CLGS

What does the past have to do with the present or the future? For social-justice activists, very much indeed. Mark Thompson and the Rev. Malcolm Boyd will illustrate the importance of remembering the past in our work of constructing a world we wish to inhabit. Both the CLGS Archives Project and the LGBT Religious Archives Network are devoted to that important work. Hear from these two living legends in LGBT spirituality and justice-making about why preserving our collective memory matters so much. Bring your lunch to the Mudd Building, Room 100, and CLGS will provide drinks and dessert!

CLGS is pleased and proud to welcome these two icons of gay spiritual liberation to the PSR campus: Mark Thompson and the Rev. Malcolm Boyd. Together, their life’s work spans filmmaking, poetry, photography, journalism, education, and religious re-visioning. While each a pioneer of the gay liberation movement in his own right, Boyd and Thompson believe their intergenerational relationship of more than 25 years to be a crucial aspect of their witness to “gay spirituality.”

Boyd’s career extends from his early years in the Hollywood film industry, to his ordination as an Episcopal priest and 1960s coffee house poet, and is perhaps best known for his book, the international bestseller, Are You Running with Me, Jesus? and the gay classic, Take Off the Masks. He was a Freedom Rider in 1961 and worked with Martin Luther King Jr. in the civil rights and antiwar movements. He was arrested for “disturbing the peace” inside the Pentagon in a Peace Mass against the Vietnam war.

Thompson, an author, editor, and photographer, worked for more than twenty years, in various capacities, for the national gay and lesbian news magazine, The Advocate. Before capping his career at the magazine by publishing his landmark volume, Long Road to Freedom: The Advocate History of the Gay and Lesbian Movement, Thompson had already begun work on his acclaimed trilogy -- Gay Spirit, Gay Soul, and Gay Body -- which he completed in 1997, and also published Leatherfolk: Radical Sex, People, Politics, and Practice in 1991.

CLGS is honored indeed to launch Arts Week with these pioneers in our midst.