Harvey Milk’s Name Stripped From Navy Ship During Pride Month, Angering LGBTQ+ Community

Just ahead of Pride festivities in San Francisco, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s move to strip the name of gay rights trailblazer and veteran Harvey Milk from a naval ship drew widespread criticism from the LGBTQ+ community and allies.

The ship will now be named after Oscar V. Peterson, a U.S. Navy chief who posthumously received the Medal of Honor for valor during World War II, Hegseth said in a video posted on the social media platform X on Friday.

“We are taking the politics out of ship naming,” he said. “We’re not renaming this ship to anything political.”

LGBTQ+ advocates and allies called the renaming inherently political, a slap in the face for all queer people and a sign of a step back on equal rights nationally.

San Francisco Supervisor Matt Dorsey sits at Milk’s former desk in the supervisors’ chambers. He questioned whether the U.S. military has anything better to do than performative actions when there are “other issues the country should be focusing on.”

“What is troubling to see is there is a mean-spiritedness that is pervading the conservative movement right now,” he said. “This is an example of right-wing woke. It is deeply unserious.”

Nicole Murray-Ramirez, an LGBTQ+ rights activist who helped launch the letter campaign to get Milk’s name on the ship, learned about the name change on Friday morning after speaking at the Stonewall Inn in New York City the previous evening.

“To do this on a Pride weekend is beyond evil and it’s cruel,” said Murray-Ramirez, who leads the International Imperial Courts of the United States, Canada and Mexico, a grassroots LGBTQ+ network. “But Harvey Milk’s legacy will last forever, we are not going to let this stand.”

Murray-Ramirez said he hopes the renaming mobilizes LGBTQ+ people to vote and protest as the Trump administration targets queer people.

“We’re a resilient community, we will continue the fight and this is absolutely a war,” he said. “We also have to be prepared to return to the streets.”

Milk, one of the first openly gay elected officials in the country, served as a U.S. Navy officer before he was forced to retire after his sexuality was made public. He was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977 and served until his assassination the following year. The USNS Harvey Milk was christened in 2021 in honor of the civil rights icon.

Milk’s nephew and Harvey Milk Foundation co-founder Stuart Milk wrote in a Facebook post that the renaming is “petty and dishonest” since his uncle “served honorably” in the Navy.

“Neither the bullets that took his life, nor the stripping of his name from this ship will stop my uncle’s message of hope, hope unshamed, hope unafraid, from reaching all that yearn for acceptance and love across the globe,” Milk wrote.

While some on social media lauded Hegseth’s decision, others like the progressive veterans group VoteVets wrote that “erasing LGBTQ+ veterans is a disgrace.”

The renaming comes after Hegseth in early June ordered a review of vessels named after civil rights leaders, including Harvey Milk.

“This is not about political activists, unlike the previous administration,” Hegseth said.

At the time, state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, called the decision part of the Trump administration’s “campaign to erase all LGBTQ people from public life.”

For many in the LGBTQ+ community, Milk’s legacy is deeply tied to the Bay Area’s gay rights movement, Wiener said, and the ship served as a powerful acknowledgment of that history and his leadership.

It will take up to six months to repaint the name and any branding on the ship, according to a spokesperson for the Department of Defense. “There are no plans to rename any other ships in this class,” the spokesperson said.