about gay issues in the newspapers. That really wasn't something that I had when I was growing up. As a teenager, I was looking for role models, for messages about what it means to be gay, and really the only thing I found in the '80s was a community responding to HIV and AIDS. Now, hopefully there are other ways that kids can find community and support.

There were definitely no role models for us when we were growing up in the 1980s. For girls, there were gym teachers.

And for men, there were English teachers and drama club. We didn't know where to find role models outside of that. What made it really easy for me to come out in college was learning about the gay community in New York, San Francisco, New Hope, Penn. I think now it's a little easier to learn about gay life because of the Internet.

When you got those letters from the Monmouth Council of Boy Scouts and the district council 10 years ago, did you sense that this was going to evolve into a campaign of this magnitude?

I never thought the Boy Scouts were going to rally around me with rainbow flags in hand and advocate a homosexuality merit badge. But I, of course, didn't expect their reaction, because I didn't know about this policy. That's really the basis of the entire lawsuit. I was a member of this program for 12 years and got many of the awards and honors from the program, and I taught other kids about the fine parts of this program as an assistant scoutmaster. I should have been passing along this anti-gay mission, but I didn't because it wasn't there.

If you had known that an explicit anti-gay policy existed, and the Boy Scouts were as important to you as they were, would it have impacted your gay activism in college?

Had my parents known there was this policy, they would never have me be in an organization that discriminates against a group of people, be they Jews or blacks or gays. The thing about scouting, though, is that you're taught to be active, to be a leader. In relation to gay life, everyone likes to call an openly gay person an activist.

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