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May–June 2015
7
Malcolm Boyd, 1923-2015: A Personal Reflection
IN MEMORIAM
The next chapter was meeting HelenWillkie at his first parish
in Indianapolis. Helen was the third wife of Fred Willkie, Wen-
dell’s brother. Helen was 25 years younger. Fred had been put
away in a nursing home with senility. They had four children:
Fredric, Arlinda, Julia, and Hall. Malcolm had baptized all four
and regularly asked about my cousins. Malcolm had been drawn
to Helen because of the Willkie association, but he also found
her dark and mysterious. One day she asked if
he was drawn to men. Without getting an an-
swer, Helen told him he must always repress
that desire. Malcolm told this story still trem-
bling as he recalled this crazy woman who
could have easily destroyed his reputation.
The final chapter for Malcolm was meet-
ing me, the grandson. He would always
greet me with his wide smile, hands touch-
ing my shoulders, gripping me with all the
strength he could muster. Malcolm had a
more traditional faith as an Episcopal priest. My faith is based
more on what I have seen and experienced. The world is very
small. We each had traveled down similar roads, living in times
of crisis and transformation. Putting our different lives together
became a circle.
Phil Willkie is a writer based in Minneapolis.
P
HIL
W
ILLKIE
M
ALCOLM
B
OYD
, an ordained Episcopal priest and the
author of two dozen books on matters of religion and
gay rights and their intersection, died earlier this year
at the age of 91. He received full obituaries in
The New York
Times
,
The Los Angeles Times
, among other papers; what fol-
lows is a personal reflection on Malcolm
and how our lives intersected.
I first met Malcolm Boyd in person at
the San Francisco OutWrite conference in
1991. Long before that, he had been an idol
of mine. I had read his best seller
Are You
Running With Me, Jesus?
(1965), his col-
lection of prayers that spoke to a time of
death: it was the height of race riots and the
Viet Nam War. Malcolm had been a Free-
dom Rider and marched with Martin Luther
King from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. In 1967, he again
marched with King, this time against the VietnamWar and end-
ing at the United Nations building in NewYork. I also knew that
he had come out as gay in the late 1970’s with
Take Off the Mask
(1978), where he wrote that “he was tired of living a lie.”
I was turned on to Malcolm’s famous book in 1969 by Ernie
Cowger, my counselor at a psychiatric institution. Ernie was a
liberal Baptist seminarian. Two year later, at age of seventeen,
while I was visiting Ernie in Atlanta, we went to Ebenezer Bap-
tist Church, where King had preached with his father, known as
Daddy King. At that service, the third anniversary of Martin’s
assassination, Daddy King said he had forgiven the killer of his
son. There were soul singers and the choir was lead by Martin’s
mother. At the conclusion of the riveting two-hour service Daddy
King said he had some visitors here today. It was not hard to tell
who they were: four whites in a sea of black faces. We were sur-
rounded by members of the congregation, greeted by everyone.
Daddy and Mrs. King thanked us for coming. The humility and
the sheer conviction of those people were a far stretch from the
staid Presbyterian services I knew in Indiana.
In the last twenty years, I regularly saw Malcolm and his life
partner Mark Thompson at their mission-style home in the Silver
Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Typically we would drink
martinis and devour hors d’oeuvres while sitting in front of their
roaring fireplace. They’d met in 1984 when Mark interviewed
Malcolm for
The Advocate
, for which Mark was the cultural ed-
itor. Malcolm and Mark were about sixty and thirty years of age
at the time; I guess sparks flew between them.
Malcolm usually brought up his “Willkie trilogy.” In 1940, at
the age of seventeen, in Denver, Malcolm volunteered for the
presidential campaign of my grandfather, Wendell Willkie. “I
was an FDR kind of guy working for his opponent,” he told me.
But Malcolm was impressed by Willkie’s vitality and the energy
of his campaign. Malcolm glowed over Willkie’s
One World
,
published in 1943, which spelled out a vision for world peace.
FDR had sent Willkie around the world, to three fronts of World
War II: North Africa, Russia, and China.