FIFTY YEARS AGO, the Freedom Riders made history. It was an ugly time, much more divided and dangerous even than our own. Jim Crow ruled in the American South. Between May and December, 1961, over 400 activists took buses to destinations throughout that region and sat at lunch counters, in waiting rooms, and next to white passengers in an attempt to change the law. One rider was an Episcopal priest in his late thirties: a sexually confused, former Hollywood executive named Malcolm Boyd who had worked intimately with Mary Pickford and counted Charlie Chaplin’s son as one of his close friends.
“In Hollywood,” he told me in an interview, “I wouldn’t say I was simply ‘closeted.’ I was Mary Pickford’s business partner. I was working hard. I was ambitious. I wasn’t going to risk anything.” Discontented with the entertainment industry, Boyd entered seminary in Berkeley in 1954. He also spent time in Europe during his training. Those were the years when he discovered his sexuality.
A second chance at love occurred when Boyd was chaplain at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. “I still didn’t know what to do with my life, with sex. I went into the one gay bar in Denver that I knew about. I met a guy—a short-order cook and waiter. I don’t think I’ve ever found anyone sweeter in my life. We were both lost. I’d go to Denver on Friday and spend the night with him. Then I’d go back home the next day to prepare my sermon. We weren’t asking too much of the world, but the world wasn’t going to give us anything. When he left, it broke my heart.”
For Boyd, this time of personal struggle gave way to a new calling, a deep and sustained commitment to the Civil Rights movement. “I got a letter telling me that 27 black and white people were going to participate in a protest. Together, they would demand service at a lunch counter—they’d get attacked, refused, arrested. It was a bloody, agonized time. I had fear. I did these things because I thought I had no alternative.” Boyd knew he had to continue to fight. “We flew to New Orleans, met at the YMCA, where John Howard Griffin lived when he was writing Black Like Me. We were instructed in nonviolence by Martin Luther King’s people. I remember being told, ‘Nonviolence is in the way you pick up a telephone.’ It is something within; don’t play nonviolence if you are reacting violently.”
The terror of those days is still real. “There was just so much pain then, so much hatred.” Boyd reminds us, “Don’t forget Martin Luther King. There was something sacred about the movement. There’s nothing exactly similar to it now. I wish we could have the equivalent of a freedom ride with its exuberance and selflessness.”
The year 1965 was an important one for Boyd. “I spent the summer with three young black men from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in rural Mississippi and Alabama. We stayed with poor blacks. Our enemy was the local media, the police, virtually everyone. We were behind enemy lines. Filling up the gas tank was a challenge. At the beginning of the summer, one of the black guys said to me, ‘We can’t be this close to a white man, so you’re gonna have to be a nigger like we are.’ Those were the ground rules.” A month later, a friend called him reporting that Watts had erupted and asking if he’d come out to L.A. “Just before we landed, the stewardess announced, ‘Out of the left side windows, you can see the fires of the Watts riots burning.’”
That same year, Boyd published a book of prayers, Are You Running With Me, Jesus?, which became a huge hit, selling some 5,000 copies a week and eventually reaching a million copies. “I was interviewed by Barbara Walters; I was on magazine covers. It was work, it wasn’t glamour.” One of the prayers hinted at what was also going on with Father Boyd:
This is a Homosexual Bar, Jesus
It looks like any other bar on the outside, only it isn’t. Men stand three and four deep at this bar—some just feeling a sense of belonging here, others making contacts for new sexual partners.
This isn’t very much like a church, Lord, but many members of the church are also here in this bar. Quite of few of the men here belong to the church as well as to this bar. If they knew how, a number of them would ask you to be with them in both places. Some of them wouldn’t, but won’t you be with them too, Jesus?
A decade later, the controversial priest came out publicly. He did so with the publication of Take off the Masks in 1977, the year of Anita Bryant. “I was two things: a priest and a writer. Both of those identities demand honesty. I can’t be a priest if I wear a mask. If you are going to be creative, how can you be, when you aren’t living and telling the truth? That reality caught up with me, but I didn’t realize how brutally difficult it would be. Reaction was violent, angry, and retributive. A couple of friends who were famous liberals I never heard from again.” The New York Times ignored the book: “They had always reviewed my books because Are You Running with Me, Jesus? was such a success. In one of their reviews I’d been called ‘a balding Holden Caulfield.’ But Take Off the Masks did not receive a review.”
In the 1980’s, Boyd moved back to L.A. and began working in AIDS ministry. He also went on a date with Mark Thompson, then a young editor at The Advocate. “Thank God Mark came along. I was fortunate. But I was pretty tough by then. I had been involved in this life—in being out—for about seven years. But I was also over sixty.” Their life together continues in an idyllic little house on a hill in Silver Lake.
Boyd’s many lives are now documented in Michael Battle’s new biography Black Battle, White Knight. A fellow priest—and a heterosexual African-American from North Carolina—Battle has learned a lot from his friend and mentor. “It was strange to hear about the Freedom Rides from a white gay man. Many more black people need to hear it as well—that apparently ‘disparate’ identities are on our side.” This idea is underscored by Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu, who says in his foreword to the book: “Malcolm is a fellow elder; this is important. We have responsibilities to the younger generations, much like a North Star responsibly guides us beyond treacherous waters.”
At 88, Boyd is still going strong. “It appears I have a new job: I’ve become a gay elder. It involves telling the truth, listening carefully to others, and offering spiritual direction. I love it. Ultimately, I am very grateful.”
Chris Freeman teaches English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California and is a frequent contributor to the GLR.
