Thompson and Boyd’s friends had hoped Boyd would live to see the completion of a documentary on his life—Malcolm Boyd: Disturber of the Peace. In an interview with filmmaker Andrew Thomas for the Bloomsbury Review, Boyd explained how “the immorality of the enemy was so blatant” in the 1950s and 1960s. “So when I as an individual got on the bus, on the Freedom Ride, I was kind of making a life commitment. I meant it. So did the rest of us, and I think that no one knew quite how to handle that, and no one obviously did because they didn’t win. And then King came along and added the Vietnam War to it.”
When the society exploded in the 1960s, many Americans didn’t understand the historic background that caused the explosion:
In other words, we were disciplined; we weren’t all complete assholes working out something that we could do with a therapist. There was a Movement. And there was a Rosa Parks, and there was a Martin Luther King.
I think the closest I ever was to King was when he invited a few of us to Selma, Alabama. King instructed us in non-violence at the time of the Freedom Ride. I didn’t know anything about non-violence. Gandhi… India… had nothing to do with me. Suddenly King was saying, “It’s the way you pick-up the phone.” Like if you’re the head of Warner Bros and you grab the receiver and roar “YEAHHH???” That’s not non-violent.
And that has affected me deeply, particularly recently, because instead of trying to change the world with an angry determination it’s a switch-over to changing the world by changing yourself.
The arc of Malcolm Boyd’s history is long and bends towards justice. Successful as a Hollywood producer in the mid-1940s (partnering with the legendary Mary Pickford, which would later prompt director Cecil B. DeMille to consult with him on “The Ten Commandments”), Boyd found Hollywood spiritually wanting. “I got very close to the pinnacle of power and prestige and fame,” he said, “and then saw it as utterly shallow and tragic, therefore its appeal ended.”
But that power of the theatrical experience served Boyd as he sought to share his point of view in poetry in the 1960s as the “coffeehouse priest.” In 1967, he shared a bill with Dick Gregory at the famed San Francisco hang out the hungry i. Guitarist Charlie Byrd accompanied Boyd on a LP recording of his 1965 book of prayers “Are You Running with Me, Jesus?”
In the book’s introduction, Boyd wrote about the “hypocritical gulf” between saying prayers in church and then acting completely differently once outside. “I am angered,” he wrote, “as are many students and other youths, by worshippers who deny in their actions outside church what they ‘pray’ about for one hour a week inside expensive Gothic or Colonial buildings.”
That hypocrisy was challenged again in the early 1980s when gay men were stricken by a deadly mysterious disease eventually identified as HIV/AIDS. Though some in the federal and local governments tried to help, many churches shut their doors to the sufferers at this precise moment of spiritual and religious crisis. Not this Episcopal priest. Malcolm Boyd held the first AIDS Mass at St. Augustine by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Santa Monica on May 5, 1985. He continued to fight for humanity, justice and human dignity until the end.