GLR May June

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Phil Willkie is a writer based in Minneapolis.

May–June 2015

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