Robert Baden-Powell's sexual orientation
Robert Baden-Powell's [...] orientation has been brought into question by some modern authors. Even though he married and had three children, circumstantial evidence suggests he may have taken an [...] interest in men. The possibility of a non-heterosexual Baden-Powell has been controversial given his iconic status in Scouting.
While early lives of Robert Baden-Powell tended towards the hagiographic, two important modern biographies, by Michael Rosenthal of Columbia University and professional biographer Tim Jeal, have reached the conclusion that he was probably a repressed homosexual
Baden-Powell "…consistently praised the male body when [...]. At Gilwell Park, the Scouts' camping ground in Epping Forest, he always enjoyed watching the boys swimming [...], and would sometimes chat with them after they had just 'stripped off.'" Jeal cites a revealing account by Baden-Powell of a visit to Charterhouse, his old public school, where he stayed with a bachelor teacher and housemaster who had taken large numbers of [...] photographs of his pupils. Baden-Powell's diary entry reads: "Stayed with Tod. Tod's photos of [...] boys and trees. Excellent." In a subsequent communication to Tod regarding starting up a Scout troop at the school, Baden-Powell mentions an impending return visit and adds: "Possibly I might get a further look at those wonderful photographs of yours." (According to R. Jenkyns, the album contained [...] boys in "contrived and artificial" poses.) However Jeal also shows that paintings of [...] boys were regarded as art, being hung in the Royal Academy each year without causing particular stir. Also Tod's photo's were accepted by parents and school authorities until the sixties, when they were destroyed. Baden-Powell himself did not write about or draw (he was a good amateur-artist) males in an [...] sense. Jeal stresses that Baden-Powell is not known to have acted on his attraction to boys, nor did he tolerate scoutmasters who indulged in [...] escapades with their charges, recommending flogging for such offenses.
At age fifty-five Baden-Powell married twenty-three-year-old Olave St Clair Soames. Olave "altered her appearance to suit him, flattening her breasts and shearing her hair." Shortly after the marriage Baden-Powell began to suffer from agonizing headaches: these left him abruptly two years after the birth of their third child when he began sleeping apart from his wife: "With every hint of [...] removed from a relationship he could get on reasonably well with women."
"Jeal's conclusion may or may not withstand scrutiny, but his discussion emphasizes an important undercurrent to Baden-Powell's life. He intensely identified with and enjoyed all-male culture and the activities that accompanied it. Whether this interest was simply an extension of a Victorian sensibility toward male friendship or a latent indication of homosexuality, we may never know."