Just as Pride Weekend activities began in San Francisco and other cities across the country, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced Friday the new name for the naval ship that had been christened in honor of the late gay San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk. It prompted a blistering denunciation from Milk’s gay nephew, Stuart Milk, who oversees the Harvey Milk Foundation.
The news site Military.com broke the news in early June that the USNS Harvey Milk would be renamed. Part of the Military Sealift Command with an all-civilian crew, the replenishment oiler can carry 162,000 barrels of diesel ship fuel, aviation fuel, and dry stores cargo.
In a video posted June 27 to his official X account, Hegseth said the ship would now be called the USNS Oscar V. Peterson. A chief watertender on the U.S.S. Neosho, Peterson suffered burns and other fatal wounds during an attack by enemy Japanese aerial forces on May 7, 1942, known as the Battle of the Coral Sea in World War II.
“We are taking the politics out of ship naming,” declared Hegseth, adding that the ship is being named after a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor “as it should be.”
Peterson was posthumously awarded for taking actions at serious risk of his own life to protect the ship and his fellow seamen. As noted by the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, “Lacking assistance because of injuries to the other members of his repair party and severely wounded himself, Peterson, with no concern for his own life, closed the bulkhead stop valves and in so doing received additional burns which resulted in his death. His spirit of self-sacrifice and loyalty, characteristic of a fine seaman, was in keeping with the highest traditions of the U.S. Naval Service. He gallantly gave his life in the service of his country.”
In denouncing the U.S. Navy’s decision in 2016 during the Obama administration to initially name the then-under-construction oiler after Milk, Hegseth said, “People want to be proud of the ship they are sailing in and so we are renaming it after a chief, a Navy chief.”
The dig at his uncle infuriated Stuart Milk, who called Hegseth’s remarks “petty and dishonest - as my uncle joined the Navy as a commissioned officer during a war and served honorably” in a June 27 Facebook post.
In 1951, Milk had enlisted in the Navy and attended Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island. By 1954, he was a lieutenant (junior grade) stationed at what was then called the Naval Air Missile Test Center in Ventura County in Southern California. Milk, a naval diving instructor, was on active duty during the Korean War aboard submarine rescue ship USS Kittiwake (ASR-13).
As the Bay Area Reporter noted in February 2020, Milk was given an "other than honorable" discharge from the U.S. Navy and forced to resign on February 7, 1955 rather than face a court-martial due to having sex with other servicemembers, according to a trove of naval records obtained by the paper.
Decades later, Milk became the first gay person elected to public office in California when he won a San Francisco supervisor seat in 1977. Tragically, a year later he and then-mayor George Moscone were assassinated in City Hall by disgruntled former supervisor Dan White.
At an event Friday to announce a redo of a public plaza named in honor of Milk above the Castro Muni Station, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie spoke forcefully about the Trump administration’s decision to rename the Milk vessel. When asked to comment by the B.A.R. when news of the decision broke several weeks ago in advance of his City Hall pride celebration, he did not explicitly do so.
“At a time when the federal government wants to ignore Harvey, we say he is exactly the kind of person we should celebrate in our country and in our city,” Lurie said at the June 27 news conference regarding the revamp of Harvey Milk Plaza. “And if they don’t understand that, we’ll keep doing that here in San Francisco. They might take his name off a vessel, but today, and every day, his legacy lives on.”
A number of the naval oiler ships in the John Lewis class of vessels were named for civil rights heroes. Lewis, the late Democratic congressmember from Georgia, participated in the Nashville sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, and the March on Washington during the Civil Rights movement for Black Americans.
Despite the action taken by Hegseth, Stuart Milk remained resolute in ensuring the legacy of his famous relative lives on.
“We may have lost a back door battle to stop this misguided action but I thank you all for having been a part of celebrating the ship’s, albeit brief, legacy - the USNS Harvey Milk’s symbol of hope, having existed at all, will live on in hearts & minds of millions across the globe!” wrote Milk. “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. To all the openly LGB appointees of the Trump administration, let me remind you of the famous MLK quote, ‘In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.’ Hope is never silent.”
