Dem
47
GOP
53
This, of course, is Pride Month. We have a couple of items planned on that subject; they're not quite ready yet, but please keep an eye out for them. For now, however, there is some relevant news that requires a timely write-up.
We'll start by noting, perhaps apropos to our "Never Forget" series this month, that before Harvey Milk was an LGBTQ icon, he was a high school graduate who did not know what to do with his life, and who did not take well to the profession he initially chose, which was teaching. Since both of his parents had served in the Navy during World War I, they suggested he give that a shot. So, in July of 1951, Milk enlisted in the U.S. Navy Reserve as an officer candidate. His superiors saw potential in him and, with the Korean War having gotten underway, he earned a commission fairly quickly, being appointed a Lieutenant (junior grade) in May of 1952.
Milk served in the Navy for about 4 years; his two postings were the USS Chanticleer and USS Kittiwake, which were both rescue submarines assigned to the area off the Korean coast. Rescue subs do pretty much what their name suggests; if something is underwater, they try to help bring it up to the surface. That might be men trapped in a sub that has broken down, or a ship that has capsized, or it might be materiel that has reached the sea floor, and really shouldn't stay there.
Eventually, Milk was outed as gay, with several witnesses reporting that he had sexual liaisons with men while in the service. That was, of course, impermissible back then. However, the Navy did not particularly want the publicity of high-profile courts martial of gay sailors. Not only did that service already have a reputation, of sorts, more than 20 years before the song "In the Navy" was recorded by the Village People, but in that era, "gay" and "communist" were dangerously being close to synonyms. So, if there were headlines about all the gay sailors, it wouldn't be too long before a Joseph McCarthy or a William Jenner started asking questions about how many communists had infiltrated that branch of the service.
Consequently, Milk was offered, and took, the standard deal that was used in that time to resolve this dilemma. He "voluntarily" resigned his commission in January of 1955, agreed to give up any benefits associated with his military service, and was given an "Other Than Honorable" discharge. In exchange for agreeing to this, Milk was not court martialed, and his personal business remained personal. Were his orientation to have become public knowledge in 1955, he would have been unemployable, he might well have ended up as a target of violence, and, in many jurisdictions, homosexuality was punishable by prison time. So, you can see why he made the choice he did.
Milk drifted around for the next decade, but eventually found some stability in the Castro District of San Francisco, which had emerged as a gay enclave in the 1940s, and where his orientation was considerably less likely to be a source of problems (note that "considerably less likely" is not the same as "not likely"; the San Francisco PD of that era was notoriously hostile toward gay men). He opened up a camera shop, became a prominent figure in the neighborhood, and was eventually elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He took office on January 8, 1978, the first openly gay man elected to political office in America (without having first been elected as an in-the-closet "straight" person) and served for a bit less than a year. As most readers will know, his time in office ended with his assassination at the hands for former colleague Dan White, who also shot and killed Mayer George Moscone. (Don't get us started on White's "Twinkie defense," which is probably the most misunderstood bit of American jurisprudence outside of the McDonald's coffee case.)
And that gives us the foundation for yesterday's news. In May of 2016, the Navy announced the construction of a new class of replenishment oilers. As with "rescue submarine," the name pretty much tells you what this kind of ship does—they deliver both fuel and supplies to ships at sea, so those ships don't have to put into port to resupply. At that time, the Navy further advised that the first ship of the class would be the USNS John Lewis, after the then-sitting congressman. The other ships in the John Lewis class of replenishment oilers were to be named after other prominent civil rights leaders and activists, among them USNS Thurgood Marshall, USNS Ruth Bader Ginsburg, USNS Harriet Tubman and USNS Dolores Huerta. In case you are wondering, the designation USNS means the ship is operated by civilians; USS means it's operated by military personnel. Or by Starfleet.
The Navy names ships well before construction begins; it's an old naval tradition. And so, none of the latter four ships exists yet (at least, not in finished form). However, the John Lewis launched on January 12, 2021. And five others of the class have also launched, the USNS Earl Warren, the USNS Robert F. Kennedy, the USNS Lucy Stone, the USNS Sojourner Truth and... the USNS Harvey Milk.
Except that it's not the USNS Harvey Milk anymore. Or, at least, it won't be for very much longer. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who clearly spends most of his time trying to find ways to express his disdain for LGBTQ people, is going to rename it. The plan was to make the announcement on June 13, and that timing—right in the middle of Pride Month—was very deliberate. However, someone at the Pentagon leaked the memo to military.com, presumably to protest Hegseth's decision.
Because of this jumping of the gun, the new name has not been decided yet. Allow us to suggest the USNS Sappho; everyone likes poetry, right? There is also some scuttlebutt that Hegseth will get rid of the other "DEI" names, though it's not clear if that just applies to the ships that have not launched yet, or to those already at sea. It's also not clear if it applies to WASPs who did helpful things for people of color (like Earl Warren), or just to brown people and Jews. As to the removal of Milk's name, the Hegseth memo says that it is part of his and the President's plan to reestablish "the warrior culture" in the U.S. military. Because, after all, how can you call someone who served 4 years, and during an actual war no less, a "warrior"? One wonders if Hegseth will also update the Naval register to assign a new name to the World War I-era USS Von Steuben, which is the first U.S. Navy ship to be named after a gay man (Maj. Gen. Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, a Revolutionary War hero, and definitely a "warrior").
In a note that is undoubtedly related, the White House has made clear that, once again, it will not be issuing a proclamation in honor of Pride Month. This has been a tradition for Democratic presidents since Bill Clinton issued the first one back in 1999, but not for Republican presidents, and certainly not for Trump.
Clearly, part of the motivation here is to curry favor with evangelical voters who dislike LGBTQ people. That would certainly explain why George W. Bush, who won reelection on the back of gay-marriage-aphobia, didn't recognize Pride Month or otherwise try to embrace the LGBTQ community. For Trump and Hegseth, however, we would guess that it goes beyond that. The Republican Party has had so much success with the anti-trans stuff, and perhaps with the anti-DEI stuff, that the administration is looking for any way to make a few more headlines of this sort.
We would not be doing our job, however, if we did not point out that they could be playing with fire. To start, anti-trans actions are clearly acceptable to a much broader swath of the American public than anti-gay actions are. And if the Trump administration pushes its luck too far, people may begin to conclude that the anti-trans stuff, just like the alleged concern for antisemitism, is just a smokescreen. There was a vicious wave of anti-gay sentiment in the 1970s, culminating in some very overtly anti-gay propositions on the California ballot. That, in turn, produced an anti-anti-gay backlash, such that even the evangelical president (Jimmy Carter) and the very conservative former governor (Ronald Reagan) spoke out strongly against the propositions. Not only were the propositions soundly defeated, but the turnout of gay-supporting voters is what allowed Milk to be elected to office.
We will also remind readers, as long as we are at it, of the Barbra Streisand effect. Before yesterday, we doubt that one American in ten knew there was a Navy ship named after Harvey Milk. Maybe not one in twenty or one in fifty. Now EVERYONE knows. And some of those people are going to read items like this one, or are going to do some of their own research, and learn a bit more about the man. Broadly speaking, that probably does not serve whatever agenda that Hegseth, in particular, is trying to serve. Plus, the next time a Democrat is president, the ship's name will probably be reverted.
Finally, as regards Hegseth, we'll just toss one other observation out there. In our experience, when a person works so very hard to communicate to the world how very bad these gays are, and how very much we need to do something about these gays, and how they are personally committed to stopping these gays from indulging in their gayness, there is usually... something going on there. (Z)