state of a typical rock group, or maybe it was gained through the insight that all of us need guidance out of a wilderness that often becomes known as ordinary life. Strangely enough, I found myself in such a wilderness listening to a voice crying in the desert.
Like many folk musicians and famous musicians, Malcolm’s voice was boosted in strange places. One such place was called the “hungry i.” The hungry i was a nightclub in San Francisco, owned by Enrico Banducci. The mysterious name “hungry i,” with the lower-case “i,” is said to represent “intellectual.” On other accounts, Banducci came up with a Freudian meaning implying “the hungry id.” In a more humorous account, the sign “the hungry i” simply was not finished in time for the club’s opening, and next-day reviews in the San Francisco papers cemented the name for all time.
The club was located at 546 Broadway Street, and was instrumental in the careers not only of Malcolm but for the actor/comedian Bill Cosby; the Kingston Trio, who recorded two famous albums there, including the first live performance of their version of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”; and jazz legend Vince Guaraldi. They were all given career boosts from their appearances at the hungry i.
When the comedy and folk music scene declined in the mid-1960s with the rise of hard rock and Vietnam War protests, Banducci closed the club and sold its name to a topless club at another location nearby. Banducci and many of the club’s performers reunited in 1981 for a memorable one-night performance, captured in the nationally televised documentary hungry i Reunion, produced and directed by Thomas A. Cohen and featuring separate reminiscences by Maya Angelou and Bill Cosby.
Malcolm’s voice crying from the wilderness started in strange places like the hungry i. But what was he saying at the time?
On a chalkboard in Malcolm’s office is this printed notice: “Who Said?” There’s a statement that could have come from one of three persons: “It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.” The three persons listed who might have made the statement are Malcolm Boyd, Gottfried Leibnix, and James Thurber. Maybe all three came up with the words. I don’t know. Whoever said the words, they accurately convey Malcolm’s voice.
Openness to change seems essential for Malcolm. Change is the answer for bureaucracy without focus, irrelevant answers to nonquestions, continuing to do things “as they have always been done,” a jaded attitude, and a numbing loss of spiritual energy. A classic Japanese film, Akira Kurosawa’sRashomon, portrays the human dilemma of trying to arrive at “the truth.” The film depicts the rape of a woman and the murder of her Samurai husband through the widely differing accounts of four witnesses. The stories are mutually contradictory. These four perspectives are also instructive of the four horsemen who frame the texture of Malcolm’s life. Seeing life from different perspectives often causes panic in the seeker for one kind of truth. This brings up the classic question posed by Pontius Pilate in his confrontation with Jesus: “What is truth?”
Malcolm writes me:
Fundamentalism comes up with “one” irrevocable answer. There is a singular interpretation. Yet in multilayered and highly complex life, I choose to remain open to various interpretations rooted in complex and dismayingly different views and experiences. This can extend to looking at a singular person or event as “good” or “evil,” “promising” or “hopeless,” “creative” or “destructive,” a “positive” sign or a “negative” one. I never like “either/or.” I prefer “both/and.” Is the above clear? Do we need another sentence or thought? If so, maybe you can come up with it. I just find life itself so amazingly “open” instead of sealed shut and “closed.” Usually it includes possibilities. Anyhow, I thought we should get Rashomon in here.3
Indeed, Malcolm sought the truth—come what may. His voice in doing so was often heard as caustic and jarring. “I’m white,” Malcolm said. “Did I murder six million Jews in Nazi Germany? Did I lynch, castrate, starve, burn, knife, hang, disembowel, rape, and murder thousands and thousands of black people in America? Do I stand today in the way of black progress, social equality, and liberation in the U.S.?” 4
This voice attracted me to the desert. It was an apocalyptic voice, irritatingly honest, calling for conscious attention to the ills of the world. It was the voice of an apocalyptic horseman galloping in the desert. Malcolm’s was a voice demanding that he better study (and learn) White history because his identity was shattered when he confronted the invisible among us—those lesser identities that Ralph Ellison referred to in the Invisible Man—such as undocumented workers and the downtrodden. Malcolm attracted me to the thought that the White Experience has been built on labyrinthine myths that now drive him to his fellow compatriots like white psychotherapists who corroborate such myths in the White Experience. Malcolm put it this way, “I try to look deeply into the White Experience but am unnerved by what I see. I had been told it was all apple pie, prayers, cleanliness, decency, morality, righteousness, goodness, a just but not overly loving god (you know, a father image), law, order, converting the natives, and it wasn’t. Am I therefore a masochist instead of the righteous ruler? What is to be ‘my role’?”5
These were my same questions, but unlike Malcolm, an eighty-eightyear- old, white, gay, celebrity priest, I was a black, forty-six-year-old, married heterosexual wannabe celebrity priest. I am an African-American Episcopal priest. For many of you, this is a strange identity, especially given the context that I should not be who I really am writing this book. Wouldn’t the reader think that a white, gay liberal is most qualified to tell Malcolm’s story? I don’t think so. Because of who Malcolm is (not either/or but Rashomon from all angles), it fits that I write this book—even if one of the crucial aspects of Malcolm’s life was his coming out as gay during a violent and turbulent period in human history. Malcolm provides me the following account that makes his life all the more vivid and real. It is contained in a letter Malcolm writes to a friend:
Dear Chris: It occurs to me that, as gays with tragic histories and innumerable problems linked to the past, we are a bit like Zionists confronting—again and again—the Holocaust. Is it forever the Rock of Gibraltar, the Tsunami that strikes without warning and casts a giant shadow, indeed, one’s very history imbedded within oneself. This is far more than a question of a “happy ending.” This is essential being. But the question remains: can we move forward, seek and perceive a new direction, achieve and maintain some solid and meaningful balance in one’s life?
A night that I visited Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1959 remains locked in my memory. Of course, I was in Brokeback Mountain territory. And Matthew Shepard territory. I drove up to Cheyenne from Fort Collins, Colorado, with a male friend. I didn’t know him well, assumed he was not gay. We were not on a gay seek. I felt vulnerable because, in a sense, I was always on a gay seek (even if I buried that deep in my consciousness). We drank a lot; I think it was beer. I’m sure our visit had no common purpose. (Why were we making this visit to Cheyenne?) Clearly, I was extraordinarily vulnerable. I felt I couldn’t let my guard down. The guy was a part of a social structure in which I moved as a chaplain at Colorado State University.
At that time I felt sure I would never be able to come out. It simply wasn’t a remote possibility. I was imprisoned. Yet here I was drinking a lot with this guy and aware that, as a closeted gay man, I was in deep enemy territory. I really had to watch my P’s and Q’s. Not let my guard down. Not react to anything. And then the sense of actual danger grew in me. This was truly “enemy territory.” We didn’t stay the night but drove back rather late. I have some vague memory of his making a possible sort of pass (in the context of a lot of alcohol) that I knew I had to ignore. He was a colleague at work in the university system. He was political. My best defense was to be free from gossip and innuendo in “the man’s world” in which I found myself. So that night in Cheyenne was hellish because it inadvertently brought up so
