Scouting America is suing this small Arizona travel company over its name: Queer Scout

A small Arizona travel company called Queer Scout is embroiled in an ongoing dispute with Scouting America, which you might know better by its previous name: the Boy Scouts.

Scouting America filed a lawsuit against Queer Scout following a two-year trademark dispute over the company’s name. They argue calling themselves Queer Scout might confuse consumers who might assume the travel agency is affiliated with Scouting America.

But they only filed that lawsuit after President Donald Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth criticized the organization formerly known as the Boy Scouts for allegedly allowing diversity, equity and inclusion measures in.

So, is this all about politics?

Joseph Darius Jafaari, founder and editor of LOOKOUT, wrote about this and joined The Show to talk more about it.

Full conversation

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, Joseph.

JOSEPH JAAFARI: Good morning. Thank you for having me again.

LAUREN GILGER: Thanks for coming on. So, first of all just tell us about this company, Queer Scout. Like, what do they do?

JOSEPH JAAFARI: Yeah, so Queer Scout is an Arizona-based company and the owner, Sam Castaneda, lives also in Colombia, but he’s from Arizona and essentially what it is, it’s a travel company for queer people who want to do adult excursions to, you know, various different places across the world. And so that’s pretty much what the company does. And so it acts as a travel agency, hence the scouting term, and then puts people into travel arrangements to go with friends or individuals or couples to wherever they’d like and do some queer excursions.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so what’s their response to this lawsuit from Scouting America?

JOSEPH JAAFARI: Yeah, so what they’ve said is that this is not quite a fair fight. One, that they are going up against a behemoth like Scouting America.

But two, the facts that if you go to the trade, so there’s a couple different things that they’re arguing. One is that the term queer is, you know, enough to differentiate them from the Scouting America Boy Scouts in the same way that the Girl Scouts argued years ago that girl was a differentiator from girl from Boy Scouts, and so this argument is kind of null. They also say that there’s no way that anybody could go to Queer Scout’s website and confuse what they do for Boy Scouts of America. And so they just kind of want the case kind of tossed out.

But they also on top, on top of the actual wonkiness of the, of the legal arguments, there is this, you know, political sheen on top of everything which is the timing of it all of, you know, when they got into this civil litigation because they’ve been in this trademark litigation, trademark dispute for a couple years. But now out of nowhere they’ve got this civil litigation right on the heels of the federal government telling the Boy Scouts, you need to get rid of your diversity and equity measures.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. And Scouting America did agree to it sounds like some pretty significant changes in order to maintain its relationships with the government after these comments from Pete Hegseth that I mentioned.

What did what did the changes entail? What did they do?

JOSEPH JAAFARI: So the changes basically were that girls can’t join the Scouting America organization anymore. Years ago, they decided that that girls could join. They also put in, you know, more LGBTQ-affirming language into their model. All of that had to go essentially in order to continue receiving any kind of help from the federal government, including putting on their jamboree on federal, on federal land.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, so they had made some pretty big changes. So what did Scouting America argue here? Did they comment on this story to you? I mean, they were already as you mentioned in trademark disputes with Queer Scout and then they went on top of that and filed the lawsuit. Now that trademark dispute is also on pause, right?

JOSEPH JAAFARI: Yeah, so they didn’t comment to us. But I what we can, what we do know is kind of there are two arguments they make.

One is they argue that they are a famous brand, right? And the the argument is, you know, Boy Scouts and Scouting America has been part of the American fabric for so long, it’s an internationally recognized organization, the term Boy Scouts, you know, you hear it and you kind of know exactly what it is.

And then their other argument is the fact that the by Queer Scout existing that it confuses consumers because that’s the entire point of trademark law, right? At the end of the day it’s a consumer protection program.

The counter to those two things, which are I think are fairly interesting, is one, when it comes to the famous, you know, trade famous brand argument is, you know, you just because you are famous doesn’t necessarily make it so in the eyes of the law, right? And so you kind of have to back that up.

So I think a really good example for listeners might be Disney. Disney is really, really strong about their trademark and their brand. They constantly litigate and go after any company that has a sniff of like Disney branding or Disney characters or something like that. They really try to keep strong to it. Same thing with Nike, same thing with Adidas, right?

The Boy Scouts has not treated their brand in the same way. You go on the trademark website and just do a simple search and you can see there are hundreds of trademarks out there for Pool Scout, for, you know, for Cookie Scout. They’re all different types of things that, you know, don’t seem to be the problem for the Boy Scouts of America. It was only this that they seem to kind of go after and so when it comes to that argument it seems to be a bit squishy.

The other argument they make about, you know, confusing, confusing people when they go if they were wanting to go part of the Boy Scouts, like I could have mentioned earlier, it’d be kind of hard any kind of regular person if you just look at those two names side by side, probably could be confused. But, you know, when you take this to the civil, when you take this to civil court, one of the things they have to consider is, OK, fine, the names sound familiar but when you go to these websites, what are what are these things offering? And I don’t think anybody who goes to Queer Scout’s website will look at this and go oh, adult excursions for queer people in Bogota, you know, is a Boy Scout program.

LAUREN GILGER: Let me ask you before I let you go, Joseph. I mean, can Queer Scout operate its business right now? I know they’ve had to do a GoFundMe to kind of stay afloat to fund legal costs here and they they kind of view this case as a as a bellwether, right, for queer-owned companies?

JOSEPH JAAFARI: Yeah, when I spoke to when I spoke to the owner and I spoke to to his lawyer, you know, they kind of said like everything is on pause. Everything is on pause because they have to fund this lawsuit against this massive organization, American organization.

But on top of it, you know, they’re not willing to back down because they do see it as, you know, if it if it starts here where else can it go? And, you know, it got the support of the National Association of Lesbian and Gay Chamber of Commerce because they also saw it as, if this, if this kind of goes this way where can we also see litigation against other queer consumer, queer companies that want to do business in in various different ways?

So they’re they’re sticking to it. But yeah, it’s a tough, it’s a tough one for a small company.

LAUREN GILGER: Very interesting case. Joseph Jaafari, founder and editor of LOOKOUT, joining us. Joseph, thanks as always.

JOSEPH JAAFARI: Thanks a lot.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

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