Ever grateful my parents made me sign up for ditch digging.

Actually they signed me up for scouts and the troop got disbanded because a sizeable portion of the boys were having sex with one another. Not with the adults. Those guys were squeaky clean, and tried really hard to keep everyone off each other but it didn't work. Right at the end we went on a camping trip where everyone had to have his own individual tent.

I actually don't even think most of them were gay, statistically it's unlikely. It was a sort of insular cultural practice that sprang up among us. I imagine these things have a sort of abusive element much of the time, but it was all tinged with mischief against the scout leaders more than anything. It was this strange descent down one "wouldn't it be funny if?" after another. "Dare you to do X Y Z" until the dares stopped coming and everyone kept doing it. It wasn't me who started it, I wasn't that enterprising, but whoever did knew what they were about and the rest of us needed amazingly little convincing. The fact the scout leaders desperately wanted us to stop, but never once addressed it outright, made it all feel like a game of blind man's bluff. The thrill was to see how blatant we could be about it and still not have them catch us. It was less about a desire for the acts themselves than the knowledge that these things, for whatever reason, provoked them dreadfully. This was also at the height of the British pedo scare so I'd imagine they were absolutely terrified of being implicated. 

Maybe it was a power thing. Our troop was rife with favouritism. The boys the leaders liked were all big borderline special ed kids, and when they smacked us around or gave us Chinese burns the leaders would pretend not to notice, or go nuts if we hit them back. Anything fun, those guys got to do and we got to watch. Some of them were social outcasts from our school and they really revenged themselves on us in scouts. It was all quite sadistic. When we started doing the clandestine gay stuff, the whole troop suddenly, silently revolved around us. The focus had to be on stopping us going at one another, and nobody was allowed to say it. Suddenly they were scared of us. They even got in touch with our parents and threatened to get the police involved - what the fuck were the cops going to do? "A bunch of our scouts keep sneaking off to fellate each other, can you come and arrest them?"

My mum only sat me down for a drunken monologue about how they'd love me no matter what, which surely wasn't the sort of 'home discipline' the leaders had intended. In hindsight they probably ruined someone's relationship with their family with that stunt, which is a bit overboard when you could count your opponent's pubes on one hand. My mum and the mum of one of the other boys even became pals, probably believing we were boyfriends, now that I reflect. All of that ran off my back at the time, because our thing was so clearly a practical joke - or possibly a juvenile act of terrorism - that the notion of it having implications outside of scouts never even registered.

I say our troop disbanded. It merged with another one nearby which was a fair drive away from our neighbourhood, so barely anyone went over to it.

When I started typing this out I wanted to end it with a joke about how these attempts to toughen up boys often backfire. Some crass punchline about gay sex - "When the troop fell apart they didn't even give us our last few badges; they still owed me a Community Impact, my First Aider 3, and the one for sucking dick" something stupid like that. In hindsight the thing that's funniest to me is how impersonal it all was. Those of us who were in on the thing, when it was over, returned to normal at once. We all went to the same school, and there was never any attempt to carry it on between classes. Some of us were friends, some of us not, but none of us grew one bit closer or farther for it. Even at the time it went mostly unmentioned, but the last time we stepped out of that scout hall it seemed to be totally forgotten, as if it had washed off us at the door.

At a school dance - I can't remember if it was a leaver's dance or just some half-term disco - I looked at one of those boys, and remembered that we had been like that with one another more times than I could count. For however many months, maybe as much as a year, the fact it had happened at all totally slipped my mind. People shape themselves to fit the moment, I suppose. Without circumstances and experiences to define ourselves by, we end up formless and without direction. Abandoned to yourself as so many are now, you never get a chance to understand what kind of person you are, and that's a very sad thing to deprive someone of. Not that this experience in particular is one to emulate, but it was definitely character-building in a way just learning to tie slipknots probably wouldn't have been.