Navy to Name Ship After Gay Rights Icon Harvey Milk: Report

The United States Navy will be naming one of their ships after gay rights icon and San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, according to a report by the U.S. Naval Institute, which cites a Congressional notice obtained by USNI News.

The July 14 notice, which was signed by Secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus, indicates that he plans to name a planned Military Sealift Command fleet oiler, USNS Harvey Milk, according to USNI.

The ship is reportedly being built by General Dynamics NASSCO in San Diego, California.

Milk, who moved from New York to settle in San Francisco in the seventies, was elected to the SF Board of Supervisors, becoming the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in California. In 1972, he and his partner Scott Smith – portrayed by James Franco in the film “Milk” – opened Castro Camera on 575 Castro Street, which he operated until his assassination in 1978. His involvement in San Francisco’s gay rights movement earned him the name “Mayor of Castro Street.”

He joined the U.S. Navy during the Korean War and served on the submarine rescue ship USS Kittiwake (ASR-13) as a diving officer in San Diego. Milk came from a Navy family. He was honorably discharged from service as a lieutenant junior grade, according to USNI.

On Nov. 27, 1978, Milk was shot inside San Francisco City Hall. He was wearing his U.S. Navy diver’s belt buckle at the time, according to the report.

Ever since the 2011 repeal of the Department of Defense’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, California lawmakers have pushed to name a ship after Milk.

“This action by the U.S. Secretary of the Navy will further send a green light to all the brave men and women who serve our nation that honesty, acceptance and authenticity are held up among the highest ideals of our military,” Milk’s nephew Stuart Milk told the San Diego LGBT Weekly in 2012.

On Thursday, San Francisco Supervisor Scott Wiener, who signed a resolution urging the Navy to name a ship after Milk, applauded the Navy's apparent decision.

“This is an incredible day for the LGBT community and for our country. As a gay man and a San Franciscan, I'm incredibly proud that the Navy is honoring Harvey Milk — and the entire LGBT community — by naming a ship after him," Weiner said.

"This momentous decision sends a powerful message around the world about who we are as a country and the values we hold," he said. "When Harvey Milk served in the military, he couldn't tell anyone who he truly was. Now our country is telling the men and women who serve, and the entire world, that we honor and support people for who they are. Harvey Milk's strength continues to reverberate throughout our city, our country, and the world.”

From reading your post, I conclude you are fine with with the normalization, glorification and proselytization of homosexuality in all aspects of society, especially in the military. That’s okay for you.

I am not for it, so yeah. It is my “hang up”. I don’t care if someone is a homosexual, that is their business. I deal with them on a personal and professional level and it isn’t my issue, so I don’t care. I treat them as a person if they treat me as such. It isn’t my business. However, when someone tries to mainstream homosexuality, works to have laws changed to put a homosexual relationship on the same legal, societal and religious footing as a relationship between a man and a woman, and treats it like a civil rights issue instead of the sexual peccadillo it is, you are right I have an issue with it.

The fact that Harvey Milk served in the Navy or any armed forces has absolutely nothing at all to do with it. Nothing. As you said, lots of people have and are. John Kerry served in the Navy and should have been imprisoned, if not worse. His prior service has nothing to do with it.

What angers me is the deliberate use of this type of tactic as a cudgel by the left to destroy the military and society as we know it, and change it into a fever swamp of moral relativism where everything goes and nobody has the right to judge anyone else on their conduct, morality, or behavior.

You don’t think it matters, is no big deal. I think that attitude is what has brought this country to where we are.

We joke about the poor bubbleheads who have to serve on the USS Jimmy Carter, but this takes it all to another level entirely.

He was a lousy POTUS. He & Ford opened the door for state sponsored terrorism. That said Carter despite his many faults brought back Navy traditions under his tenure. February 1977 there were no Bosun whistles, no Crackerjacks, lifers were leaving, people were deserting literally under a policy started under Rummy which was the 31 day AWOL discharge. To his credit all got addressed in Carter's tenure even a decent retention effort. $15-$18K bonus to re-up in 1980 kept a lot of guys in. Carter was also connected directly to the Nuclear Propulsion Program and showed some heroics in his time in the program at Chalk River. That added to POTUS yeah I could see him having a namesake.

A lousy POTUS in most aspects but he seemed to be a good Naval Officer an underling Rickover. Carter like many men left the service going back home to take the roll as head of his family after his dad passed.

I can’t say every person feels that way. But I have talked to enough veterans, served myself, read enough accounts to know that it is an extraordinary common thing.

People are human. Any young man who volunteers or is drafted is going to hate being on a floating hunk of metal at times, and would do or say nearly anything to get it over with and be back home with his loved ones and friends. I don’t think I have ever known a sailor who didn’t feel that way at some point. I felt that way myself on more than one occasion, and I can only imagine the exponential negative feeling it must have been for men who were drafted, put on a ship, and didn’t see their home for several years, in terrible, uncomfortable hot or cold environments with the threat of death hanging over your head. As another poster referenced, the acronym “FTN” was not an unknown or rare thing to hear people say or see scrawled somewhere.

But, at the same time, most men are young, and those years are transformative years. I only did one tour and got out, didn’t want to do it for the rest of my life. But, even at the time, and in retrospect most clearly, I recognized that I got far, far more out of my military service than they got out of me. I saw things and learned lessons I never, ever in a million years would have seen or learned if I had got out of High School and gone right to work or into college. Never. I would not be the person I am, I would be someone completely different.

And I am grateful beyond words for it, because my outlook on life is quite different. Even today, 35 years later, there are times when I go down to the 24 Hour store on the corner to buy something at 1:00 AM, and...it pops into my mind: “It is good to have the freedom to do this. To do what I want, to go where I want to go.”

When you are on a ship or in many parts of the military, you become acutely aware of that limitation, that your life does NOT belong to you. You CANNOT do what you would like to. And that’s the way it is.

Even apart from men who have served in the terrible crucible of actual combat on a ship, who develop a special bond with their shipmates that withstands the test of time, men still form a bond. For most of you, you are young. You pull into port in a place you have never been or seen, and you get to experience the world in a way many people simply don’t, and you do it with people who are your friends at the time. And you form a bond, and the ship is there, like a giant, unseen presence, but there nonetheless. You have to be back on it at a certain time, and you are drawn back to it, not because you WANT to go back, but you have to. And you come aboard, and there is that “ship smell”.

You could blindfold me and put earplugs in my ears, take me on a stretcher onto a ship in a dead flat calm, so there is no way I could tell you where I was being taken, and I could tell you I was on a ship. It is the smell. It is a distinctive combination of steel, paint, rust, oil, fuel, and many other smells, including human smell. Those all mingle into a smell that just isn’t found anywhere else. (I am not saying it is a “good” smell, I am saying it is distinctive.)

And when you get back to your rack, and you climb in, and pull that stupid blue curtain around you (if you are lucky enough to have been able to trade around to get enough to string together into a real curtain, not one that simply blocks your lateral sight for a couple of feet) and the sound of the ship, the announcements over the 1MC, the noises of sailors walking by, it all mixes into a...home of sorts. It isn’t home with your family, but...it is a lot more comfortable than being wet and cold on some circling liberty launch that cannot get you on the ship because the water is too rough. So the ship acquires a...for lack of a real word...personality of some kind.

Some feel it more than others, and many don’t feel it until some years later, but some felt it acutely as they were in the water or on another ship watching a ship burn, roll over, and go down. But they feel it. You can see it in their eyes when they get a chance to visit it again (if they are lucky enough to do so) or in just talking about it.

A great deal of it is nostalgia. But then again, what in life doesn’t have an element of that when you get older. If you don’t get that, you probably don’t have a heart.

Yeah. I know. I served under Carter too, and there was some rot in the Navy at the time, but there was rot everywhere, in all branches, and in society too. I had a great time in the Seventies, but there were a LOT of people who struggled to get by, and the country and military had a general air of decrepitness and depressing disrepair to it.

I detest Carter and all he ever stood for, but like you, I recognize that he served and I don’t find fault with him there, even though I have no idea in what esteem he was held by in the eyes of his peers or the men who served under him. And having worked as a Nuc Med tech for years, I have interest in and have read quite a bit and understand to a better degree than most people the nuclear industry, and I had read accounts of the Chalk River incident. (we learned a lot from that about cleanup, which was why he was there. IIRC, Rickover sent Navy people up there on his own, didn’t consult with anyone)

The USS Jimmy Carter is a bit of a mild running joke, though I would be interested to hear what any of her crew members think.

But the USS Harvey Milk is an abomination.

I have a much higher regard for Gerald Ford than Carter, for a couple of reasons.

I don’t think Ford was ambitious in a presidential sense, and I don’t think he was talented or even very high on the intellectual scale. He was in over his head, and I thought he ran in 1976 because...he felt like it was his duty to do so. Not so with Carter, he wasn’t a dummy, but I don’t think he had a lick of common sense, he was all vinegar and ambition.

Plus, I respect the Hell out of Gerald Ford’s service in WWII. His service on the Monterrey was marked by some real danger and peril, and he acquitted himself well, coming within a few inches of losing his life. Plus, when the SS Mayaguez was hijacked, he took action. At a time when America would scream “No! No more!” going after the Mayaguez would be unpopular, and the military botched it pretty bad from nearly every angle, but I give him credit for making the decision.

We should be a lot more selective about ship names, period. The fact that other bad choices have been made does not justify this one. I would agree that it does help his case that at least Milk was a naval veteran, and apparently honorably discharged even though he later claimed for “political” purposes that he had been drummed out of the navy for his homosexuality (there is no evidence this ever happened, from what I have read, Milk made it up).

BUT, there are hundreds of thousands of US navy veterans over the generations who served in combat and/or had longer and much more significanat naval careers than Milk. There are TONS of naval veterans alive and dead who are far more deserving of this honor. From the standpoint of the US Navy there is no conceivable reason to name a ship after Harvey Milk. It is purely an outside “political” decision for purposes of promoting his homosexual life and politics.

When one adds in that Milk was documented as a scurrilous liar, also a close ally of the infamous Jim Jones (and Milk actually tried to head off federal investigation of Jones in the months before the massacre at “Jonestown”), there is no good reason to honor Harvey Milk in the US navy.

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