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On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of American Youth
by Jay Mechling
University of Chicago Press
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Forget helping little old ladies across the street, Scouting is a lot more complicated. And also forget the fantasies of Boy Scout camps being hot-beds of homo-sex and homo-fun. That is also a lot more complicated. Jay Mechling­ a professor of American Studies at University of California at Davis­ has produced a study based on more then 20 years of research and observation at one Boy Scout troop's summer encampment as well as extensive interviews with generations of scouts. The result is a fascinating, provocative, and often rather startling investigation into the complicated, and often contradictory lived realities of scouting on boys as they struggle to define themselves socially, sexually, and emotionally.

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He carefully places the US Scouting in a form historical context. While Scouting originally began in Great Britain under the direction of Lord Baden Powell as a nationalist, essentially white-supremist movement that was a direct feed-line to the British military (already under attack and losing its colonies), the movement in the United States was somewhat different. Taking some cues from Powell's vision, and combining them with nascent wilderness and nature appreciation movements that were already formed in America, the US Scouting movement of 1910 was a direct response to social concerns over masculinity; concerns that were remarkably similar to "the boy problem" of today which is so over written about in Time and Parents Magazine. This historic frame gives Mechling's study the broader dimensions it needs to carry both the sociological and emotional weights that he intends.

For the most part, Mechling concerns himself with analyzing the specifics and myriad meanings of camp songs rituals, play and language. He carefully charts how these have changed over the years­ nude bathing and overtly (hetero)sexualized joking is now a thing of the past, and there is a great deal more attention paid to the new "rule of three"­ you can have two scouts with a Scout Master, or two Scoumasters with a Scout, but never one Scout with one Scoutmaster­ but also writes at length describing how so much of Scouting is built about the production of normal­ i.e. heterosexual­ boys. Part of this, he claims, is what allows homophobic language and slurs as a central theme in camp activities. But this is only part of a more complex larger picture and Mechling does a great job at detailing how, ironically, forms of homoeroticism­ including transvestism­ are actually promoted to reinforce a heterosexual identity as well as alleviate tension over sexual desires and identities. His descriptions of this endless, repetitive cultural tension­ the innate homoeroticism of boys at play with one another and the cultural mandate to be heterosexual­ plays out especially in relation to the Scouts' overtly anti-gay policies as well as to the changes that have occurred in the Scouting manuals about topics such as masturbation.

Being an academic (writing a book intended, in part) for an academic audience Mechling draws on a wide variety of fascinating critical and cultural works including Freud, Mary Douglas, and Nancy Chodorow. By the end Mechling weaves his observations into an evaluation of how Scouting's self-image and purpose has changed in response to everchanging social transformations, including the anti-gay (as well as the anti-girl and anti-atheist policies). While the book is measured in its criticism, and ultimately supportive of Scouting, there still is a problem which Mechling admits: the games, rules, and social conventions that both build "normal" boys while admitting the presence of sexual ambiguity and ambivalence can be extremely painful when experienced by gay scouts. While he never really comes to grips with this primary, and troubling dilemma­ after all, for the Scouts to actually grapple with this would mean that they would have to admit that all of the sleeping-bag and closed-tent fumbling (and more) that go on (between Scouts and sometimes masters as well) might be more then just straight boys finding themselves. And that would be pretty much the opposite of what Scouting defines as "morally straight" not to mention legal. But in spite of this, Mechling has turned out a smart, provocative and unique analysis of what has become one of the major­ in Baden Powell's words­ "character machines" in the world.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com