It worked for me– what problem were you having?

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In 2009 eight men were convicted of running the most depraved child sex ring in Scottish history. Besides sharing the worst categories of dark web paedophile abuse, they fantasised about gaining access to a real child.

One of them, James Rennie, was trusted to babysit his godson, the child of university friends. So, starting when the boy was three months old, Rennie filmed himself sexually abusing the child then shared videos with the other men, even suggesting it would be “hotter” if they came along to join in.

Rennie, who was given a life sentence, was the head of LGBT Youth Scotland (LGBTYS), joining the charity in 1997 and becoming chief executive in 2003. Rennie’s trial heard that he often accessed his special sex ring Hotmail account “kplover” (kiddy porn lover) at work.

You’d expect the Scottish Charity Regulator to launch an inquiry to ascertain whether Rennie had access to vulnerable young people, or how being led for years by a predatory paedophile had affected office culture and safeguarding. But it did not. Nor did the police forces that had exposed the sex ring investigate LGBTYS. Both accepted its internal investigation which concluded that everything was fine.

Even more extraordinary, seven months after Rennie was jailed, BBC Children in Need decided to award, for the first time, a grant of £24,000 to LGBTYS. The charity turns down 90 per cent of good causes that apply for funding, yet money raised by BBC viewers was given to a charity whose outgoing chief executive sexually abused a baby.

Indeed Children in Need has continued to fund LGBTYS for the last 14 years, with a total of £466,000, until this week, when it abruptly terminated funding. Why? Because this month Andrew Easton, a co-author of the LGBTYS’s 2010 guidance for schools, was convicted of sharing indecent images of children as young as newborns and attempting to groom online what he thought was a 13-year-old boy but was in fact a police officer. For Children in Need this was the final straw.

In 2022 two men said they were groomed at LGBTYS around the time Rennie was chief executive. Sam Cowie, now 28, was 15 and in foster care when he was given cigarettes and alcohol by staff, then taken underage with a fake ID to clubs where he was assaulted and raped by older men. The second claims he was groomed by Rennie and one of his sex ring associates: the culture of the charity, he says, was “like a social network to connect older men with teenagers”. In response, LGBTYS suspended a staff member and has referred itself to the police.

After these revelations, at a tense board meeting in May, Children in Need’s chair of trustees, Rosie Millard, proposed LGBTYS’s funding be suspended, pending an inquiry. But then came Easton’s conviction, with the BBC charity at risk of serious reputational damage. Senior figures argued it should quietly pay the last two tranches of money in LGBTYS’s grant, rather than risk the wrath of activists by publicly defunding it. But Millard prevailed and Children in Need finally cut ties.

But even before these two recent scandals, LGBTYS raised numerous red flags. Its stated charitable purpose is to work with young people aged over 13, yet its “champions scheme” operates in 40 Scottish primary schools. Its 2017 schools guidance, funded by the Scottish government, stated that a child must be allowed to choose whichever changing room matched their gender identity. A girl upset at undressing with a male should wait until after the “trans young person is done”. Likewise on overnight trips, schools should permit a male pupil to sleep in female dorms, with no need to inform parents. This guidance, after opposition from women’s groups, was removed.

LGBTYS has also campaigned for the prescription of puberty blocking drugs (banned after the Cass review), advised girls online to bind their breasts, referred children to the trans charity Mermaids (which is now under investigation by the English Charity Commission) and demanded schools not inform parents if a child socially transitions. Extreme ideas that few Children in Need fundraisers would support.

Keeping secrets from parents, compromising children’s privacy, discussing sexuality with very young children, swerving official scrutiny even after being led by a child-rapist: LGBT charities have lately been granted a free pass on safeguarding protocols afforded to no other organisations. And many gay men are horrified. They abhor drag queen story hours where men in dresses twerk at toddlers, child drag artists performing in gay bars or little children colouring in Pride flags.

The oldest and gravest homophobic slur, the justification for Section 28, was that gay men can’t be trusted around children. This myth was rightly demolished, yet since then a collective guilt has tipped the scales the other way. Anyone who raises safeguarding concerns about LGBT groups or individuals risks being called a bigot.

I spoke to a gay man who worked at Stonewall in the early 2000s producing materials for schools. The guide for primaries said little more than that gay families exist; the one for secondary kids was about emerging teenage sexuality. But there was a mix-up and some secondary guides went to primaries. Aghast, this man offered to resign; the materials were retrieved with apologies. A gay charity dreaded being accused of sexualising children. Now, he thinks, it wouldn’t care, because no one would dare point a finger.

As another friend puts it: “We’ve gone from ‘every gay man is a paedophile’ to ‘no gay man can possibly be a paedophile’. We are no worse than other men — but neither are we any better.” True equality, he says, means being treated the same, not a free pass. Because predatory paedophiles will always look for places where silence grants them impunity, which is deadly for children and calamitous for LGBT people themselves.