Malcolm Boyd is, perhaps, best known for being an early supporter of gay rights within the Episcopal Church (publicizing his homosexuality in 1977).  Boyd had become an Episcopal priest some twenty-five years earlier, having had a successful career in advertising and television. In his 1958 Christ and Celebrity Gods, Boyd argued for the necessity of seeing the world as it is from a “Christian point of view”—building a bridge between theology and life. He arrived at this point having concluded that preachers and parishioners alike were enmeshed in “communication webs.” Boyd, known as the “espresso priest” for his poetry readings at the hungry i nightclub in San Francisco, was a freedom rider and civil rights activist, angered by white hypocrisy and those who pray for “one hour a week inside expensive Gothic or Colonial buildings” and then manipulate a “white power structure to keep Negroes in housing ghettos and interminable second-class citizenship.”

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