USNS Harvey Milk (T-AO-206) underway in San Francisco Bay, California (USA),
28 March 2024
In a quiet but deeply striking move, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ordered the renaming of USNS Harvey Milk, a replenishment oiler that had stood as a powerful emblem of the progress that LGBTQ people have made in the U.S. military.
Issued just days into Pride Month 2025, a time intended to celebrate the accomplishments and triumphs of the LGBTQ community, Hegseth’s order instead rebukes this recognition, choosing instead to further expand the Trump administration’s purge of anything remotely tied to diversity, equity and inclusion.
To understand why this decision resonates so painfully in our community, we must revisit who Harvey Milk was and what he meant not just to the fledgling gay rights movement, but what he meant personally to the institutions he swore to uphold.
Before he served the city of San Francisco as supervisor, Harvey Milk served the nation in a different way — first as an officer and diving instructor in the U.S. Navy, aboard the USS Kittiwake and later as a junior-grade lieutenant stationed at a submarine rescue base in San Diego during the Korean War.
Like many service members of his era, Milk faced a culture of enforced secrecy and rigid conformity due to his sexual orientation. In 1955, he was forced to resign, and, while he never spoke publicly about the details of his discharge, his departure was widely speculated to be because of his sexuality. Despite the shame the military tried to impose on him, Milk never gave up on fighting for the people in his community.
In 1977, after several unsuccessful campaigns, Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. From City Hall, he championed the city’s first gay rights ordinance while remaining deeply engaged with the grassroots movement that had propelled him into office.
“He knew he was going to be on the inside,” recalled his friend, activist Cleve Jones. “But he also knew that we needed to keep up the pressure on the streets.”
Decades later, in 2016, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus announced that a new Navy ship would bear Milk’s name to honor his service to this country and acknowledge the Navy’s historic mistreatment of LGBTQ personnel while at the same time promising to chart a new path forward.
The USNS Harvey Milk launched in 2021, conducting resupply missions across the East Coast until it began scheduled maintenance in Mobile, Ala., earlier this year.\
Now, with a single stroke of a pen, Hegseth has rescinded this gesture of reconciliation. The timing — renaming the ship during Pride Month — was infuriatingly intentional on Hegseth’s part. And his efforts to “re-introduce the warrior culture” in the U.S. military rings hollow, coming as it does from a TV presenter threatened by the same activists who had challenged the status quo decades ago.
If honoring a man forced out of the Navy simply for being gay is “too feminine,” then perhaps we should be asking: Just whose masculinity is being protected here?
Milk’s life was defined by his ability to navigate both protest and policy. This duality of insider and outsider, public servant and proud street activist is what made Milk so dangerous to the status quo. It is also what makes him so worthy of national recognition.
To strip his name from a Navy vessel is to deny both the pain and the progress of LGBTQ people in uniform.
What makes this erasure especially painful now is that it comes at a time when queer Americans are again under attack, when we’re seeing statewide bans on discussions of queer people in classrooms and rising violence against LGBTQ people in public. We are once again fighting for our place in the story of America.
At this moment, symbols matter. Representation matters. Memory matters.
Removing Harvey Milk’s name from that ship reinforces just whose service is considered worthy of honoring. It tells every queer sailor, Marine, soldier and airman that their struggles being honored was a mistake. That authenticity must be set aside in favor of an imposed conservatism that encourages erasing their very existence.
Milk once said, “It takes no compromise to give people their rights.” His name on that ship was never a compromise. It was a correction. And now that correction has been undone.
As we reflect this Pride Month on how far we’ve come, and how far we still must go, we should recommit ourselves to defending the gains we’ve made. The struggle for equality is not linear, and victories are never permanent unless we defend them.
Harvey Milk gave us a blueprint: Fight in the halls of power, and fight in the streets. Do both, always arm-in-arm. His name may have been removed from the hull of a ship, but his legacy remains unmoored only if we let it be.
Let us speak his name louder than ever.
Michael Hendrix works in Austin as a lobbyist when the Texas Legislature is in session. He lives in Irving and is active in the North Texas LGBTQ community.
What did Harvey Milk ever do for the military?