If I were to have a child I would name her Megan. That’s not really true. Any future girl child will be saddled with Billie and a boy Ulysses; however, today I’m all about Megan. Specifically Megan McArdle.

McArdle went after our love for the word fascism, especially when describing those on the opposite end of the political aisle. Whether it’s conservatives crying that everything President Barack Obama does has a fascistic bent (morning Glenn Beck), or liberals convinced that to be a Republican is to have an affection for black boots (hey there Keith Olbermann).

As Atlantic blogger McArdle points out using the term for politics you don’t approve of is silly, hyperbolic, and ahistorical.

“Fascism is a particular thing, not the amalgam of everything you happen not to like. ”

Ahh, but what better way to get our choirs all ginned up, nodding their heads in righteous indignation?

Wanting a moratorium on the f bomb does not mean political disagreements have gone the way of the do-do; however, persuasion does not come about by calling your opponent as a black boot thug.

Look at the long Senate career of Edward Kennedy. No one would question his liberal street cred; however, did he ever demean his Republican foes with the f epithet? Probably not because he understood you can’t insult an opponent on one day and work with her the following.

Please do me a favor? Don’t leave any comments about how you are a “student of history” and how the fascism charge sticks because of X,Y, or Z reason. Using the word without talking about the real ones, shows how you and history have never been close friends.

RIP Dominick Dunne.

Frederick Douglass had no use for Abraham Lincoln. The American abolitionist thought the country’s first Republican president was cool at best on the slavery question and timid when it came to fighting the Civil War.

The two men looked at each from completely different viewpoints. Lincoln was a politician who had to meet the demands of competing and contradictory public interests (and win a war at the same time). Douglass, a former slave, was an advocate for those in bondage and northern blacks whose freedom was consistently under attack.

Writer James Oakes does yeoman’s work in describing the relationship between the two in his The Radical and the Republican, a book worth reading for its history and lessons for today’s times. It’s easy to be disappointed with President Barack Obama when it comes to gay and lesbian issues, especially with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. However our disappointment should not cloud our vision. Obama, aside from being temperamentally deliberative, has to cobble together a number of communities that have antagonistic points of view. Essentially he has to create the space for what is possible, not what is desirable. When the Civil War started Douglass wanted black soldiers enlisted in the Union war effort (the desirable). Lincoln understood when the war started he would have lost political support (the possible) if black men were put in Union military uniforms.

None of this means we shouldn’t be funky about Obama and his White House. Nor does it mean we should keep our displeasure silent. Douglass never did and Lincoln was the better for it.

“Like most men of his generation,” biographer Randy Shilts wrote in The Mayor of Castro Street, “Milk assiduously stuck to the double life he had carefully followed since his high school days.”

More than half a century later, the Long Island Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Services Network will honor the slain gay-rights activist posthumously to draw attention to gays and lesbians with small-town roots. Milk’s nephew, Stuart Milk, will accept the award for his uncle on Saturday.

“Things have changed dramatically since the late 1940s when Harvey Milk graduated from high school,” said David Kilmnick, founder of the network of three organizations. “But there’s a lot more to be done.”

Milk, the focus of renewed attention this year when the biographical film “Milk” won two Oscars, became one of the country’s first openly gay elected officials when he was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977.

In November 1978, Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone were fatally shot by Dan White, a disgruntled former city supervisor. Milk was 48.

Since the days when Milk was growing up in the shadow of New York City, there’s no question life for gay men and women on Long Island, home to more than 2.8 million people, has improved in many ways.

Many gays and lesbians say they feel comfortable enough to live openly. Still, they add, not everyone welcomes that openness.

During his senior year at Bay Shore High School, which counts Milk among its alumni, Erik Normandin came out.

“Everyone was pretty much OK with it,” the 18-year-old recalled, except his ex-girlfriend’s family. “They told me it was disgusting,” said Normandin, who graduated in 2008.

Since then, Normandin has had no qualms about holding another guy’s hand at the mall or on the street, but the manager of a restaurant that markets itself as a family establishment once asked him to stop or leave, and a customer complained.

“I’m very surprised how many people on Long Island are accepting of it,” Normandin said. “I thought they’d have more resistance.”

Normandin didn’t rule out settling in Long Island after college but he was unsure whether his career goal of working in stage lighting and design will take him elsewhere.

One of the goals of Kilmnick’s organization is to get Normandin and other suburban and rural gays and lesbians to live openly gay lives and create friendlier environments in their hometowns, rather than flock to gay meccas like New York, San Francisco and Atlanta.

That was partly the point of the posthumous award to Milk, he said.

“We need to keep some of that in suburban and rural America, if we truly want to see full equality,” Kilmnick said.

When Milk was elected, he was only the fifth openly gay U.S. elected official, according to Denis Dison, a spokesman for the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, a political action committee.

Today there are 427 openly gay elected officials, Dison said, and more than three-quarters of them serve at the local level. “In the last few years there have been folks who did not leave their towns and go to the coastal cities,” he said.

When Kilmnick and his partner of eight years moved into their Long Island home in 2003, a neighbor dropped by to welcome them to the neighborhood.

“She asked, `Oh, where’s your wife?’” Kilmnick said. He then introduced her to his male partner, Robert. “This was six years ago and we haven’t seen her since,” he said.

Still, Kilmnick said, there’s tangible evidence things have changed since Milk lived in Long Island. There are 67 gay-straight alliances in Long Island schools, he said, and last year, more than 40,000 students participated in National Coming Out Day.

If you are  of  a certain age, black, and wanted to be your lawyer your role models were Barbara Jordan and Thurgood Marshall. If you dreamed of writing, James Baldwin and Langston Hughes were the authors you copied from. If history was your thing, you looked to W.E.B. DuBois and John Hope Franklin.

Franklin was a scholar and activist. His books on southern history have become a standard for anyone looking to learn about the South. He even admitted that he thought a historian had to be involved in the worlds of scholarship and policy making. He worked with Marshall and a team of lawyers to strike down “separate but equal” in  Brown v. Board of Education. He marched with Martin Luther King in 1965 from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.

But the activism never made the academic work second rate. Sure he got slammed (rightfully in my opinion) for the report written by President Bill Clinton’s 1997 Advisory Board to the President’s Initiative on Race, but outside of that blemish his work got respect from peers and the general public.

My mom will hate this story, but she’s not here to defend herself. She saw Franklin on C-SPAN and called me. Ma was terrible with names and we would always play this game when she was describing someone (for some reason any time she talked about Princeton professor Cornel West she called him the  “unkempt one”). So she starts talking about this black scholar, “an elderly gentleman” who has written many books.

“Have you heard of him,” she asked.

“Mom, I’ve heard of a lot of elderly black men who have written books,” was my reply.

“You are such a snob.”

So we played twenty questions. She remembered he taught at Duke University (Franklin’s last institution). I started laughing which made her even more convinced of my snob status.

“Ma you are talking about John Hope Franklin. You have his books.”

“You don’t know what I have.”

“Yes I do. I met him at a conference and had him sign two of his books to you.”

There was a pause.

“I so hate you,” she said as we both laughed.

She went downstairs and there they were. A collection of essays and speeches and From Slavery to Freedom.

Note: Go check out what colleagues Emma and Jenna have to say about this topic.

A few years back I covered a marriage rights rally. After dutifully taking notes during the speeches (all typical and boilerplate), I walked the crowd looking for people to talk to. Spoke to everyone from the older gay male couple, who left the country to get married, to the young straight duo. She was there because for her it was unfair she could marry her love but her father could not do the same.

Walked up to a middle aged gay man, who was standing alone, and he had a lot to say. It was time gays and lesbians got off our collective “lazy butts” and pushed the same sex marriage memo. Anyone who stood in the way of marriage rights didn’t understand the Constitution and Rush Limbaugh was a dupe. After 10 minutes, I thanked him and looked to move on. We talked a bit and he continued with his Limbaugh rant. He said he listened to Limbaugh and was amazed at the intellectual dishonesty.

“And no one is fighting him,” he complained.

He then told me of an idea he had for a radio show. A program where he could logically make the case for gay rights and fight the Limbaughs of the world.

“Do you know I can get such a thing started,” he asked.

As a bottom feeder in the media world, I noted I was not the person to ask about a gig; however, why didn’t he volunteer some time to the group that organized the rally. He stared at me for a few seconds.

“Yeah, we need a radio show that fights the hate.”

I want to be kind to this fellow because he wasn’t a kook in the traditional sense (you find them at all political rallies), but the grunt work for freedom wasn’t on his agenda. Instead he wanted the bells and whistles. What do I mean by bells and whistles? Calls for marching on Washington or the fetishization of ACT-UP as if gay rights is a perpetual photo-opp with angry queens.

Yes freedom struggles in America at times have included marching and taking to the streets, but that is not the only quiver. Just because there isn’t some large rally that makes the news stations scurrying doesn’t mean hard work isn’t being done. Look at the organization Lambda Legal. I can’t even think of the last rally they sponsored on their own, but the group is in the trenches doing the work that isn’t particularly glamorous but is essential.

There is nothing wrong with the occasional march, but there is more to rights than yelling some tired cant (am I the only one who groans when “the people united will never be defeated” gets started?). To all of you who point to the civil rights movement as template for what gays and lesbians should do, you need to learn history. What happened in the 196’s came about because lots of people, a few famous most anonymous, did small things. Served a meal, typed a letter, drove a speaker to the next gig, copied a speech, sat down with an ally, donated some cash, sat on a committee. Without those small boring non-dramatic moments freedom never comes.

Note: This is the start of a weekly conversation between the 365gay.com bloggers, Jenna Lowenstein, Emma Ruby-Sachs and James Withers. We’ll take one topic and have a conversation about it. This week we start with the debate about fighting for marriage or civil unions.

One of the things that irks in the marriage debate is how some gay marriage advocates smooth out the edges in black history. In their desire for the grand prize of marriage as opposed to civil unions, people rightfully point to the fight against “separate but equal” (effectively killed by Brown v. Board of Education). All fair really but what is lost in the conversation when we don’t even acknowledge that the debate about “separate but equal” was messier than most realize? And would we change our tactics if we knew the father of the civil rights movement, W.E.B. DuBois, opined that voluntary segregation was no sin?

In David Levering Lewis’ biography, W.E.B. DuBois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, there is the story behind DuBois’ infamous editorial called “Segregation.” Written when DuBois was fighting with the NAACP board (for his whole long life DuBois seemed to be in intellectual warfare with everyone), the essay sent shock waves in the NAACP community and beyond because DuBois seemed to be taking up an argument that was once put forth by his nemesis, Booker T. Washington.

“It must be remembered that in the last quarter of a century, the advance of the colored people has been mainly in the lines where they themselves working by and for themselves, have accomplished the greatest advance.”

Here was the leader of the race, when the phrase actually had meaning, extolling the virtue of segregation.

Why the early morning history lesson? Those who demand marriage rights always say that the benefits of the institution can be conferred with the name and civil unions are at best a poor substitute. But if the rights of marriage are transferred to civil unions, then what’s the problem? By pushing for marriage and marriage only, aren’t we boxing ourselves into a corner and making the fight for equality more complicated than it needs to be? And let’s be honest: vigorous demands for civil unions that match marriage in everything but name will earn a large number of straight doubters and put our enemies on the defensive.

Maybe the debate is over. It’s marriage or nothing, But if we can get marriage minus the word, what’s the problem?

Founded in Greenwich Village by gay activist Craig Rodwell its first home was on Mercer Street but later moved to its current home at 15 Christopher St.

It has faced bomb threats, smashed windows and graffiti with the words “kill fags” written on the walls.

Six years ago, with the growth of major chains and internet bookselling, the shop nearly folded. It was saved at the last minute by a new owner and briefly saw a revival – mainly from tourists from outside the country.

But the global downturn in the economy has virtually ended the visitors from Europe and Asia. In addition internet and big box bookstores have continued to take market share.

In an e-mail to customers owner Kim Brinster said the store will close on March 29.

Under Paragraph 175 of the German penal code which banned sexual intimacy between members of the same gender, an untold number of gays and lesbians were rounded up by the Nazis and sent to concentration camps where they were subjected to medical experiments including lobotomies, and forced to work in labor camps.

Estimates of gays and lesbians persecuted by the Nazis range from several thousand to a quarter million. A large number of those interred were sent on to the gas chambers.

“The murder of six million Jews and countless Roma, Poles and other Eastern Europeans, gay men and lesbians, trade unionists, disabled people and political and religious opponents of the Nazis was not a sudden and frenzied explosion of hate, but a horror that had been methodically and carefully planned,” said British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in a statement Tuesday.

“Hatred may begin with small acts of prejudice or bigotry – but it rarely ends with them. That is why we all have an obligation to stand up to hatred.”

Monuments to gays murdered during the Holocaust are in Berlin Copenhagen and Amsterdam in Europe, San Francisco and Sydney. A monument is planned in Tel Aviv, Israel.

In Jerusalem, the Yad Vashem Museum on the Holocaust features a small exhibit dedicated to gay and lesbian victims of the Nazis.

The American Holocaust Museum in Washington also has an exhibit dedicated to gays and lesbians.

Yet there remain Holocaust deniers.

Four years ago, the United Nations designated Jan. 27 International Holocaust Remembrance Day in part to counteract “Holocaust deniers” like Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In 2003, Minnesota state Rep. Arlon Lindner (R) during debate on two bills he had brought forward to repeal gay rights laws in the state, said gays were lying when they cited thousands of homosexuals who were exterminated or sent to concentration camps by the Nazis.  

“It never happened,” Lindner told the House. 

“I was a child during World War II, and I’ve read a lot about World War II,” he said. “It’s just been recently that anyone’s come out with this idea that homosexuals were persecuted to this extent. There’s been a lot of rewriting of history.”

The remarks shocked the legislature, but attempts to censure him failed.

Police learned her motive in a confession when she was terminally ill last November and made it public Friday, four days after she died.

Smith ensured the mystery would outlive her, however, when she also claimed the lead detective, now dead, helped her bury the murder weapon. Investigators swore Friday to verify that allegation and to find out why one of their own would have hidden Smith’s guilt in a case that has practically become folklore in this Shenandoah Valley city of 25,000.

“If he had anything to do with covering this thing up,” Commonwealth’s Attorney Raymond C. Robertson said as residents lined the city council chambers to hear the news, “we are hell-bent on finding out what it was and why.”

Smith, 61, died Monday, more than a month after her arrest in the deaths of 19-year-old Constance Smootz Hevener and her 20-year-old sister-in-law, Carolyn Hevener Perry on April 11, 1967. Smith told investigators she shot both women in the head in the back room of the ice cream shop because they teased her about being homosexual, Robertson and Staunton Police Chief Jim Williams said.

“That was different in 1967 than it is today, extremely different,” Robertson said. “It would have been a matter that it would have had different ramifications that it would today if it had been made public.”

Smith told police she gave the .25 caliber pistol she used to shoot the women to detective David Bocock, and they buried it.

Bocock died in 2006, leaving a wife who is now in a nursing home. Police are investigating his involvement, although they said other aspects of Smith’s confession have checked out.

“We know that’s what she told us and we’re trying to corroborate every aspect of her confession,” Robertson said.

Robertson did not know the extent of the relationship between Smith and Bocock, though he said she had practiced shooting at Bocock’s farm.

Smith swiped $138 from the store as she fled, which led police to think it was a robbery. Police initially focused on William Thomas, who told them he saw two men running from the scene. Thomas was tried for one of the murders and acquitted, but the other murder indictment remained on his record until Dec. 30, when Robertson said police were satisfied that he had nothing to do with the murders.

Thomas said having that hanging over his head for 40 years was tough, though it could have been worse.

“My loss is not comparable to what happened to those families,” Thomas said recently. “Regardless of whether those girls – there may been some things they were doing that may or may not have been correct – but certainly they didn’t do anything to deserve what happened to them, and those families didn’t do anything to deserve what Dave Bocock put them through.”

Smith moved away for a long time after the killings, got married and had two daughters, both of whom have declined to speak with The Associated Press.

About two decades after the killings, Smith returned to Staunton without her husband and moved in with a woman, living with her new partner until her death. Her partner also has turned down interview requests.

The investigation meandered until last summer, when police heard from Joyce Bradshaw, who worked with Smith at her other job. Bradshaw said she went out to grab a burger with Smith about a week before the shootings and that Smith showed her a gun and told her she had two bullets – one for her stepfather, who had sexually abused her, and one for “that Hevener girl.”

After the shootings, Bradshaw said, she told Bocock about Smith’s statements. The detective came back to her a couple of days later and told her that Smith had taken a polygraph test and passed it, and that the bullets didn’t match Smith’s gun.

Bradshaw said Bocock also mentioned that Smith was a good shot, something she took as enough of a threat that she was afraid to go back to police after that.

“I tried 41 years ago, but it just didn’t work out,” Bradshaw told the AP last week. “But I always knew that she was the one.”

Williams said police had not focused on Smith until recently because their records indicated she had been cleared.

Danny Perry, Carolyn Perry’s widower, said he was glad that now they at least know who the killer was, even if it may never really be known if others were involved.

“We’ll just have to wait and see down the road the real why and if there was a cover up,” Perry said.

Robertson said he worked with Bocock for more than a decade and that he always knew him to be a “genuinely good, responsible and competent police detective.”

Authorities promised to continue to seek the truth.

“While we are continuing to investigate this matter,” Williams said, “the fact remains that there will likely be questions surrounding this case we will never be able to answer.”