[[link removed]]

WHY IS PETE HEGSETH GOING TO WAR AGAINST HARVEY MILK 47 YEARS AFTER
HE WAS ASSASSINATED?  
[[link removed]]


 

Peter Dreier
June 6, 2025
Talking Points Memo
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Milk is a target in the Trump administration’s homophobic
crusade, part of a broader effort to eliminate recognition of people
who fought discrimination against women, people of color, and LGBTQ
Americans, including those who served in the military _

Harvey Milk in front of Castro Camera, June 1977, HARVEY MILK
ARCHIVES-SCOTT SMITH COLLECTION, HORMEL GAY & LESBIAN CENTER, SAN
FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY

 

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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]],
the second African American to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, and Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman selected
[[link removed]] 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 called_The 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
[[link removed]], 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 and minorities, ran successfully for county sheriff with
the support of the gay community. Other liberal politicians began to
court gay and lesbian support. Key gay leaders, including the
publisher of the gay newspaper the_ Advocate_, started the Alice B.
Toklas Democratic Club in 1971 to mobilize gay voters.

Milk lived as an openly gay man. He and Smith had opened Castro
Camera. The store’s back room became a gathering place for Milk’s
widening circle of friends. He frequently complained about taxes on
small businesses, underfunded schools (which he learned about when a
teacher asked to borrow a projector because her school’s equipment
did not work), and ongoing discrimination against gays by employers,
landlords, and cops. In 1973 Milk decided to run for supervisor. “I
finally reached the point where I knew I had to become involved or
shut up,” he recalled.

Milk, who still looked like an aging hippie, ran a spirited but
low-budget and chaotic campaign, drawing on patrons of gay bars angry
about police harassment. His fiery speeches and flare attracted media
attention, and he garnered 16,900 votes — winning the Castro
District and other liberal neighborhoods, finishing tenth out of
thirty-two candidates. It was not enough to win the citywide campaign,
but it made Milk a visible presence.

Milk and other gay business owners founded the Castro Village
Association, which chose Milk as its president. He also organized the
Castro Street Fair to attract more customers to the area. By then,
Milk had started referring to himself as the “mayor of Castro
Street.”

Milk ran a better campaign for supervisor in 1975. He cut his hair and
wore suits. His community organizing paid off. He had more money and
more volunteers. Thanks to his activism, he earned the support of key
unions. This time he came in seventh, one spot away from winning a
supervisor’s seat.

Milk remained involved in grassroots gay activism, which was facing a
backlash by the religious right across the country. The growing
antigay climate had real consequences. Random attacks on gays in the
Castro increased. Upset by the lack of police protection, groups of
gays began patrolling the neighborhood themselves. On June 21, 1977
conservative thugs attacked Robert Hillsborough, a gay man, yelling
“Faggot!” while stabbing him fifteen times, killing him. A few
weeks later, 250,000 people attended the Gay Freedom Day Parade,
fueled by anger as well as by gay pride.

Milk’s leadership in these mobilizations, plus his previous
campaigns, gave him an advantage when he ran again for supervisor in
1977.

Equally important, voters had just approved a city charter change to
elect supervisors by geographic districts instead of citywide. The new
District 5, centered in the Castro area, was Milk’s home base. That
November, Milk was finally elected to the Board of Supervisors,
beating sixteen other candidates, half of them gay. This time he had
an effective campaign manager, a large cadre of volunteers, and the
endorsement of the _San Francisco Chronicle_.

Milk’s victory made national news. He became a close ally of Mayor
George Moscone, a progressive who had been elected two years earlier.
Together, they challenged the power of the big corporations and real
estate developers that were gentrifying the city and changing its
skyline. They supported rent control, unions, small businesses,
neighborhood organizations, and a tax on suburban commuters. Milk made
sure that he responded to constituency concerns, such as fixing
potholes and installing stop signs at dangerous intersections.

In fact, soon after taking office, he sponsored two bills. The first
outlawed discrimination based on sexual orientation. Milk was
responding to his core constituency, San Francisco’s gay community,
which had endured years of bigotry from employers, landlords, and
other institutions. The second bill dealt with an issue that,
according to polls, voters considered the number-one problem in the
city: dog feces. Milk’s ordinance, called the “pooper scooper”
law, required dog owners to scoop up their pets’ excrement. After it
passed, Milk invited the press to a local park, where, with cameras
rolling, he intentionally stepped in the smelly substance. The stunt
attracted national media attention as well as extensive local press
coverage, as Milk had anticipated. He later explained why he pulled
off the photo op: “All over the country, they’re reading about me,
and the story doesn’t center on me being gay. It’s just about a
gay person who is doing his job.”

Milk was a big personality, but he was also a serious and brilliant
politician. After his election, he was the most visible gay public
figure in America. At a time when homophobia was still deeply
entrenched in American culture, Milk encouraged gays and lesbians to
come out of the closet. He received thousands of letters from gays
around the country, thanking him for being a role model. “I thank
God,” wrote a sixty-eight-year-old lesbian, “I have lived long
enough to see my kind emerge from the shadows and join the human
race.”

Milk knew that to win elections and pass legislation, he had to build
bridges with other constituencies and with his straight colleagues on
the Board of Supervisors. He cultivated support from tenants’
groups, the elderly, small businesses, environmentalists, and labor
unions.

Milk forged an unlikely alliance with the Teamsters union, which
represented truck drivers. The Teamsters wanted to pressure beer
distributors to sign a contract with the union to improve pay and
working conditions for its members. They were particularly angry at
Coors, which of all the beer companies was the most hostile toward
unions. A Teamsters organizer approached Milk for help in reaching out
to gay bars, a big portion of Coors’s customer base. Within days,
Milk had canvassed the gay bars in and around the heavily gay Castro
District, encouraging them to stopping selling Coors beer. With help
from Arab and Chinese grocers, the gay boycott of Coors was
successful. Milk had earned a political ally among the Teamsters. At
Milk’s urging, the union also began to recruit more gay truck
drivers.

Much of Milk’s eleven months in office — before he and Moscone
were assassinated — was spent organizing opposition to a statewide
referendum sponsored by State Senator John Briggs to ban gays from
teaching in public schools. Milk went up and down California speaking
out against the initiative. He debated Briggs on television. He
crashed Briggs’s events, generating media stories. When Briggs
claimed that gay teachers abused their students, Milk countered with
statistics documenting that most pedophiles were straight, not gay.

Opposition to the Briggs initiative mobilized gays and their liberal
allies. They knocked on doors, wrote letters to the editor, and paid
for TV and radio ads. More than a quarter of a million people attended
that summer’s Gay Freedom Day Parade in San Francisco. (Similar
events in other cities attracted record numbers). Milk rode in an open
car and later gave an inspiring speech that, according to the San
Francisco Examiner, “ignited the crowd.” He said:

On this anniversary of Stonewall, I ask my gay sisters and brothers to
make the commitment to fight. For themselves, for their freedom, for
their country. We will not win our rights by staying quietly in our
closets. We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the
distortions. We are coming out to tell the truths about gays! I’m
tired of the silence. So I’m going to talk about it. And I want you
to talk about it. You must come out. Come out to your parents, your
relatives. Come out to your friends.

On November 7, 1978, Briggs’s initiative lost by more than a million
votes, with 58 percent of voters — and 75 percent in San Francisco
— opposing it. It was a stunning victory for the gay community, and
Milk was its most visible leader.

Twenty days later, Milk and Moscone were dead. On November 27, former
supervisor Dan White, carrying a gun, climbed into city hall through a
basement window and shot both public officials. White had represented
one of the city’s more conservative neighborhoods and was the only
supervisor to oppose Milk’s antidiscrimination ordinance. Frustrated
by his marginalization on the board, he abruptly resigned on November
10, only ten months after being sworn in. He quickly changed his mind
and asked Moscone to reappoint him to his old position. Moscone
refused to do so, in part because of Milk’s lobbying against White.

White was charged with first-degree murder, making him eligible for
the death penalty. A conviction seemed a slam dunk. But White’s
lawyer claimed that he was not responsible for his actions because of
his mental state, which the lawyer termed “diminished capacity.”
On May 21, 1979, a jury acquitted White of the first-degree murder
charge but found him guilty of voluntary manslaughter. He was
sentenced to seven years in prison. The verdict triggered riots
outside city hall as gays and their allies unleashed their fury.

Milk had anticipated his murder. He had received many hate letters and
death threats. He recorded his thoughts on tape, indicating who he
wanted to succeed him if he were killed, saying, “If a bullet should
enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.” He
added, “I would like to see every gay lawyer, every gay architect
come out, stand up and let the world know. That would do more to end
prejudice overnight than anybody could imagine. I urge them to do
that, urge them to come out. Only that way will we start to achieve
our rights.”

Milk’s charisma and political savvy helped unleash the power of gay
voters and advance the issue of gay rights, including the growing
number of gay and lesbian elected officials and widening acceptance of
same-sex marriage.

The Trump administration’s, and Hegseth’s, recent efforts to paper
over and rewrite history suggests they don’t want the current and
future generations to know about that movement, its accomplishments,
and the persistent battle for LGBTQ equality.

Responding on his Facebook page to news of the effort to rename the
USNS Harvey Milk, gay playwright Harvey Fierstein described the move
as a “crime against the gay community” and wrote that Trump is a
“vile, petty, stupid, destructive, jealous, illiterate, hateful,
ego-maniacal and dangerous shmuck.”

California State Senator Scott Wiener, who is also gay, told
[[link removed]] the
Los Angeles Times that Hegseth’s move against Milk is part of a
“systematic campaign to eliminate LGBTQ people from public life.”

“They want us to go away, to go back in the closet, not to be part
of public life,” added Wiener. “And we’re not going anywhere.”

_Peter Dreier [[link removed]] is
the E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics at Occidental
College._

_TALKING POINTS MEMO [[link removed]] (TPM) is an
independent news organization that publishes reporting and analysis
about American politics, public policy and political culture. We are
particularly focused on reporting on abuses of power and betrayals of
the public trust. Our reporters have exposed scandals and driven
coverage of major news stories across multiple administrations._

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]