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Despite all the military threats facing the United States, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth decided to go to war with the gay community. During the first week of Pride Month, he ordered the Navy to rename the USNS Harvey Milk, which honors the late gay rights leader and Navy veteran.
“Secretary Hegseth is committed to ensuring that the names attached to all DOD installations and assets are reflective of the Commander-in-Chief’s priorities, our nation’s history, and the warrior ethos,” said a Pentagon spokesman.
On Thursday, Senate Republicans blocked an effort by Democrats to oppose Hegseth’s order.
It is notable that Hegseth, an outspoken Christian nationalist, targeted Milk, who was not only gay but also Jewish. Hegseth is aligned with a wing of the evangelical church that believes in establishing a theocratic Christian government in which Jews would be, at best, second-class citizens, and LGBTQ individuals would lose nearly all of the rights they have won in recent decades. Earlier this month, Hegseth promoted staffer Kingsley Wilson as the Pentagon’s chief press secretary, despite her history of disseminating antisemitic conspiracy theories and neo-Nazi rhetoric on social media.
Milk, a gay rights activist, was elected to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors (its city council) in 1977, making him, at that time, the most high-profile LBGTQ figure in the country. He was assassinated the following year.
In 2016, then-U.S. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, a former Mississippi governor, observed that “Even after death, his voice still spoke, his struggles continued and his cause taken up by countless others.” Milk, he said, “offered hope for millions of Americans who were being ostracized and prosecuted just for who they loved.”
When the ship was finally built and christened in 2021, then-Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro spoke at the event, “not just to amend the wrongs of the past, but to give inspiration to all of our LGBTQ community leaders who served in the Navy, in uniform today and in the civilian workforce as well, too, and to tell them that we’re committed to them in the future.”
To Hegseth, Milk is an obvious target in the Trump administration’s homophobic crusade. It is part of a broader effort to reverse decades of progress toward equality and human rights. Trump and his MAGA followers want to eliminate recognition of people and movements who fought discrimination against women, people of color, and LGBTQ Americans, including those who served in the military.
In March, the Pentagon removed from its website a story about Jackie Robinson’s military service, explaining that “DEI is dead at the Defense Department.” Toward that goal, the Pentagon also removed a page about Ira Hayes, a Native American who was one of the marines pictured raising the American flag at Iwo Jima during World War II, as well as articles about Native American code talkers. The DOD also deleted an article about a Tonawanda Seneca officer who drafted the terms of the Confederacy’s surrender at Appomattox. A DOD webpage about a Black Medal of Honor recipient, Maj. Gen. Charles Calvin Rogers, was also briefly taken down but later restored. A DOD page about an all-Japanese-American unit that fought in WWII was also removed and then restored.
The backlash against scrubbing mention of Robinson, the trailblazing baseball hero and activist, was so widespread that the Pentagon restored the story a day later, but Hegseth has pursued his crusade nevertheless.
According to a memo from Navy Secretary John Phelan, the names of other civil rights pioneers are also on the list to potentially be removed from Navy vessels, including Supreme Court justices Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, abolitionist leader Harriet Tubman, suffrage and anti-slavery activist Lucy Stone, NAACP leader Medgar Evers (who was assassinated by a Ku Klux Klan member), and farmworker organizer Cesar Chavez, who was also a Navy veteran.
Soon after taking office, Hegseth fired prominent Black and female officers, including Air Force Gen. CQ Brown, the second African American to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman selected as the Navy’s top officer, suggesting that they may have been promoted to those positions due to their race or gender rather than merit.
Hegseth has also pushed to eliminate courses at West Point and the Naval Academy that deal with gender, racial, and LGBTQ issues and remove books from their libraries that focus on these subject. He ordered the military academies to end consideration of gender, race, or ethnicity as part of their admissions standards. “Selecting anyone but the best erodes lethality, our warfighting readiness, and undercuts the culture of excellence in our armed forces,” said Hegseth.
Hegseth seems unaware that Harvey Milk was also a warrior. He demonstrated courage, leadership, and resilience in challenging the status quo. In his day, as an activist and public official, Milk did battle with conservative and religious right forces.
Milk is hardly an obscure figure. He was the subject of an acclaimed 1982 biography by Randy Shilts calledThe Mayor of Castro Street. The Times of Harvey Milk won the 1984 Academy Award for Best Documentary. In 2009, the film Milk garnered eight Academy Award nominations (including best picture). Sean Penn, who played Milk, won the Oscar for Best Actor, while Dustin Black earned the award for Best Original screenplay. That year, the California legislature established Milk’s birthday, May 22, as Harvey Milk Day throughout the state and President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Milk the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contribution to the gay rights movement. Obama explained, “He fought discrimination with visionary courage and conviction.”
Milk is to the gay rights movement what Jackie Robinson was to baseball, what Martin Luther King Jr. was to civil rights, what Betty Friedan was to the women’s movement, and what Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta were to the farmworkers movement.
When Milk was elected to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors in 1977, most gay women and men were still in the closet. Many states had laws against hiring gay people as schoolteachers and other occupations. This was just a few years after the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. It was before the AIDS epidemic, before Rock Hudson became the first movie star to acknowledge that he was gay. It was before Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” a policy that allowed gay and lesbian people to serve in the military. It was before Ellen DeGeneres, star of the TV comedy series “Ellen,” publicly came out as a lesbian during an interview on the Oprah Winfrey show and became the first openly gay character on a major TV show. It was before colleges offered courses in gay literature, history, and politics. It was before the Supreme Court ruled, in the 2003 decision Lawrence v. Texas, that state laws criminalizing gay or lesbian sex were unconstitutional, and ruled again in 2015, in Obergefell v. Hodges, that states could not prohibit same-sex couples from legally marrying.
Milk was not the first openly gay person to win public office. Voters in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan had already elected gay and lesbian candidates. But Milk’s victory, winning a powerful high-profile position in the nation’s gay capital, made him instantly a national figure.
Today, at least 1,336 openly LGBTQ persons are serving in public office, according to the LBGTQ Victory Institute, including three governors, 13 members of Congress, and 68 mayors.
Milk grew up in a middle-class Jewish family on Long Island outside New York City. In high school he played football and developed a passion for opera. He graduated from college in 1951 with a degree in math. Although he knew he was homosexual while he was still a teenager, he kept it secret. A college friend recalled, “He was never thought of as a possible queer — that’s what you called them then — he was a man’s man.”
After college Milk joined the navy for four years, serving as a diving officer aboard a submarine rescue ship during the Korean War. He was discharged in 1955 with the rank of lieutenant, junior grade.
For the next fifteen years, Milk drifted, taking a series of jobs for which he had little enthusiasm. He taught high school, then worked as a statistician for an insurance company and as an analyst for a Wall Street brokerage firm. During that period he had a number of relationships with men.
In 1972, Milk and his partner Scott Smith joined the exodus of hippies and gays migrating to San Francisco. The city had long been a haven for nonconformists and bohemians. The 1950s beatnik scene, with its overlapping circles of radicals and folk music devotees, morphed into the hippie culture of the 1960s, centered in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. After World War II, San Francisco had also become a mecca for gay men. By the 1960s, it had more gay people per capita than any other American city and a thriving gay scene of bars, businesses, and bathhouses. The Castro District became the city’s gay ghetto, but the official culture still reflected mainstream antipathy toward gays. For example, landlords could legally evict tenants whom they discovered to be homosexual.
As their numbers grew, gays became a political force in the city. Two organizations — the Society for Individual Rights and the Daughters of Bilitis — began challenging the police department’s arbitrary and sometimes brutal persecution of gay bars and entrapment of gays having sex in public parks. In 1971, 2,800 gay men were arrested for having sex in public restrooms and parks. That year Richard Hongisto, a straight ex-cop who had fought the police department’s bias against gays and minorities, ran successfully for county sheriff with the support of the gay community. Other liberal politicians began to court gay and lesbian support. Key gay leaders, including the publisher of the gay newspaper the Advocate, started the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club in 1971 to mobilize gay voters.
Milk lived as an openly gay man. He and Smith had opened Castro Camera. The store’s back room became a gathering place for Milk’s widening circle of friends. He frequently complained about taxes on small businesses, underfunded schools (which he learned about when a teacher asked to borrow a projector because her school’s equipment did not work), and ongoing discrimination against gays by employers, landlords, and cops. In 1973 Milk decided to run for supervisor. “I finally reached the point where I knew I had to become involved or shut up,” he recalled.
Milk, who still looked like an aging hippie, ran a spirited but low-budget and chaotic campaign, drawing on patrons of gay bars angry about police harassment. His fiery speeches and flare attracted media attention, and he garnered 16,900 votes — winning the Castro District and other liberal neighborhoods, finishing tenth out of thirty-two candidates. It was not enough to win the citywide campaign, but it made Milk a visible presence.
Milk and other gay business owners founded the Castro Village Association, which chose Milk as its president. He also organized the Castro Street Fair to attract more customers to the area. By then, Milk had started referring to himself as the “mayor of Castro Street.”
Milk ran a better campaign for supervisor in 1975. He cut his hair and wore suits. His community organizing paid off. He had more money and more volunteers. Thanks to his activism, he earned the support of key unions. This time he came in seventh, one spot away from winning a supervisor’s seat.
Milk remained involved in grassroots gay activism, which was facing a backlash by the religious right across the country. The growing antigay climate had real consequences. Random attacks on gays in the Castro increased. Upset by the lack of police protection, groups of gays began patrolling the neighborhood themselves. On June 21, 1977 conservative thugs attacked Robert Hillsborough, a gay man, yelling “Faggot!” while stabbing him fifteen times, killing him. A few weeks later, 250,000 people attended the Gay Freedom Day Parade, fueled by anger as well as by gay pride.
Milk’s leadership in these mobilizations, plus his previous campaigns, gave him an advantage when he ran again for supervisor in 1977.
Equally important, voters had just approved a city charter change to elect supervisors by geographic districts instead of citywide. The new District 5, centered in the Castro area, was Milk’s home base. That November, Milk was finally elected to the Board of Supervisors, beating sixteen other candidates, half of them gay. This time he had an effective campaign manager, a large cadre of volunteers, and the endorsement of the San Francisco Chronicle.
Milk’s victory made national news. He became a close ally of Mayor George Moscone, a progressive who had been elected two years earlier. Together, they challenged the power of the big corporations and real estate developers that were gentrifying the city and changing its skyline. They supported rent control, unions, small businesses, neighborhood organizations, and a tax on suburban commuters. Milk made sure that he responded to constituency concerns, such as fixing potholes and installing stop signs at dangerous intersections.
In fact, soon after taking office, he sponsored two bills. The first outlawed discrimination based on sexual orientation. Milk was responding to his core constituency, San Francisco’s gay community, which had endured years of bigotry from employers, landlords, and other institutions. The second bill dealt with an issue that, according to polls, voters considered the number-one problem in the city: dog feces. Milk’s ordinance, called the “pooper scooper” law, required dog owners to scoop up their pets’ excrement. After it passed, Milk invited the press to a local park, where, with cameras rolling, he intentionally stepped in the smelly substance. The stunt attracted national media attention as well as extensive local press coverage, as Milk had anticipated. He later explained why he pulled off the photo op: “All over the country, they’re reading about me, and the story doesn’t center on me being gay. It’s just about a gay person who is doing his job.”
Milk was a big personality, but he was also a serious and brilliant politician. After his election, he was the most visible gay public figure in America. At a time when homophobia was still deeply entrenched in American culture, Milk encouraged gays and lesbians to come out of the closet. He received thousands of letters from gays around the country, thanking him for being a role model. “I thank God,” wrote a sixty-eight-year-old lesbian, “I have lived long enough to see my kind emerge from the shadows and join the human race.”
Milk knew that to win elections and pass legislation, he had to build bridges with other constituencies and with his straight colleagues on the Board of Supervisors. He cultivated support from tenants’ groups, the elderly, small businesses, environmentalists, and labor unions.
Milk forged an unlikely alliance with the Teamsters union, which represented truck drivers. The Teamsters wanted to pressure beer distributors to sign a contract with the union to improve pay and working conditions for its members. They were particularly angry at Coors, which of all the beer companies was the most hostile toward unions. A Teamsters organizer approached Milk for help in reaching out to gay bars, a big portion of Coors’s customer base. Within days, Milk had canvassed the gay bars in and around the heavily gay Castro District, encouraging them to stopping selling Coors beer. With help from Arab and Chinese grocers, the gay boycott of Coors was successful. Milk had earned a political ally among the Teamsters. At Milk’s urging, the union also began to recruit more gay truck drivers.
Much of Milk’s eleven months in office — before he and Moscone were assassinated — was spent organizing opposition to a statewide referendum sponsored by State Senator John Briggs to ban gays from teaching in public schools. Milk went up and down California speaking out against the initiative. He debated Briggs on television. He crashed Briggs’s events, generating media stories. When Briggs claimed that gay teachers abused their students, Milk countered with statistics documenting that most pedophiles were straight, not gay.
Opposition to the Briggs initiative mobilized gays and their liberal allies. They knocked on doors, wrote letters to the editor, and paid for TV and radio ads. More than a quarter of a million people attended that summer’s Gay Freedom Day Parade in San Francisco. (Similar events in other cities attracted record numbers). Milk rode in an open car and later gave an inspiring speech that, according to the San Francisco Examiner, “ignited the crowd.” He said:
On this anniversary of Stonewall, I ask my gay sisters and brothers to make the commitment to fight. For themselves, for their freedom, for their country. We will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets. We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions. We are coming out to tell the truths about gays! I’m tired of the silence. So I’m going to talk about it. And I want you to talk about it. You must come out. Come out to your parents, your relatives. Come out to your friends.
On November 7, 1978, Briggs’s initiative lost by more than a million votes, with 58 percent of voters — and 75 percent in San Francisco — opposing it. It was a stunning victory for the gay community, and Milk was its most visible leader.
Twenty days later, Milk and Moscone were dead. On November 27, former supervisor Dan White, carrying a gun, climbed into city hall through a basement window and shot both public officials. White had represented one of the city’s more conservative neighborhoods and was the only supervisor to oppose Milk’s antidiscrimination ordinance. Frustrated by his marginalization on the board, he abruptly resigned on November 10, only ten months after being sworn in. He quickly changed his mind and asked Moscone to reappoint him to his old position. Moscone refused to do so, in part because of Milk’s lobbying against White.
White was charged with first-degree murder, making him eligible for the death penalty. A conviction seemed a slam dunk. But White’s lawyer claimed that he was not responsible for his actions because of his mental state, which the lawyer termed “diminished capacity.” On May 21, 1979, a jury acquitted White of the first-degree murder charge but found him guilty of voluntary manslaughter. He was sentenced to seven years in prison. The verdict triggered riots outside city hall as gays and their allies unleashed their fury.
Milk had anticipated his murder. He had received many hate letters and death threats. He recorded his thoughts on tape, indicating who he wanted to succeed him if he were killed, saying, “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.” He added, “I would like to see every gay lawyer, every gay architect come out, stand up and let the world know. That would do more to end prejudice overnight than anybody could imagine. I urge them to do that, urge them to come out. Only that way will we start to achieve our rights.”
Milk’s charisma and political savvy helped unleash the power of gay voters and advance the issue of gay rights, including the growing number of gay and lesbian elected officials and widening acceptance of same-sex marriage.
The Trump administration’s, and Hegseth’s, recent efforts to paper over and rewrite history suggests they don’t want the current and future generations to know about that movement, its accomplishments, and the persistent battle for LGBTQ equality.
Responding on his Facebook page to news of the effort to rename the USNS Harvey Milk, gay playwright Harvey Fierstein described the move as a “crime against the gay community” and wrote that Trump is a “vile, petty, stupid, destructive, jealous, illiterate, hateful, ego-maniacal and dangerous shmuck.”
California State Senator Scott Wiener, who is also gay, told the Los Angeles Times that Hegseth’s move against Milk is part of a “systematic campaign to eliminate LGBTQ people from public life.”
“They want us to go away, to go back in the closet, not to be part of public life,” added Wiener. “And we’re not going anywhere.”
