Mike De Socio

Mike De Socio

Mike De Socio is an award winning independent author and journalist that tells stories about the LGBTQ+ community.

His career path has taken him through just about every part of the newsroom, where he’s worked as a writer, photographer, editor, and reporter. As a freelancer, Mike’s work has been published in Xtra, YES! Magazine, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, Fortune, The Guardian, and Insider, as well as other places.

Mike is a Boston University graduate, and has gotten awards from the Boston Press Photographers Association, and the Society of Professional Journalists and Boston University. He was a Logan Nonfiction Program fellow in Fall 2021.

He lives with his partner in upstate New York, spending much of his free time hiking through the Adirondacks, or figuring out how to get places almost exclusively on his bike.

Morally Straight: How the Fight for LGBTQ+ Inclusion Changed the Boy Scouts - and America is a deeply reported narrative which illuminates the battle for LGBTQ+ inclusion in the Boy Scouts of America, a decades long struggle led by parents, everyday Americans, activists, teens, and parents.

Mike weaves in his own experience as a journalist and scout, and tells a story which plays out over the course of 25 years, starting back in an era when gay rights were little more than just a cultural sideshow; when same-sex marriage wasn’t even on the radar yet; and when so much of the country was recommitting to conservative social mores. It was during such a treacherous time that accidental activists emerged, and challenged one of America’s most iconic institutions in a struggle that’d forever change the country’s view of gays and their rights in society.

In this book, we meet James Dale, the poster child of Scouting that took his fight for inclusion to the Supreme Court; Zach Wahls, the son of lesbian moms who led the last push for policy change; Jennifer Tyrrell, the lesbian den mother whose expulsion out of the Scouts reignited gay membership controversy; Steven Cozza, the 12 year old scout in California that started Scouting For All. And this array of other formerly unknown Scouters that played smaller, yet no less vital, roles in the fight for total inclusion.

Through original reporting and interviews, this book brings together these characters and brings to life their collective struggle. Here is an essential narrative in the American LGBTQ+ rights movement, and is truly an American tale about the battle for a better future for our nation’s bedrock youth organization.

Mike De Socio: F.A.Q