is that although his name is great, it can evoke pain.
Malcolm once told me about a particular portrait of him painted by world-renowned artist Don Bachardy. Malcolm wondered what the artist would see when he examined him closely, paintbrush in hand? Malcolm drove to the artist’s home feeling like the proverbial Cowardly Lion. Sitting in a chair facing the artist, with a view of the ocean over Malcolm’s shoulder, Malcolm sat for his first portrait. For the second, Malcolm sat on a couch and propped himself against pillows. For the third he lay down on a couch with his head resting on a pillow. Later, when Malcolm saw the portraits, he liked the first and third. But he had an immediate negative reaction to the second. Malcolm explains, “I didn’t like the ‘me’ it reflects.” That is to say, it didn’t resemble Malcolm’s own idea of what he looked like—or wanted to look like. Malcolm concludes, “Yet I had to face the fact that perhaps this picture showed a part of me I chose to reject. Maybe I didn’t want to deal with this person (a part of myself) at all. As a further complication, was it possible I hadn’t a clue how this person could be an integral part of ‘me’? Who am I? This remains a central question in all our lives.” When asked specifically if Malcolm could identify what “part” of him he found in the portrait that he didn’t like, he responded, “No. Only the awareness or an opening up to a different reality of self that you didn’t see before often scares you.”
Malcolm was born in New York City in 1923 as the child of a prosperous investment banker. His parents divorced by the time of the Depression and he went with his mother to Denver, where he graduated from high school in 1940. Bronchial trouble kept him out of military service during World War II and led him to the University of Arizona. An indifferent student, he graduated in 1944 with a major in English and a minor in economics.
From Arizona he went to Hollywood and a $50-a-week job with the Footer Cone and Belding advertising agency. After directing a homemakers’ hour on radio, he moved to Republic Pictures, where he became a publicist, an excellent entry position in the film industry. Republic Pictures was (and still is, in-name-only) an independent film production-distribution corporation with studio facilities, operating from 1934 through 1959 and best known for its specialization in westerns, movie serials, and B-films emphasizing mystery and action. They were also responsible for financing one Shakespeare film, Orson Welles’s Macbeth (1948), several films directed by John Ford during the 1940s and early 1950s, and for developing the careers and star-status of John Wayne, Gene Autry, and Roy Rogers.
By 1949 Malcolm was in New York and associated with Mary Pickford and Buddy Rogers in a venture organized to package television programs. Two years later, in 1951, he was in a hotel room in Tucson, Arizona, spending a weekend with the Bible. Shocking his friends and amazing Hollywood—he had seemed to be only starting a promising career—he decided to enter the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, California.
Three years as a seminarian were followed by a year at Oxford University. In England he discovered an Episcopal mission ministering to the needs of workers in Sheffield. From England he went to an ecumenical institute in Geneva and on to Union Theological Seminary in New York, “where every question was asked.” Then he was back in Europe at the Taizé community in France, learning firsthand about spirituality and worker-priests.
Malcolm’s first church was in Indianapolis. There in 1957 he took charge of a 150-member, all-white parish in a neighborhood that had become largely black, and there he became aware of the depths of the race problem when he traded altars one Sunday with a black priest and “the biggest question in his parish was whether they would receive the chalice from a nigger’s hand.”
1n 1959 he became a chaplain at Colorado State University and received nationwide attention as well as his first ecclesiastical rebuke when he moved his ministry off-campus into the Golden Grape Coffee House and a student beer joint. Bishop Joseph Minnis decried “priests going into taverns and drinking and counting it as ministry.”
Malcolm got the message that his kind of ministry was perceived as at best unorthodox and at worst blasphemy. Malcolm felt like he was expected to conform, to be quiet, and not to question or criticize anyone over him. In particular Malcolm vied with the power of Bishop Minnis. No longer did Malcolm feel welcome in the church by Bishop Minnis. Concurrently, Malcolm got the divine message about racism and the need for faith and religion to hit the streets. In 1961 Malcolm went on a Freedom Ride with twenty-six white and black priests who traveled from New Orleans to Detroit, where they attended an Episcopal General Convention.
From 1961 to 1963 he served as a chaplain on the Wayne State University campus in Detroit. While there he wrote five plays about racism (one performed on television). At one point, Malcolm took up modern dance when an essay of his on Christianity was being choreographed. But his writing got him into trouble, too, and Michigan Bishop Richard Emrich criticized Malcolm for using the words “damn” and “nigger” in his plays.
Early in 1964 Malcolm found friendly shelter when then Suffragan Bishop Paul Moore Jr., of Washington, D.C., took him under his wing and made him assistant priest of the historically African-American Church of the Atonement. From that base, Malcolm traveled to as many as 125 campuses in a year and became an unofficial chaplain-at-large to college students.
This initial portion of Malcolm’s biography is an attempt to really see Malcolm, and in turn see ourselves. In the African sense, I want to know his real name—his real identity. That’s the beauty of biography; the journey of a life always invites the discovery of self-identity for the reader as well. Much of this journey is about the reconciliation of disparate identities articulated so well by Malcolm: the “me” I want and the “me” I try to avoid. Where Malcolm helps all of us is in his tenacity not to rest until there is a synthesis. Although he calls himself the Cowardly Lion, Malcolm is a cauldron of courage. As you will learn, Malcolm’s tenacity requires sustained courage and grit. To illustrate this, one of the best descriptions of Malcolm comes from his friend Paul Monette, who won the National Book Award in 1992 and died too young at age forty-nine. In Monette’s book Last Watch of the Night, he describes Malcolm in these words: “He wrestles God as Jacob wrestled the angel, till the breaking of the day.”
In this biography, I seek to reconcile the God so easily encountered in Malcolm with the angst in Malcolm’s unique life due to his encounter with racism and xenophobia, especially toward gays. Malcolm’s life is the image of God in that there are so many different perceptions of him and yet there exists one large geographic identity. To see such identity requires a quiet place, like a desert. Malcolm tells the story of sitting under a 400-year-old tree and learning to not use words. The tree didn’t move, but Malcolm crossed his legs. The tree simply remained there with him. In so being, Malcolm came to realize that, like him, the tree’s identity isn’t simple at all but is immensely complex. Malcolm and the tree share this complexity in common. However, by its very existence, the tree makes the strongest possible statement. It is anchored here and now. Malcolm states, “I ask the same for myself.”
Before we begin the biography in earnest, more context is still in order. I first heard about Malcolm when I lived with Desmond Tutu in Cape Town, South Africa. Tutu modeled for me the health that derives from staying in spiritual direction. Tutu’s tremendous impact against apartheid would not have occurred apart from his own deep spirituality. With the backdrop of Table Mountain outside, I sat in Tutu’s office looking through his writings and constant requests for book endorsements. On one particular day, I ran across a book sitting on Tutu’s desk entitled Gay Priest: An Inner Journey, written by Malcolm Boyd. Even in 1993, I found this a provocative title. Neither Tutu nor I are gay, but as I explored why this book was in Tutu’s office, I discovered that Malcolm had blessed both me, an African-American heterosexual, and Tutu, a world-renowned African saint. We were deeply impressed by the Holy Spirit in Malcolm’s life. As I look back to 1993, this is where the seed for this book was planted. Malcolm
