When I was young the adults had the yearly table conversation about the dearth of black leadership. No one ever matched Martin Luther King, Jr. and they would ask when a king would return.When I got colleged the old ones still wondered where the black leaders were and when would there be the return of the one to lead us like MLK. When I suggested the whole leadership question was removed from actual history (King was one among many) and waiting for King 2.0 was at best a pipe dream, the adults paused, looked at me, and continued their lamentation.

Leadership conversations, especially in minority communities, are always suspect because they are more wish fulfillment than dialogues about the actual meaning of freedom. The very idea that one person can lead a diverse minority group is the sort of thinking that makes good TV but is removed from the actual record.

And when MLK is added into the mix everything turns all hushed as if he were a mythical god too good for this evil world. His humanity, which was messy, complex, and never simple, is drained out. Don’t believe? Then start reading Taylor Branch’s America in the King Years.

Over at Huffington Post, Max Mutchnick, goes for the simple history tale in his “Where is My Martin Luther Queen” essay. I’ll leave alone how Mutchhnick lobs the tired chestnut of being embarrassed by loud queens who get TV time during Gay Pride parades (yes, the guy who created the character Jack is ashamed of loud skinny queens with moxie). Well wait a minute. Let’s not glide over that too quickly. Here is Mutchnick showing way too much moxie his own darn self:

“Dykes on bikes, Tarzana Trannies, Jewish Leather Daddies and Kathy Griffin’s mom. Don’t get me wrong. I love these people. Let’s call them the ‘Usual Suspects.’ They fought for my rights and taught me how to dance. But they should no longer be representing “the pride.”

Not much to add to that is there? If Mutchnick thinks you will make it difficult for him to live a respectable gay life, silence is required; however, please be there when his rights need to be fought for. That’s only fair of course.

Aside from this unabashed disaster of upper middle class privilege run amok, Mutchnick then wonders where is his gay MLK–the guy who makes a speech everyone will steal from but few will understand. But to be a little fair here, Mutchnick gets rightfully greedy. He asks why the President of the United States isn’t making a Kingian argument for gay rights.

A fair question of course, and one that everyone is asking; however, once again Mutchnick is writing in a history vacuum. No president of this country enters the Oval Office willing to fight for the rights of minorities. Some come to it of course but they are always pushed. From Lincoln to Johnson, the White House only becomes a beacon of freedom when it becomes politically expedient to do so. If Mutchnick is looking for President Obama to become a “fierce advocate”, he better team up with those “freaks” he is so willing to dismiss.

Warren was invited to give the keynote address at the church, but gay rights advocates said he belied King’s message of inclusiveness. His participation at the event and his invitation to deliver the invocation at President-elect Barrack Obama’s inauguration on Tuesday has infuriated gays and lesbians.

Warren, the pastor and founder of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., publicly supported California’s Proposition 8, which amended the state Constitution to ban gay marriage.

Dr. King never publicly spoke about gay rights, but his 1963 March on Washington was organized by Bayard Rustin, an openly gay black man. King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, often appeared at LGBT rights rallies before her death in 2006.

In 2003, she invited the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to take part in observances of the 40th anniversary of the March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech.

It was the first time that an LGBT rights group had been invited to a major event of the African American community and drew the ire of some of the other speakers.

King said her husband supported the quest for equality by gays and reminded her critics that the 1963 March on Washington was organized by Rustin.

In March 2004, she told a university audience that same-sex marriage is a civil rights issue and denounced a proposed amendment to the Constitution ban it.

“Gay and lesbian people have families, and their families should have legal protection, whether by marriage or civil union,” she said in a speech at The Richard Stockton College in Pomona, New Jersey.

The protest against the appearance by Warren at Ebenezer Baptist Church was the second day of protests over the involvement of Warren in the inauguration.

On Sunday about 100 people, many waving rainbow flags, demonstrated in California front of Saddleback Church.

Obama’s invitation to Warren to say the invocation at Tuesday’s inauguration led to criticism by many gays who had supported the President-elect’s campaign.

That anger led the inaugural committee to invite Gene Robinson, the openly gay Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire, to appear at Sunday’s official inaugural kickoff at the Lincoln Memorial.

Robinson asked the crowd to pray for “understanding that our president is a human being and not a messiah.”

“Bless us with tears – for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS,” he said in his invocation.

“Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.”

But the appearance before an estimated 400,000 was not covered by HBO, which had bought the television rights to the massive concert.

Several blocks away at 17th and Constitution, a small group of anti-gay protesters demonstrated but followers of Rev. Fred Phelps who had said they intended to protest were visibly absent. Phelps is the leader of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas which is largely made up of family members and routinely pickets LGBT-positive events.

In his address to the throng that spread from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument Obama declared that “Anything is possible in America.”

“Despite the enormity of the task that lies ahead – I stand here today as hopeful as ever that the United States of America will endure – that the dream of our founders will live on in our time,” the President-elect said.

Among the stellar lineup of stars was Washington’s Gay Men’s Chorus.

Obama arrived in Washington on Saturday, ending a majestic train ride across the frigid mid-Atlantic seaboard that recreated the triumphant journey of President-elect Abraham Lincoln.

Celebratory crowds braved subfreezing weather to salute Obama along his 137-mile journey to the nation’s capital from Philadelphia.

On board the “Obama Express” were several dozen “everyday Americans” who Obama had met on the campaign trail.

Among them were Lisa Hazirjian and her Michelle Kaiser of Cleveland.

Hazirjian, a Case Western Reserve University history professor, recruited volunteers from the gay community in Ohio and Pennsylvania. She worked full-time for the Obama campaign in Cleveland over the summer and fall.

Hazirjian became involved in LGBT civil rights after she was denied a job at another university when she sought domestic partnership benefits for Kaiser.

Both women, along with Robinson and other gay rights leaders also will attend the inauguration.

I saw Martin Luther King, Jr. before I heard his voice. My parents had a framed photo of him. It was a head shot and he stared somberly into the camera. For years I was sure the photo was taken in our living room because the wall color in the picture matched ours (a light green).

His voice cam through a record of his speeches, Whenever my folks put that record on, silence was required. When the adults ever talked about King, silence from the young was part of the bargain. Sure I had tons of questions, but asking them were inappropriate.

Their reverence for the man makes perfect sense. They were out of high-school when King initially came on the national scene and were a young couple with an elementary age child when he was killed.

My relationship with King is not as visceral. When I began school segregation was illegal and the fruits of King’s work was something I accepted without question. About ten years ago, my mother was talking about King and she called him a prophet.

“Come on, Ma” I sad. “He was just a man.”

She looked at me trying decide which part of my face to slap. Recognizing the look, I quickly retreated. Noted his historical importance but  added we do him a disservice when he make him out to be some type of religious figure. She was slightly mollified, but not by much.

I think of that conversation every MLK day because the man is lost under the hagiography. Snippets of his speech on the March on Washington get played in an endless loop and he now is cold  marble.  Under the cast of stone though was an imperfect man who was struggling imperfectly with how to make America a more perfect union. This is no attempt to denigrate his genius or work but King, and his freedom work,  are not served by keeping him on a pedestal. We can only learn from him when we stop the hushed reverence.

The Jan. 19 event in Georgia is the day before the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama, who has chosen Warren to give the inaugural invocation. Warren had backed the recent Proposition 8 ballot measure banning same-sex marriage in his home state of California.

On Monday, the inaugural committee announced that Episcopal Bishop V. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the world Anglican Communion, would lead prayer at the Lincoln Memorial on Jan. 18 for one of Obama’s kick-off inaugural events.

Warren, pastor of the 20,000-member Saddleback Church in Southern California and author of the best-selling “The Purpose Driven Life,” will appear on Monday at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King preached from 1960 until his death in 1968.

Well it’s over. The confetti has been thrown and the slogans repeated over and over and over again. Barack Obama gave his acceptance speech last night. There were multiple rhetorical tricks like flipping the celebrity charge on its head and the constant refrain about his middle America background. However, the one thing that Obama did shows how race is a tender and touchy subject.

Yesterday was the 45th anniversary of the  March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Organized by Bayard Rustin, the speakers at the rally were a who’s who of American history: Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph, Whitney Young, John Lewis, and a reverend named Martin Luther King, Jr.

As the first black man to lead a major party in a November election, Obama has a lot of history thrown at his feet. But as his campaign has proven, Obama is leery of taking on the race mantle. Hard to get elected as president of a whole nation if you only play to 13 percent of the population.

So last night after making a case for why people should vote for him, reasons that were post-racial, Obama mentioned the historic event that changed the course of the country’s history. Obama didn’t say King’s name, just called him a “Georgia preacher.” Nor did Obama mention any of King’s complaints with the country. Instead Obama stressed the universal message of King’s speech, without quoting  the over-used “content of their character” line.

And that has always been the crux of Obama’s campaign. Universal themes stressed by a man of color. A willingness to acknowledge our racial divide, but also an insistence that it isn’t as large as we assume.

No matter what happens in November, that’s worth remembering.

He was Bayard Rustin. He was gay. And he is all but forgotten during our country’s annual January commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Rustin was 17 years older than King, and had been working for the cause since leaving college. Born into a Quaker family in 1912 in a town where the Klu Klux Klan paraded proudly down the street on holidays and where blacks weren’t able to take a seat in white restaurants or theaters, Rustin was soon convinced that non-violence was the answer to winning black civil rights. He traveled the country with the Fellowship of Reconcilliation, calling on “angelic troublemakers” to use their bodies to protest unfair conditions.

Rustin was athletic, polite and handsome. He was also completely unashamed of being gay. He met his first partner, Davis Platt, at a conference at Bryn Mawr College.

In the documentary “Brother Outsider,” showing today on Logo (Logo is the parent company of 365Gay), Platt recalls what Rustin was like: “Such intelligence, such a love of life, such a sense of humor, really a lot of wisdom. And he had absolutely no shame about being gay.”

That comfort with his gayness ended in 1953 in Padadena, Calif., when he was caught by the police in the backseat of a car with two other men. His conviction for “sexual perversion” was to haunt him the rest of his life. It convinced him to tone down his sexuality in public, and was used by foes of the civil rights movement – notably Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-SC) – to try to convince the public that King was working with moral deviants.

Rustin was a long-time advisor to King – the documentary says that it was Rustin who really taught King the practical application of non-violence. Though all was not rosy, usually because of King’s fears that Rustin would subvert the civil rights movement with his homosexuality. Though they were later reconciled, Rustin’s strongest falling out with King, according to the documentary, came when Sen. Adam Clayton Powell threatened that he would accuse King and Rustin of having a sexual affair. King blinked, and friends recall Rustin as feeling personally betrayed.

While King inspired, Rustin’s genius lay in the actual organizing of people and events. Rustin set up phone banks and transportation for the 1963 March on Washington, making the impossible possible. He insured that African-Americans around the country knew about the march, that every group that wanted a bus to Washington got one, and that no buses got lost.

King and Rustin were hoping for a crowd of 100,000 – instead, over 200,000 people from around the country packed the Washington Mall to hear King give his soaring “I Have a Dream” speech.

For the rest of his life, Rustin would continue his activism, working to end nuclear war, advocating on behalf of Soviet Jews and Israel, visiting refugee camps, and working with the gay and lesbian civil rights movement.

In 1977, Rustin met Walter Naegle in Times Square – they would be parters until Rustin’s death of a ruptured appendix in 1987. Perhaps it was this relationship – and the changing times – that spurred him once again to be open about being gay.

Toward the end of his life, in 1986, Rustin said, “Indeed, if you want to know whether today people believe in democracy, if you want to know whether they are true democrats, if you want to know whether they are human rights activists, the question to ask is, ‘What about gay people?’ Because that is now the litmus paper by which this democracy is to be judged.”

Bayard Rustin. An activist for civil rights for all until the end.

You can watch the documentary “Brother Outsider” today on Logo. Check your local listings for details, or see http://www.logoonline.com.