‘Rebel’ Priest Takes Up Crusade Against AIDS

‘This is where my being a priest, a writer, an older man and a gay person all come together.’

--Malcolm Boyd

Malcolm Boyd--civil rights activist, Vietnam War protester, author and poet--never went looking for causes. Instead, said the Santa Monica priest, “I participated in the life of my time.”

From 1961 to 1971, the Episcopal churchman preached racial equality on Detroit sidewalks, risked beatings as a freedom rider in Alabama and went to jail protesting U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia. Then, deciding he could no longer “tell a lie for Jesus,” Boyd proclaimed his homosexuality in 1976.

“When I became aware that I was gay, that there was a gay history, that to me it was a good thing to be gay, then to come out made sense,” Boyd said. “But again, that wasn’t a cause. It was being alive rather than dead, and still is.”

Now a “writer-priest in residence” at St. Augustine-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church, Boyd has embarked on a new spiritual mission--the battle against the deadly virus, acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

“The ramifications of AIDS are just littering the landscape,” Boyd said. “This is simply the No. 1 health problem in the country.

“It would be easy to be depressed or nervous, to see a lot of gloom, and it’s very important right now to change that spiritual climate into seeing and doing positive things,” Boyd said. “This is where my being a priest and a writer and an older mature man and a gay person all come together.”

Special Mass

Earlier this year, Boyd led St. Augustine’s in a special AIDS Mass, the first in the country, according to the Rev. Fred Fenton, rector of the parish. Boyd also belongs to the Los Angeles AIDS Task Force, which acts as an advocate for victims of the virus and advises Mayor Tom Bradley and the Board of Supervisors on possible courses of action.

In a series of interviews, Boyd emphasized the magnitude of the AIDS crisis and talked at length about his diverse interests: his role at St. Augustine’s, his life as an author-poet-dramatist and his involvement in an international literary association. Boyd, author of the 1965 best seller, “Are You Running With Me, Jesus?” also reflected on his decades-long struggle to come to terms with himself as well as his anger toward a church that refuses to ordain homosexuals or sanction gay relationships.

When Boyd began his first sermon at St. Augustine’s four years ago with the words, “I am a Christian and a homosexual, a Christian and a gay,” several members walked out in protest, and 25 eventually quit the congregation of 500.

Despite the ensuing controversy, Fenton said he was determined to offer Boyd a place at St. Augustine’s.

“I did it on the basis of personal loyalty,” said Fenton, who had met Boyd two decades earlier. “I saw him time and time again risk his life in the civil rights struggle. Malcolm had been in lonely places in the South where he could easily have been killed.”

‘Absolutely Loyal’

Besides, Fenton said, “Malcolm’s presence would provide the environment to explore the issue of homosexuality.”

Although some feared that Boyd’s presence would divide the congregation, Fenton said, “I have found him absolutely loyal to me, completely faithful to the church, and he has not embarrassed me in any way.”

On a recent Sunday, a smiling Boyd moved down the center aisle, his arms open in greeting to parishioners, who returned his handshakes and hugs with the blessing, “Peace be with you.”

Boyd preaches every third Sunday and takes Communion to elderly and ill members unable to attend Mass. He believes that the initial resentments have faded and that the congregation accepts him now as a priest and friend, not a “gay priest.”

“Our witness is that he is here,” Fenton said. “He’s beloved, he’s a superb preacher--yet there is so much more to Malcolm.”

Fenton characterized Boyd as impossible to stereotype: Mysterious yet open, complex yet simple, and simultaneously at war and at peace with himself.

“Ambiguity plays a major role in my life,” Boyd agreed. “Pain and pleasure, purity and corruption, life and death, success and failure. These are all archetypal things.”

Indeed, in one of his new poems, Boyd writes, “There is a haunted house in my head, I am so many people, have so many different ghosts, have carried so much luggage into the house.”

Energetic Life Style

Today, Boyd wears a deep tan, and he appears extremely fit in his muscular 5-foot-8 frame, courtesy of an energetic life style that includes swimming, hiking, daytime strolls along the beach and disco dancing.

“The waist happens to be 32,” Boyd said. “I also take care of myself mentally, spiritually--to me that’s just automatic.

“I do subscribe to the personal principle that it’s really best to have about five balls up in the air at the same time, and when I don’t have them up in the air, I’m unhappy.” Boyd said. “All you have to do to put the ball up in the air is to just have it in your hand and throw it up there. Generally, they come down in the same afternoon, and I usually have a black eye, and I’m bruised, and then I get five more up.”

One of the five up there now is his 21st book, an anthology scheduled for January publication by St. Martin’s Press in New York. This past week, he was rewriting the introduction and making the final editing decisions. Tentatively titled, “Half Laughing, Half Crying--A Malcolm Boyd Reader,” the book will feature the best of his published and unpublished work, Boyd said. After that, Boyd said, he may try his hand at fiction under a pseudonym.

Another of Boyd’s varied interests is PEN, an international literary organization of thousands of poets, playwrights, essayists, novelists and editors dedicated to the exchange of literature among nations and to the freedom of writers, as well as the written word. Boyd recently was elected president of the Los Angeles chapter of PEN for the second year.

Boyd has always seemed willing to act on his beliefs. In 1951, at the age of 27, he abandoned his career as a television producer, dissolved his partnership with Mary Pickford and Charles (Buddy) Rogers and began studying for the ministry at Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley. He was ordained in 1955.

University Chaplain

Six years later, as the Episcopal chaplain of Colorado State University at Fort Collins, Boyd began organizing “espresso festivals” and mixing with beatniks and bongo players. When an Episcopal bishop criticized beatniks and their “matted hair, dirty bodies and black underwear,” Boyd responded, “Christ loves a beatnik just as much as the more socially reputable front-pew member of a church congregation.”

Boyd resigned under pressure in 1961 and moved to a similar position in Detroit, but soon found himself immersed in the civil rights movement. He spent one summer on the rural back roads of Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas, registering voters with three black members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

“Most of my friends didn’t understand what I was doing,” he said, “and a number objected, including some of the most prominent people in the civil rights movement, who just felt I was moving out into very deep waters, and they were scared of what might happen to me.

“There was no script out there. I have stood in a small town where I wanted to mail a letter, and we were aware that to go to the post office was dangerous; where if you asked someone to wipe the windshield after buying gas, they called the sheriff; where we were arrested for speeding and beaten when we were going below the speed limit to avoid the attention of the police. At the end of that summer, I was permanently scarred.”

By the early 1970s, Boyd had become, in his own words, a celebrity priest. He had read his guitar-accompanied prayers in a nightclub act at the “hungry i” in San Francisco. He had been arrested saying Mass on the steps of the Pentagon to protest the “savage immorality” of the Vietnam War. He had stepped from behind the altar to bring the social gospel of Jesus into nightclubs, coffee shops, theaters and corner hangouts. In the public eye, Boyd became the “espresso priest,” “beatnik priest,” “nightclub priest” and “rebel for God.”

Spoke at Colleges

He toured the country year after year, speaking at hundreds of college campuses, appearing on radio and television talk shows and promoting his books.

“I used to go out and speak to thousands of people, and I didn’t prepare, and I thought, ‘Gee, they were lucky to have me,’ and I let them have a slice of myself,” Boyd said.

But by 1976, Boyd was tired and bored with the routine. He watched the has-beens on the celebrity circuit sell “mushy oatmeal” to audiences, and it made him sick. More important, Boyd decided to “take off the mask” that hid his homosexuality, a mask that forced him to disguise his life patterns.

“Coming out as a gay man in 1976, particularly inside the church, from the vantage point of a well-known American, was fairly deep water, much deeper than I would have assumed.” The reaction ranged from Boyd’s books being burned in a backyard in Iowa to requests for his removal from the church.

“I had to go out on this gay journey by myself, and it was lonely and it was scary,” Boyd said. “Yes, I was hurt and I was angry. If I assumed you were going to reject me, I’d try to let you have it first. But that’s all over.

“It was good for me to go through a period of quite a lot of rejection, a tremendous amount of introspection. In doing it, I got rid of a lot of the fat.”

Although Boyd feels quite at home at St. Augustine’s, he is looking for ways to involve himself more in the political and human turmoil arising from the AIDS crisis.

“I’ve learned projections about how serious it’s going to be,” Boyd said. “It’s tragic that there’s no cure and that it’s doubling every six months and will continue to do this for a number of years.

“I have a close friend who had lived in San Francisco and came down here a year ago. He has lost 17 close friends of his from AIDS in a six-month period, and that number included his doctor.”

“From the right-wing fundamentalists’ attacks on homosexuals, the assumption is that it is a gay disease. A couple Neanderthals in that area have even called for a quarantine of gay people.”

Dangerous Ideas

Such assumptions are dangerous, Boyd said, because the incidence of AIDS among heterosexuals, while still quite small, is increasing.

Boyd said he is still furious with the Episcopal church because it has refused to bless relationships between two homosexuals, even though the medical community recommends avoiding multiple sex partners as one of the best ways to prevent the spread of AIDS.

“I am in a church today that is caught in a great deal of furor and controversy over whether a relationship between two lesbians or two gay men can receive the blessing of the church,” said Boyd, who recently celebrated the first anniversary of his relationship with a magazine editor.

A month ago, Boyd presided over St. Augustine’s first “covenant of commitment,” or exchange of vows between two men.

“I said in the homily that I felt history was being made,” Boyd said. “Then I mentioned AIDS and said the church, in my opinion, was guilty of mortal sin when it did not wish to bless relationships. Loving relationships right now become a major way to combat AIDS because it’s eliminating multiple sex partners.”

Despite his many scrapes with the church in the past 30 years, Boyd said he never considered quitting.

“I’m angry toward the Episcopal church for many things, but that would be all the more reason to remain a priest and work for change,” he said. “The people who are going to change anything are the ones who have to be inside it. And they change it a lot, just being there.”