Scout's Honor on AllMovie

In the late '90s, a heterosexual California teen named Steven Cozza and his father, Scott Cozza, a San Francisco social worker, began a petition to allow gays to participate openly in the Boy Scouts of America. Their work formed the basis of the national movement Scouting for All and provided the central narrative for this documentary about the BSA's ban on gays and the numerous grassroots and court challenges to that policy. Scout's Honor presents Steven as a 13-year-old collecting petition signatures at a grocery store in his hometown of Petaluma, CA, and again as a 15-year-old attaining the rank of Eagle Scout even after his father and his troop leader, Dave Rice, have watched their own political convictions put an end to their scouting careers. Director Tom Shepard intersperses the story of Rice and the Cozzas with historical footage of scouting propaganda and interviews with Tim Curran and James Dale, the former scouts who waged legal battles against the Boy Scouts' gay ban a decade apart. The BSA declined to participate in Scout's Honor, but interviews with parents from Cozza's troop and archival footage of Curran's debates with well-known politicians present the opposing perspective. Scout's Honor screened at numerous festivals and appeared as an episode of PBS's P.O.V. series in 2001.