As an openly gay African-American candidate running for the mayoral seat in Clarkdale, Miss., McMillian was quietly signaling that neither his race nor his sexual orientation would abort his aspirations. On McMillian's personal Facebook page there is a photo of him posing with President Obama. His campaign motto, Moving Clarksdale forward," was a challenge to the town as well as the state. If there is any place to challenge the intolerant conventions of Mississippi, Clarksdale, the Delta's gem, known as "a place where openness and hospitality transcend all barriers and visitors are embraced as family" and the birthplace of blues music, is that place.

"We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths - that all of us are created equal - is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall."

As an African-American lesbian, whose identity is linked to all three movements, I felt affirmed. I applaud the president's courageous pronouncement.

Some African Americans, however, felt "dissed" by the president's speech. The linkage of their civil-rights struggle to that of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) Americans did nothing to quell their dislike of the comparison. The fact that it was spoken by this president made it sting more.

If he were alive today, King would be 84, and he would have seen that a lot has changed in the U.S. since that dark day he was gunned down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis by an assassin's bullet on April 4, 1968.

Since King's death, every struggling civil-rights group has affixed themselves to his passionate cause for justice.

The lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities, in particular, have been reviled for not only naming our struggle as a civil-rights issue, but also for naming MLK as one of the civil-rights icons that would speak on our behalf.

But would King have spoken on our behalf?

As we celebrate MLK Day 2013, we no longer have to hold King up to a God-like standard. All the hagiographies written about King immediately following his assassination in the previous century have come under scrutiny as we come to understand all of King - his greatness as well as his flaws and human foibles.

As I comb through numerous books and essays learning more about King's philandering, sexist attitude about women at home and in the movement, and his relationship with [gay March on Washington organizer] Bayard Rustin, I am wondering would King be a public advocate for LGBTQ rights?

With an estimated 3,400 AP employees in bureaus around the globe, the AP's suggestion could have a tsunami-like effect on how the world comes to understand, be informed about or dismiss discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people. AP's online Stylebook defines a phobia as "an irrational, uncontrollable fear, often a form of mental illness" and says words such as "Islamophobia" and "homophobia" therefore should be expunged from political and social contexts. Preciseness in language is important, but language is a representation of culture. How we use it perpetuates ideas and assumptions about race, gender and sexual orientation. We consciously and unconsciously articulate this in our everyday conversations about ourselves and the rest of the world, and it travels generationally.

What's in the word "homophobia"?

"By institutionalizing memory, resisting the onset of oblivion, recalling the memory of tragedy that for long years remained hidden or unrecognized and by assigning its proper place in the human conscience, we respond to our duty to remember."

-- UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura

Friday, June 27th, was the last day of school that year. And with school out, my middle-school cronies and I looked forward to a summer reprieve from rioting against Italian, Irish and Jewish public school kids for being bussed into their neighborhoods. However, the summer months in Brooklyn's African American enclaves only escalated rioting between New York's finest--the New York Police Department--and us. During this tumultuous decade of Black rage and white police raids, knee-jerk responses to each other's slights easily set the stage for a conflagration, creating both instantaneous and momentary fighting alliances in these Black communities­ across gangs, class, age, ethnicity and sexual orientations--against police brutality.

That night of June 27th started out no differently than any hot and humid summer Friday night in my neighborhood. Past midnight, folks with no AC or working fans in their homes were just hanging out. Some lounged on the fire escapes while others were on the stoops of their brownstones laughing and shooting the breeze. Some were in heated discussion of Black revolutionary politics, while the Holy Rollers were competing with each other over Scripture. The Jenkins boys were drumming softly on their congas to the hot breezy mood of the night air. And directly under the street lamp was an old beat-up folding card table where the Fletchers and the Andersons, lifelong friends and neighbors, were shouting over a game of bid whist.

The sight of Dupree galloping up the block toward us abruptly interrupted the calm of the first hour of Saturday, June 28th. Dupree stopped in front of the gaming table and yelled out, "The pigs across the bridge are beating up on Black faggots--right now!" Cissy Anderson, who was just moments from throwing in her hand to go to bed, let out a bloodcurdling scream that shook us and brought a momentary halt to everything. Nate Anderson grabbed his wife to comfort her and said, "Cissy, calm down."

Greenwich Village in the 1800s had housed the largest population for former slaves in the country. But gentrification forced racial relocation and led to Harlem becom­ing the Mecca of Black America.

When Dupree stopped in front of Mr. Fletcher's game table, he was signaling to his aunt and uncle that their son Birdie, who sang like a beautiful songbird, was more than likely in the melee across the bridge.

Simply put: In the last presidential election it would have been political suicide to support marriage equality. This November it may be a risk not to.

With Ramadan, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice, and Christmas all going on this time of year, one would think that an all-inclusive seasonal greeting emblematic of our nation's religious diversity would be embraced by us all with two simple words - "Happy Holidays."

However, in 2011 the season's greeting is a continued chapter in the culture war spearheaded by what the Christian right calls the "War on Christmas."

With this month commemorating the 150th anniversary of the start of the American Civil War, I went combing through Civil War annals for our queer brethren - and I found them!

When shots were fired from Fort Sumter, a fortification near Charleston, S.C., signaling the war's beginning, its gay Confederate and Union soldiers didn't have to worry about Clinton's infamous DADT policy, which blatantly discriminates against LGBTQ servicemembers.

Those soldiers, unlike today's, did not have to bear their souls to disprove that military readiness is a heterosexual calling, nor did they have to prove that their patriotism to the cause was diminished because of their sexual orientation.

Also, before any of us in the African American community flatly dismiss these assertions as part and parcel of a racist conspiratorial propaganda machine that is out to discredit our brother Malcolm, we need, at least, to hear these nagging claims.

And this time hear them coming from one of our own - Manning Marable, a renowned and respected African American historian and social critic from Columbia University.

Sadly, Marable died April 1, just days before the release of his magnum opus, an exhaustive and new 594-page biography Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, on April 4th, which also marks the anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968.

His assertions in the book - deriving from meticulously combing through 6,000 pages of F.B.I. files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, records from the Central Intelligence Agency, State Department and New York district attorney's office, as well as his interviews with members of Malcolm X's inner circle and security team - leaves the reader in shock and awe.

The most recent one is titled Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India by Joseph Lelyveld.

And according to Lelyvard, Gandhi the pacifist was a wife-beater, denied sex to his wife for decades, was purported to be a "celibate" living life as an ascetic but actually was a pedophile who ritualized sleeping naked with underage girls in order to test "the ferocity of his sexual desires," and at one point left his wife for a male lover.

While one would think, at first glance, reading Lelyveld's shocking revelations about Gandhi, it's all tabloid fodder for a rapacious audience that diets on sordid tales, Lelyveld, former editor of the New York Times, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, pays meticulous attention to details.

Between 1908 and 1910, Gandhi left his wife to be with wealthy German-Jewish bodybuilder and architect Hermann Kallenbach. But the only evidence Lelyveld gives the reader, suggesting the bonding of the two men was at least homoerotic if not homosexual, is a salacious one-liner where Gandhi allegedly told Kallenback, "How completely you have taken possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance." According to Gandhi's own wife, Gandhi engaged in heterosexual intercourse, but it repulsed him so much it actually made him physically ill, and he vowed never to attempt it again.

For LGBTQ African-Americans, it's the black church, and for LGBTQ Irish, it's the St. Patrick's Day Parade.

St. Patrick's Day has rolled around again, and like previous March 17th celebrations nationwide, its LGBTQ communities are not invited. As a contentious and protracted argument for now over two decades, parade officials have a difficult time grasping the notion that being Irish and gay is also part of their heritage.

Unlike the black church, however, that has and continues to throw the Bible at its LGBTQ community to justify their exclusionary practices, the St. Patrick's Day parade committee uses the First Amendment, debating that they are constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of religion, speech and association, and the tenet separating church and state.

For undergraduates, if they were paying attention, Gomes bookended their four-year experience at Harvard with his welcoming remarks during orientation and his baccalaureate address at graduation.

In between those years, undergraduates had ample opportunities to partake in Gomes' weekly teas at Sparks House, the university's parsonage, to hear his rich melodic baritone voice most Sunday mornings preaching at Memorial Church in the Yard, or to enroll in his popular courses: Religion 42: "The Christian Bible and its Interpretation," which I had the privilege to be his head teaching fellow for several years, and Religion 1513: "History of Harvard and its Presidents."

During the wee hours of the morning this past Tuesday when I received a phone call from a reporter at WBUR, the voice on the other end said "Hello and Good Morning Rev. Monroe. I would like to speak with you before our 8 a.m "Morning Edition" Show about the passing of Rev. Gomes. I'm very sorry if you're not aware of his passing. I want to talk with you about his legacy and impact in your life and Harvard's," I dropped the phone in despair.

As one of the religions brought to the New World by the African Diaspora, there is no religion that frightens and fascinates the world over as Vodou.

What most people do not know is that its spiritual tenets allow room for the acceptance of all people, of all sexual orientations and gender expressions.

Today's popular culture misconstrues Vodou with racist images of zombies rising from graves, jungle drums, orgiastic ceremonies ritualizing malevolent powers of black magic, and cannibalism. In reality, Haitian Vodou is an ancestral folk religion whose tenets have always been queer-friendly.

Ironically, homosexuality has been legal in Haiti since 1986, but few protections and provisions come with it. For example, same-sex marriage, and civil unions are not recognized, and it is unclear whether LGBTQ couples can adopt children or have custody of their own children. LGBTQ Haitians do not openly serve in the military, and the nation does not have anti-hate crime legislation that specifically addresses the discrimination and harassment of LGBTQ Haitians.

But the civil rights movement of Martin Luther King's era of the 1960's is dying a slow and necessary death.

And for many African Americans of younger generations, who are now the beneficiaries of the racial gains from the Movement, feeling the Movement's slow death is like a welcoming boulder gradually being lifted from their shoulders, especially for those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer.

With many key African American organizations and institutions of the civil rights movement of the 1960's still resistant to address this generation's outwardness about their sexual orientations and gender expressions as a civil rights issues, these organizations and institutions have not only lost their mantle as part of a prophetic justice movement for this day and age, but many of our present day key African American organizations and institutions of the Movement have also lost the moral high ground that was once so easily associated with them.

And much of the kerfuffle is about who's staking a claim on its use.

The now recent kerfuffle concerning the n-word is focused on Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known fondly to us as Mark Twain, and the New South Books edition of the 1885 controversial classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

In a combined effort to rekindle interest in this Twain classic and to tamp down the flame and fury the use of the n-word engenders both from society and readers alike, who come across the epithet 219 times in the book, Mark Twain scholar and English professor at Auburn University in Alabama Alan Gribben proposed to replace the n-word with the word "slave."

"The n-word possessed, then as now, demeaning implications more vile than almost any insult that can be applied to other racial groups. There is no equivalent slur in the English language. As a result, with every passing decade this affront appears to gain rather than lose its impact. Even at the level of college and graduate school, students are capable of resenting textual encounters with this racial appellative," Gribben writes in the introduction of the new edition.

I think for grade and middle school students, the word should be removed. I remember reading the text as a sixth grader at a predominately white public school in Brooklyn and suffering mightily from both the teacher's inept ability to contextualize the text and from my classmates' insensitivity concerning the epithet. But several years later, unfortunately, I experienced "deja vu all over again" with this text. This time, I was a first year student at Wellesley College and suffering mightily, because of the professor's ineptitude in contextualizing the use of racist language.