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........

© Common Dreams