Harvey Milk Was a Patriot

By John Fund

Tuesday, June 03, 2025

 

Since he was sworn in four months ago after an airtight confirmation vote, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has continued to be at the center of controversy. We have seen Hegseth’s use of the Signal messaging app on an unsecure personal phone to discuss sensitive military operations, his firing of three senior aides, and a Pentagon chock-full of internal turmoil.

 

Now, Hegseth has reportedly approved the renaming of the USNS Harvey Milk, a fleet replacement oiler that was named in 2016 after the former Navy lieutenant and gay-rights leader who was assassinated in 1978.

 

It is extremely rare for the Navy to rename ships. The two most recent instances were in 2023, when a ship named after a Confederate Civil War victory and another after a Confederate general were changed by the Navy’s Naming Commission.

 

A memo obtained by CBS said the move to rename the USNS Harvey Milk is intended to realign the U.S. military with the Pentagon’s priority of “reestablishing the warrior culture.” A Pentagon official said that Navy Secretary John Phelan had been ordered to make the change by Hegseth himself.

 

A former Pentagon official told me that Hegseth’s decision is “low-rent.” It certainly seems like a gratuitous insult. It’s one thing to properly wipe away obnoxious DEI programs that have created a playpen for superficial thinking and morale-sapping behavior at the Pentagon. It’s another to deliberately remove the name of a historically significant figure. Harvey Milk had a real association with the Navy. During the Korean War, Milk volunteered for the Navy, in which both his father and mother had served. He served as a diving officer on a submarine rescue ship. According to his biography, in 1955, at age 25 and after four years of service, he left the service “after being officially questioned about his sexual orientation.”

 

Milk was proud to serve his country. According to his biographer, the late Randy Shilts, one of Milk’s motivations was his staunch anti-communism. Shilts, who knew Milk well, includes in the biography a fascinating discussion of how Milk remained a conservative until he was more than 40 years old.

 

“A hard-boiled conservative in the laissez-faire capitalist mold, Harvey and (his lover) Jack spent much of the fall of 1964 rising early so they could distribute Barry Goldwater leaflets in New York City subways. . . . He had a fierce argument with President Kennedy’s move against the steel industry. The raw use of federal power in the economy made Harvey’s blood boil.” Indeed, his close friend Craig Rodwell once called Milk a fascist, which made the young securities analyst laugh.

 

Reihan Salam, the president of the free-market Manhattan Institute, says that Milk’s views were neither uncommon nor inexplicable:

 

Faced with ferociously hostile police and the constant threat of public disgrace, it makes perfect sense that lesbians and gay men in the 1950s and 1960s would have been instinctive libertarians, leery of further empowering an already overweening, overly intrusive state. The Goldwater movement attracted all kinds of freethinkers who, like Milk, later gravitated towards a hippie sensibility.

 

Milk’s shift toward progressive politics began with his opposition to the Vietnam War and with his move to San Francisco, a mecca for young gays in 1969. But his move was gradual. According to Shilts:

 

Milk became the champion of the little guy against the big institution, be it big business or big government. Drawing from his Republican roots, Milk could talk a convincing fiscal conservative line. He called for the city to invest revenues in high interest accounts. He excoriated the poorly managed public transit system, insisting he would pass a law to force all its bureaucrats to take buses to work every day.

 

He also led a tax revolt after he set up his shop, Castro Camera, in 1973. Shortly after he opened, a state bureaucrat visited him to tell him that he could not legally run his business until he paid a $100 deposit ($750 today) against sales taxes. Shilts says that the shakedown — which was largely enforced only against gay business owners — “rekindled all of Milk’s old resentments about government interference in the economy.” He shouted at the bureaucrat: “You mean to tell me that if I don’t have $100, I can’t run a business in free enterprise America?”

 

Milk organized other business owners in protest, constantly upbraided the bureaucrat’s bosses in their offices, and finally bargained the deposit down to $30 ($225 today). James Peron, a scholar who has written on Milk’s politics, reports that the experience prompted Milk to run for office. He expanded his platform, condemning the “brutal and ruthless” firing of gays in the military and calling for an end to housing and employment discrimination. He truly had a holistic view of freedom. He once said during a rally in San Francisco, “Let me have my tax money go for my protection and not for my prosecution. Let my tax money go for the protection of me. Protect my home, protect my streets, protect my car, protect my life, protect my property.”

 

I grew up just outside San Francisco and can remember attending a speech during which Milk spoke eloquently about how human rights begin on neighborhood streets.

 

“It takes no compromising to give people their rights. It takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no political deal to give people freedom. It takes no survey to remove repression,” he said.

 

In 1977, Milk finally became one of the nation’s first openly gay officials by winning a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He was killed by a former board colleague in his office in 1978. One of the terminals at San Francisco International Airport is named after him. So too should the Navy ship continue to bear his name.

 

Stripping the ship of the only name it has ever had would be a retrograde move and needlessly exacerbate divisions in the armed forces. President Trump has taken an ax to counterproductive DEI government programs, but he has always exhibited an urbanite’s tolerance toward gays. After all, in 2020, Richard Grenell became the first openly gay member of a presidential cabinet as Trump’s director of national intelligence. And this year, Scott Bessent became the first openly gay secretary of the treasury in the nation’s history.

 

Allowing the Pentagon to make a petty and prejudicial move against the naming of a ship after Harvey Milk sullies that record and is no way to build esprit de corps in our military.