Malcolm Boyd grew up in a wealthy New York family. After graduating from the University of Arizona, he went to Hollywood where he became a production partner of screen legend Mary Pickford, eventually becoming the first president of the Television Producers Association. Ultimately unhappy with this career, he decided to enter the Episcopal priesthood in 1951. He was ordained to the diaconate in 1954 and the priesthood in 1955.

Boyd began his ministry in Indianapolis, Indiana where he encountered racism when his parish resisted his efforts to work with Black priests in combining church functions. Additionally, his speaking engagements were often abruptly cancelled when he criticized the church for its position on race issues.

From Indianapolis, Boyd served as a chaplain at universities in Colorado and Michigan. His revolutionary ideas on social inclusiveness, rooted in the teachings of Christ, blossomed in his work for civil rights. He became heavily involved in demonstrations and other civil rights activities. In 1961, he and a group of other Black and white Episcopal priests went on a Prayer Pilgrimage from New Orleans to Detroit in an effort to integrate bus terminals and restaurants. He became the national field director of the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity (ESCRU) in 1964 and traveled throughout the South helping with voter registration, educational activities, and other civil rights activities. Additionally, he wrote a series of plays about race issues that were performed at coffee houses, college campuses, and churches across the country.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, in addition his civil rights activism, Boyd participated in the anti-war movement through demonstrations and teach-ins against the Vietnam War. Following the war, he became involved with other social issues, the most significant of which concerned the participation of openly gay people in the church. Boyd publicly announced his homosexuality in 1977. In 1981, he became the parish priest at St. Augustine-by-the-Sea in California. Three years later, in 1984, he met his partner, Mark Thompson, whom he would marry in 2013. For the rest of his life Boyd remained active in AIDS ministry and gay rights.

Boyd was a poet/writer-in-residence at Los Angeles' Episcopal Cathedral of St. Paul into his eighties. He wrote and edited 35 books, including Are You Running with Me, Jesus?, (in collaboration with Bishop Chester Talton) Race and Prayer: Collected Voices, Many Dreams, and Human Like Me, Jesus.