Vanguard Priest Tempers His Radicalism : Episcopal Church: The Rev. Malcolm Boyd continues his fight for better acceptance of gays. He also speaks of patience and the need for spirituality.

The Rev. Malcolm Boyd, author and gay priest, stood near the altar in his white vestments and long, narrow green stole. Smiling warmly at the congregation, he began to speak of a chance encounter with a woman during a cruise to Catalina.

She had a broad, plain face. Her smile was engaging, magnetic. “It was her attitude that drew me to her. It was remarkably kind, trusting and giving,” he said.

Then Boyd, who has for so long been identified with the cause of gay rights, exhorted parishioners of St. Augustine’s By-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Santa Monica to admit others into their lives--without preconditions and judgments.

“I hope our face says you are accepted . . . and reveals the wonderful secret that our love of self--rooted in God’s love for us--is unconditional, too,” he said as he closed.

“I am accepted! We are accepted!” he declared, sounding like the radical priest of years back.

For Boyd, who has spent two decades fighting for acceptance as an openly gay priest, it was both a statement of fact and a shout of defiance. He has been in the vanguard of efforts to strike down prohibitions against ordaining gays and he continues to question those who insist upon celibacy for all but married clergy.

Yet, as Boyd approaches the 40th anniversary of his ordination next year, what is most striking about his radicalism is how it has been tempered by age and what he describes as his pilgrimage. In the deep recesses of his being, Boyd has mellowed. He speaks of patience and the need for spirituality. He stares at death.

Balding and graying, Boyd, 71, finds himself increasingly confronting mortality--his own, his 96-year-old mother’s, and that of his “life partner” of the past 10 years, author and editor Mark Thompson. Thompson is healthy but has the virus that causes AIDS. Boyd is HIV-negative.

“It means that I’ve had a great deal to work through--a great deal (still) to work through,” Boyd said in a recent interview at his book-lined Silver Lake bungalow.

In the dark hours before dawn, Boyd entreats the divine. There are long stretches of prayer and meditation when, he said, he is consciously with God.

“It’s insights more than visions. It’s not verbal. You’re not sitting there dictating to God and God isn’t speaking to you through an echo chamber. . . . I don’t know anything quite like it and do find it enormously comforting,” Boyd said. “To me, it’s linked with mortality.

“It’s part of a very deep meditation that extends (beyond) mortality because I’m aware I’ll still be doing the same thing after I die,” he said.

*

These insights seem to have tempered his thinking about the urgency of temporal causes. He is untroubled by the fact that many in the church still refuse to accept him.

“There’s no reason why all this has to be resolved in a matter of weeks, months, years or decades,” said Boyd, who wrote the 1965 bestseller “Are You Running With Me, Jesus?” “I do believe our life with God is an eternal life and there’s an eternity in which to work these things out.”

Friends see the change.

“He used to be a severe activist. He was very much against the Establishment and now has grown more appreciative of what the Establishment’s been doing,” said Jack Plimpton, who has known Boyd for 25 years and is now executive director of the Bishop’s Commission on AIDS Ministries of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles.

“I don’t want anything more to do with masks,” Boyd told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1976 when he announced his sexual orientation amid anguished cries for his removal from the priesthood. “I’m tired now with all the preoccupation with public relations packaging,” he said. “I’m tired of politicians and churchmen who are liars and hypocrites.”

This was the radical priest who 29 years ago joined the civil rights march in Selma, Ala., with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and, on another occasion, was beaten by police in Alabama because he was found riding in a car with an African American. It has been 26 years since his arrest on the steps of the Pentagon during a Vietnam War protest where he celebrated the Eucharist--the Lord’s Supper.

In those years Boyd had written 24 books. He counted among his friends Henri Perrin, the French worker-priest; writer and social reformer Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker movement, and the late Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton, who helped set a trend toward intellectual liberalism and was attuned with the peace and civil rights movements.

To many in the church, Boyd remains not only a radical priest but an outlaw. He lives openly in a monogamous--and non-celibate--relationship with Thompson. And despite the Episcopal Church’s recent refusal to endorse (or clearly condemn) same-sex unions, Boyd vows to continue to perform marriage-like ceremonies for gay men and lesbians. He has presided over about two dozen same-sex unions during the past 10 years.

Boyd insists that he is unrelenting in his support for gay rights and the need for all Christian churches to affirm the dignity of gays and their contributions to the church.

“The church needs to be doing something in a far more militant, courageous way,” he said.

The Episcopal Church, along with virtually all Christian denominations, continues to struggle with bitterly divisive issues of sexual morality.

In August, a group of conservative Episcopal priests asked Michigan Bishop R. Stewart Wood Jr. to resign because he recently ordained a lesbian.

*

At the same time, the nation’s Episcopal bishops at the church’s policy-making General Convention rejected a proposed pastoral letter on human sexuality that would have opened the door, some say, to the official blessing of same-sex unions. Instead, after protests from 101 active and retired bishops, they called for more dialogue and study.

And despite Boyd’s high profile as a gay priest, the vast majority of gays in the clergy remain in the closet because few congregations would have them if their sexual orientation were made public, Boyd said.

He began dealing seriously with his sexual orientation in graduate school when he was about 30. He did not “come out” until he was 53. Early in his life in the church, Boyd said, he had no stake in homosexual issues.

“I was in a great deal of denial because my view of homosexuality was so terrible at that point,” Boyd said. “My self-esteem was probably quite low and both the church and society gave you such terrible images of it (homosexuality) that in a way you had to say I couldn’t possibly be that.”

To this day, he said, he still carries “tremendous scars . . . and woundedness.”

His family was “dysfunctional.” He said his father was an alcoholic and a womanizer. His parents’ marriage collapsed in divorce. “I’d get a box at Christmas with clothes that didn’t fit and I wouldn’t be caught dead in. I’d get a book that I didn’t want to read--and here was this sincere, earnest, struggling man doing his best,” Boyd said of his father.

“When my father died, I was a young priest and I realized the last thing I could do for him was to conduct his funeral. We’d had an opportunity to get to know each other and I really loved him. I was able to forgive, whatever that means.”

A sense of humor helps, he said.

The Rev. Marni Schneider, associate rector at St. Edmund’s Episcopal Church in San Marino, said she learned early about Boyd’s ability to laugh at himself. About 12 years ago, before she became a priest, Schneider was a member of the vestry at St. Augustine’s. To the consternation of some parishioners, Boyd had just been called to serve as an associate rector and writer-in-residence.

“Someone said, ‘How can we hire a professional homosexual?’ I related that comment to Malcolm,” Schneider recalled. “He was indignant! He said, ‘I’ve never charged! Never!”

*

Today, many in the church still see Boyd as a “gay priest” rather than a priest who happens to be gay.

“I live in different worlds and sometimes they don’t meet except in me,” Boyd said.

He sees no contradiction between believing that all things will eventually work out in the long run and continuing to press in the here-and-now for gay rights.

“I think that’s one thing that religion gives you, a sense of roots and a sense of timelessness. But with gay rights, I don’t want to wait for eternity. I want them now. . . . I never want to lose the divine discontent, what Kierkegaard called the seeking and suffering, of being rent asunder in the peace of God. That’s central to me. So peace of God isn’t just Elysian Fields. I never want to lose that urgency and crisis. But I want to temper urgency and crisis with a certain sense of timelessness and very deep roots.”

When asked what was the one irreducible thing he held onto, Boyd replied: “I don’t think I’ve held onto it as much as it’s held onto me. It’s this terrible, strong love--God’s love and strength. It’s just always been there.”