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Editorial: Boston Boy Scouts Honor Man with Sexual Disease David Brudnoy Is Presented as Role Model for Boys   It's All a Matter of Money MassNews Staff June 13, 2002 The local Boy Scouts in Boston have honored a man with a venereal disease as their role model for the 18,000 Scouts in their care. The attention has focused on talk show host David Brudnoy, who was Master of Ceremonies at an annual fundraiser by Boston's Minuteman Council on Monday evening.

Although David Brudnoy has the image of a kind and gentle, pipe-smoking philosopher, he is far from the disinterested critic of the public scene as he is portrayed.

This was done on purpose, according to the local leader of the Scouts, Brock Bigsby, who told the Boston Globe he hopes that the choice of Brudnoy will end any confusion that the Boston group agrees with the national policy on homosexuals.

A.P. wrote that Brudnoy was invited to make it "crystal clear - that it [the local Council] opposes the ban on gay troop leaders."

Brudnoy informed the gathering that they told him, 'We want to signal through you, our nondiscrimination policy."

The Council also introduced a new "diversity awareness award badge," which includes homosexuality.

The concern of the local group is about money, according to Bigsby, who said that fund-raising has been damaged as a result of the national policy.

Many Parents Wonder

As a consequence, parents are left wondering if David Brudnoy is a man they want their sons to emulate. Should the boys be exposed to him just because of "fund-raising?" It seems to many like a high price to pay.

Not all Massachusetts Scout Councils have a problem with the national policy. To the contrary, the leader of the Framingham Knox Trail Council has stated that an "avowed homosexual" is not a role model for the Scouts.

One has to feel sorry for Brudnoy and the lifestyle he has chosen, but should we make him a model for children to follow?

Brudnoy told Reason magazine he got AIDS as the result of oral homosexual sex in the 1980s and was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988. He kept the news to himself until he collapsed in 1994, twenty minutes from death. He spent two months in the hospital.

This was after the AIDS crisis was known to everyone.

What would drive a man to such behavior? Why is he a hero?

He says he kidded himself for years. Is he still kidding himself? Is he kidding us now?

Kidded Himself

Brudnoy tells us he deluded himself for years. "I lied to myself," he now says. He wrote this for The Body, a website about AIDS.

"I mentioned earlier the phenomenon of denial - of kidding oneself - convincing oneself - of something that isn't true, then permitting oneself to tell what you believe to be true - but which is, in fact, a lie, to everybody else. I told everybody I was well because I believed it. I didn't lie to anybody. I lied to myself. And that is one of the stupidest things I have ever done. I know people do it all the time. I would urge anybody who can tell that something is odd in a friend of theirs or family member -- you've got to get that person straight into the hands of somebody who can take care of that person. I just said, 'No, I'm fine!' Well, we see what happened? A very un-fine period in intensive care."

He also wrote, "During the period of denial, my body was telling me, 'I'm sick'. My brain was convincing myself that I was well - just a little flu!"

Some would say that Brudnoy is still in denial. If this man cannot control his sexual impulses, do we want him mentoring to our youth?

A little bit of the suffering that this man inflicted upon himself is reflected in this interview with the Valley Advocate.

"I was diagnosed in 1988, probably infected some time earlier. I was in pretty good shape for some years and then I got very pained with my feet, a thing called 'neuropathy' -- very common with people on certain drugs for AIDS or for HIV.
"I was so crippled up, and then I began to have terrible symptoms of illness in September and October of 1994, all of which I ignored. Then I collapsed, I have no memory... I wound up nine days later waking up in an intensive care unit, having been in a coma for those nine days, told that I had 20 minutes to live when I was rushed to the hospital.

"And then I found out I was paralyzed in my feet and was told I would never walk again. And after two months in hospitals, getting every conceivable, awful thing you could imagine -- shingles and diarrhea endlessly, and... name it, name it. I gradually... My nerves regenerated and I learned to walk again on crutches and canes; and now I don't quite run marathons, but I ride a lot of bicycle, and I put back on 50 pounds, and I'm on the so-called 'AIDS cocktail,' which are these drugs that are helping people a great deal."

Almost Fired in 1990

Brudnoy has always been a talk show host. He almost was terminated from WBZ in 1990. But the activists raised such an outcry that the station kept him on. When he almost died and announced he was a homosexual with AIDS in 1994, the liberal establishment canonized him as a saint. He is untouchable now. He started at WHDH in 1976, moved to WRKO in 1981 and on to WBZ in 1986.

Brudnoy Seeks to Outlaw Belief in God

Brudnoy also used his time at the Scout podium on Monday to urge a change in their belief about God. According to the A.P., "Brudnoy said that Minuteman Council has done the right thing with its nondiscrimination policy - and should even go a step further - looking at the national bylaw requiring duty to God. 'Currently an atheist or agnostic kid cannot be a scout,' he said, adding that he [Brudnoy] planned to call for change."

Brudnoy has even been advising the Catholic Church. He wrote an article for the Boston Herald on April 18, in which he solemnly advised the church that it is not homosexuals who caused their problem.

He says there are those on the left who say celibacy is the problem instead of seeing this as "the more encompassing matters of sex, sexuality and marital status in the church." Those on the right "insist that gay priests are the cause of pedophilia."

But they're both wrong, according to Brudnoy.

He then tells us, "Some homosexuals take advantage of those too young to make rational decisions, as do some heterosexuals."

But that's not true, David.

A homosexual is ten times more likely to be molesting children. While it is true that they commit only 30% of the molestation of children, it must be remembered they are only 3% of the population.

From that he jumps to this. "When mindless commentators latch onto the simplistic babblings of some local cleric or some sensationalistic author or some thoughtless spokesman invoking wrath from the Vatican upon all homosexuals, we are experiencing not rational thought but rank bigotry and stupidity."

Good try, David.

It the first place, please tell us when you have ever heard anyone from the Vatican "invoking wrath upon all homosexuals." You know that is not even close to the truth.

But you use that falsehood as your marker.

And then, even though you cannot control your own sexual impulses, "It is the failure to restrain sexual desire that undermines the priestly role."

And that, in turn, he says, raises questions about what should be done to "reform'' the system. He wants the Catholics to acknowledge the "desire of many heterosexual priests to marry, of many women to assume the priestly role and of many homosexuals in the priesthood to have what is now forbidden them: a realized sexual life."

He then lectures us that, "Most gay clergymen, like their straight brothers, honor their vows. Homosexuals always have been, are now and forever will be found in the priesthood. Expelling homosexuals or pretending that their presence is irrelevant merely avoids crucial issues, manifests ire and spreads rancor. When it finally casts out the enablers in the hierarchy and focuses on these matters, the church must deal with priestly abusive behavior, not with priests' sexual orientations per se. The drumbeat of accusations, cover-ups and bizarre exercises in excuse-making, from Boston's archbishop or any other, guarantees that this crisis will deepen - until stereotypes and jargon are supplanted by psychological acuity, cogency, candor, compassion and intellectual honesty."

David Brudnoy is also advising the Boy Scouts. In a column in the Boston Herald last Saturday, he wrote about the "national organization's bigotry." The only way to eliminate this bigotry, he says, is to let men like him become scout leaders.