I have three e-mail accounts. I use my AOL account for 95% of my e-mails. I have a gmail account with my full name. Somehow, someway the Boy Scouts of America started to send me e-mails about Boy Scout Meetings. WTF?
Hey, when I was of the age to join Boy Scouts, I wanted to in the worst way. Like any ten year old I wanted to be accepted and liked by my peers. But as a ten year old Fifties Poor Kid living in the Poor White Section of the small town of Downingtown, Pennsylvania, one block away from the segregated black street of Cox Avenue, joining the Boy Scouts was out of the question.
WE.DIDN'T.HAVE.THE.MONEY. Case closed. Mom told me "We don't have the money for THAT."
Perhaps it was just as well that I didn't join the Boy Scouts but instead played with my friends up and down Washington Avenue. My friend Larry joined the Boy Scouts and from his retelling of his experiences, I didn't miss a whole lot.
Fast forward to the present time and the Boy Scouts well known discrimination toward gay people. Hey, I was gay back in the Fifties. Of course back then my "condition" was called HOMOSEXUAL and something to be feared. To tell you the truth I didn't want to join the Boy Scouts for any "activity" but just to be accepted. To be like the other boys.
So how ironic is it that this past summer I started to receive e-mails in my gmail account informing me of upcoming Boy Scout meetings and events. I ignored the first few and deleted them. However, they kept coming, flooding my pristine gmail account. WTF? So then I sent an e-mail asking them to stop sending me their e-mails. I received no response and the Boy Scout meetings e-mails kept a coming.
Almost every week I received two or three e-mails about bringing crates of food, meetings, whatever. These e-mails were really annoying me because I had my gmail account as a private account, for special message to cut through the spam I receive in my AOL account. Now I was getting Boy Scout spam.
So I took the bull by the horns yesterday and sent this message:
I asked them to take me off their mailing list and told them I was GAY. That did it.
