WITH more and more American institutions becoming inclusive and even openly gay-friendly, the Boy Scouts of America has just reaffirmed its unregenerate straights-only status: a special committee, formed in 2010, recently announced the organization’s intention of sticking with the 2000 Supreme Court decision that it is within its constitutional rights to exclude gays from leadership roles. All this is richly ironic in view of the fact that the founder of the Boy Scouts, Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell (raised to the peerage as Lord Baden-Powell) was in probability a gay man himself — though closeted, of course, considering the circumstances. A Victorian military hero who skyrocketed to fame after his valiant defense of the besieged city of Mafeking during the Second Boer War, Baden-Powell was one of the British Empire’s most adulated soldiers, looked to as the very model of muscular Christianity. Baden-Powell, the author of the hugely popular and influential “Scouting for Boys” (1908), inspired a national cult of manliness even as he entertained serious worry about his own sexuality.

“Was B-P a closet queen?” Ian Buruma asked in The New York Review of Books two decades ago. “The pointers are hard to ignore.” Indeed they are, as a perusal of Tim Jeal’s superb and definitive 1989 biography of the hero, “The Boy-Man,” will show.

Baden-Powell’s formidable mother, left an impecunious widow with a large family, forced all of her children to participate in her fierce and occasionally demeaning struggles to promote the family’s fortunes and social status. Young “Stephe” was a sensitive boy who liked playing with dolls, and as he grew into a young man he formed deep attachments to other boys. Once in the army he made a name for himself playing female roles in army theatricals. Throughout his life he openly admired muscular men and pretty boys, while attractive women sent him into a state of anxiety; he was much more comfortable with plain, companionable ones. He was 55 before he decided to marry, but he panicked soon after his union with the lovely young Olave Soames, developing agonizing headaches that were relieved only when he left the matrimonial bed and returned to his ascetic soldier’s cot.

Baden-Powell’s strongest emotional bond was with Kenneth McLaren, a fellow army officer. The two met while serving in India, in 1881, acting in an army performance of a farce called “The Area Belle” in which Baden-Powell, for once, played a male part, while McLaren, a 20-year-old who looked 14, appeared in the ingénue’s role. Baden-Powell nicknamed McLaren “The Boy,” and the two remained extremely close for years. McLaren’s second marriage, in 1910, put strains on the friendship — Baden-Powell did not hide his disapproval of the match or his distaste for the bride — but it was not until his own marriage that the partnership ended definitively, for Olave was jealous of her husband’s old friends in general and of this special favorite in particular. The two men never met again; “The Boy” slipped into clinical depression during World War I and spent the last few years of his life in an asylum.