LITMIR.BIZ

      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 many issues, made me confront my reality once again (hell, why go through that shit again?), rendered me helpless, and all this was taking place in the deep, deep shadow of—yes—Brokeback Mountain territory. . . . So this is another slice of gay history, gay experience. But even in an ambience of male bonding-cum-alcohol, it was necessary to keep the lid on.

I wonder what a few of those guys who later killed Matthew Shepard thought of us, two men together visiting their bar, strangers from the nearby university, good-looking men without women. Why were they here? What were they looking for? They were strangers. Do we want strangers like that to come into our turf? Indeed, this is a part of gay history. Can we lift the shadow a bit? Instill good memories into bad? Become a bit more trusting, a bit more positive? In fact—whether it’s a holocaust or a Brokeback Mountain—dare/can we surrender a chunk of our vulnerability?⁶

      Constantly in writing this biography, Malcolm pushed me toward vulnerability, which in turn created a common ground for seemingly disparate persons like Malcolm and me. Our common ground was more than being priests. Even if you are not religious, what I am about to say is fascinating because it points to how boundaries around human identity have changed. What I mean is: the Episcopal Church has historically meant a white European church in which my kinds of identity (for example, Negro, colored, black, African American) were not anticipated as becoming vibrant members. Surely, the original founders of the colonizing Church of England did not foresee my ancestors, African slaves, as the average Anglican.

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