Being a white, straight male who’s currently attending college, I don’t bring much to the table in the way of diversity. One day I may grow up and become the dreaded Man that people are always fighting.

However, that doesn’t mean that I’m blind to the world around me. Growing up, I was a member of one of the most institutionally homophobic organizations in the U.S.: The Boy Scouts of America. In essence, I still am a member. I took a lot of lessons away from my experience as a scout, but one of the most important revolved around the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. While not uniformly implemented on a national level, this is a dangerous and misinformed attempt to avoid addressing a problem.

The results can be bad. In the summer of 1999, at a camp where I would later work, a 16-year-old employee and Eagle Scout was fired after being questioned about his sexuality. The following day came to be known as “Black Tuesday” among the staff. For the first time in its 80 years of operation, the camp was effectively shut down by a sit-down strike. The striking workers, aged 15 to 23 and scouts themselves, demanded the reinstatement of the terminated employee.

The local media jumped on the story and the employee filed a suit for wrongful termination. When the dust settled, the employee was rehired, many top-level administrators at the camp and the council were fired, and the camp changed forever.

When I started working there, five summers later, Black Tuesday had become something of an urban legend. Most of the staff from 1999 had grown up and moved on. All we were left with was bits and pieces of the camp’s most important campfire story. The longer I worked there, the more I came to know the story and how it had affected the lives of the staff that had lived through it. Even though the employee had been rehired, there was still a fear reprisal if someone were to be openly gay. There was an unspoken distrust of the administration, even 10 years later.

I know many gay scouts, some of whom chose to remain in the closet to maintain their connection with scouting. While we may be growing up in a post-Will and Grace world (see “Breaking the Silence”), there are still a lot of walls to overcome. When I look back at pictures from 1999 and see young men in scout uniforms giving the finger to the administrative building, I see a generation that’s ready to overcome this old guard mentality.

The lesson that I learned is this: Despite the radical advances that our society has made, there are still places (not too far from here) where this civil rights movement has yet to get off the ground.