NEW YORK -- On his 18th birthday, Ryan Andresen received a symbol of the Boy Scouts’ highest honor, which the national organization had denied him because he is gay: an Eagle Scout pin.

He got it on Monday from another Eagle Scout, Matthew Kimball, 30, who was also in his troop years ago and publicly came out as gay after learning about his fellow Scout’s plight.

“I look at it; it just gives me hope,” Andresen, of Moraga, Calif., told NBC News on Friday during a visit to New York. “I see it as there’s people out there that support me and care about me and believe that I earned it. And it also shows me that things are happening, change is happening, there’s hope in the Boy Scouts to change this policy.”

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Andresen learned more than a week ago from his father, Eric, that the Scoutmaster of Troop 212 would not be signing off on his Eagle application even though he’d completed the requirements. The father said the Scoutmaster told him he was grappling with the conflict between Ryan’s sexual orientation and the policy set by the national organization that bans Gay Scouts and leaders.

The Scoutmaster has not responded to emails or a phone call seeking comment. Andresen said he had found his father crying over the rejection, which he then explained to him.

“It's not fair that gay people can’t go through it and can't get the recognition,” he said. "It’s especially not fair that people like me can go through the whole entire program, you know, do everything and get all the way to the Eagle award and at the very last minute be told they can’t get it. It's totally devastating, it’s terrible … that's bullying.”

Andresen came out in July to his fellow Scouts in a letter that was focused on bullying in the troop. But he said his Scoutmaster knew before then that he was gay and had encouraged him to stick with the troop when he had thought about not pursuing his Eagle Scout rank.

His final Eagle Scout project focused on bullying. Named the “tolerance wall,” it consists of 288 tiles depicting acts of kindness and is displayed at his middle school, where he says he endured name calling over his sexual orientation. He said he also was bullied in the Boy Scouts because he was gay.

Speaking about the bullying brought his mom, Karen, to tears.

“It's hard … when you're a mom and your kids are, you know, suffering in pain,” she said, adding that the Eagle Scout denial “was like the final straw because we were all in such shock about this decision. And I didn’t want Ryan to go down to a bad place again and be so depressed, and so I just had to step in and be his advocate.”

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The Boy Scouts of America have a longstanding policy denying membership to gay leaders and Scouts, which they reaffirmed earlier this year after a two-year confidential review of the controversial ban.

“While a majority of our membership agrees with our policy, we fully understand no single policy will accommodate the many diverse views among our membership or society,” BSA spokesman, Deron Smith, said in an email in August.

The organization said last week in a statement that because of Andresen's sexual orientation and that he did not agree to Scouting’s principle of "Duty to God," “he is no longer eligible for membership in Scouting.”

But the family has disputed that, saying the only reason Andresen was denied the rank is "because the Boy Scouts of America has a problem with Ryan being gay."

Andresen has had his emotional ups and downs since he learned he wouldn’t get his Eagle, though is family is still appealing that decision and Karen Andresen started an online petition calling for him to get the award. He is also hurt that his Scoutmaster has not responded to a letter he wrote him.

“He still won't talk to me and, it’s sad," he said. “He was a huge role model to me so it’s devastating. I really looked up to him.”

Andresen said he has received some critical messages online that he was bullying the Scoutmaster.

“I apologized that it looked that way and I said that this is not what I’m trying to do and I’m very against bullying,” he said. “I’m not targeting anyone. I love Boy Scouts. I love the boys in my troop and I really just want this policy to change.”

To earn the Eagle rank, which is in its 100th year, Scouts must progress through five lower ranks, earn 21 merit badges and serve six months in a leadership position, among completing other tasks. More than two million young men have received the Eagle rank.

Kimball, who started a campaign to collect Eagle regalia for Andresen, said he has gotten up to 170 pledges of pins. Scouts for Equality said last week that some 300 Eagle Scouts had returned their regalia to the Boy Scouts in protest since mid-July.

But many other Eagle Scouts have said they agreed with the policy.

Brian Groenig, 36, of Lake Stevens, Wash., said he backs the BSA’s decision.

“This is an organization that has set ‘their own’ standards and set ‘their own’ values. All those (who) want to join are only asked that they live by those standards and values.We’re not forcing it upon anyone … but it is a private organization that can choose what they will and will not accept,” Groenig, a charter organization representative with his troop, told NBC News in an email. “I find comfort in knowing there are organization that won’t bend and conform to the ‘social norm’ just because of peer pressure and political positioning.”

A spokesman for the Boy Scouts of America, Deron Smith, said 50,000 Scouts earn the Eagle rank every year. He said in August that a “few” had returned their medals, badges or certificates since the membership policy announcement. On Tuesday, he said he didn’t have an update on numbers of regalia returned, but noted such items were either kept at the national office or stored in the National Scouting Museum.

Andresen said he is looking forward to returning to high school and being out of the spotlight, though he knows this experience has changed the course of his life. He initially thought he would go into the family business after college, but now has some new ideas.

“What if I could help people when I’m older and share my experiences?” he asked. “It's really just making me thing about all of that. … I don’t have a good idea of what I’m going to do going forward, but I definitely think this is going to be a part of it.”

If you are a current or former member of the Boy Scouts and would like to share your thoughts on the membership policy, you can email the reporter at miranda.leitsinger@msnbc.com.

 

 

 

Updated at 10:00 p.m. ET, Tuesday -- Matthew Kimball walked away from the Boy Scouts in 2005.

Since he was gay, Kimball knew that his sexual orientation would be at odds with the Boy Scouts of America’s policy banning gay Scouts and leaders. Kimball was both: an Eagle Scout and an assistant Scoutmaster.

 

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Kimball had not revealed his sexual orientation during his Scouting years. But he decided, like a number of other gay Scouts, that he could no longer stay publicly quiet about the organization’s membership policy after learning that Ryan Andresen, a teen from his own Troop 212 in Moraga, Calif., had been denied the Eagle rank last week because he is gay.

 

 

 

 

“My immediate reaction was frustration with myself, because I felt if I had done what this kid did … he wouldn’t have to be going through this, hopefully,” said Kimball, referring to Andresen’s coming out in July to his troop in a letter.

Kimball has called on other Eagle Scouts to give their pins to Andresen after the teen’s story emerged last week. “I never thought I’d ever come out in an explicit way ever,” Kimball, who was leaving Scouting as Andresen was joining the troop, told NBC News late Monday. “But I just felt like I had to.”

Andresen, 18, had completed the requirements to earn the Scouts’ highest honor, but his Scoutmaster would not sign off on the award because he is gay, his mother said. The Scoutmaster has not replied to emails or a phone call seeking comment.

Kimball, a technology entrepreneur in San Francisco, said he has received up to 170 pledges of pins from Eagle Scouts, including about 48 from Troop 212 alumni. Scouts for Equality said last week that some 300 Eagle Scouts had returned their regalia in protest to the Boy Scouts since the organization announced in July that it had re-affirmed its membership policy after a confidential, two-year review.

But many other Eagle Scouts have said they agreed with the policy.

“The BSA's stance on this policy, along with the policy that you must subscribe to a belief in a higher being have both come under attack over the past few years,” Scott Prater, a 45-year-old unit commissioner in the Chattahoochee District for the Boy Scouts’ Northeast Georgia Council, said last week in an email to NBC News. “Anyone who desires to sign up as a member, either as a boy, or as an adult, must read and sign a statement to the fact that they understand and agree to abide by those principles. If you knowingly sign that you agree to those principles and have no intent on abiding by the rules, then you shouldn't expect to get special consideration.”

A spokesman for the Boy Scouts of America, Deron Smith, said 50,000 Scouts earn the Eagle rank every year, and in August noted that a “few” had returned their medals, badges or certificates since the membership policy announcement. On Tuesday, he said he didn’t have an update on numbers of regalia returned, but noted such items were either kept at the national office or stored in the National Scouting Museum. He also said Scouting ranks, such as the Eagle Scout, represent a past achievement and the BSA did not revoke them once they were awarded.

Most of the Scouts pledging their pins were heterosexual, Kimball said, though a number of gay Eagle Scouts made similar offers in emails sent to NBC News since hearing of Andresen’s story. One of those was Eric-Richard de Lora, an adviser to the Gay-Lesbian Union that Andresen and others founded at his high school in Berkeley, Calif., this fall.

De Lora, 53, said he considered returning his Eagle in 1997 after coming out but felt strongly that he had earned it and decided to keep it. He also thought about returning it in 2000, when the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the Boy Scouts on the anti-gay membership policy.

“Ultimately I held on to the award believing that it might someday serve a useful purpose,” said de Lora, a teacher at Maybeck High School.

That day appeared to come after Andresen informed de Lora last Monday about what was happening with his Eagle bid. Andresen, de Lora wrote, had completed the requirements for the Eagle, including building a “tolerance wall” for victims of bullying such as himself.

“This week I have finally decided that the best use of my award, short of giving it to Ryan, would be to donate it to the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco,” he wrote in an email to NBC News. “ … it seems the right place for both a tribute to homosexual Scouts and all that they have endured.”

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Another gay Eagle Scout, Robert Goris-Kolb, a 25-year-old pharmacist from Grand Island, N.Y., said his husband had been pushing him to return his badge after the BSA announced it was sticking with the membership policy.

“Unlike Ryan, at the time I earned my Eagle Scout badge I was not out of the closet, and did not have to face the indefensible discrimination he is currently confronted with,” he wrote. Media reports on Andresen have “finally pushed me over the edge and I can no longer stay on the sidelines of this tragedy. Instead of returning my award to the BSA however, I would like to send it to Ryan, so that if he does not win his fight against this organization, he may in one way be granted what he has rightfully earned.”

Karen Andresen, who had started an online petition calling for her son to get his Eagle rank, said the Scoutmaster knew about her son's sexual orientation and that Ryan was led to believe he would nonetheless get the award.

But Boys Scouts spokesman Smith said Andresen was no longer eligible for membership in Scouting because he did not meet the membership standard on sexual orientation and he had informed his unit leadership that he did not agree to Scouting’s principle of "Duty to God." The family disputed that, saying the only reason Andresen was denied the rank was "because the Boy Scouts of America has a problem with Ryan being gay."

Kimball, who knows Andresen’s father, Eric, the troop's chief administrator, attended a troop meeting earlier this week on how to resolve Ryan’s case. He said talks were under way on recognizing the teen’s accomplishment while keeping the troop together amid the difficult time and some hard feelings.

“I want Ryan to be recognized. I want him to get an Eagle award even if it’s mine,” he said. “It’s a physical symbol that encapsulates so many great memories and a really important time in our lives … it’s difficult to let go of, but for me, I knew that it would be a positive thing.”

If you are a current or former member of the Boy Scouts and would like to share your thoughts on the membership policy, you can email the reporter at miranda.leitsinger@msnbc.com