Hegseth orders the name of gay rights activist Harvey Milk scrubbed from Navy ship

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the Navy to rename the USNS Harvey Milk, a highly rare move that will strip the ship of the moniker of a slain gay rights activist who served as a sailor during the Korean War.

U.S. officials say Navy Secretary John Phelan put together a small team to rename the replenishment oiler and that a new name is expected this month. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said the next name had not yet been chosen.

The change was laid out in an internal memo that officials said defended the action as a move to align with President Donald Trump and Hegseth’s objectives to “re-establish the warrior culture.”

It marks the latest move by Hegseth and the wider Trump administration to purge all programs, policies, books and social media mentions of references to diversity, equity and inclusion. And it comes during Pride Month — the same timing as the Pentagon’s campaign to force transgender troops out of the U.S. military.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement that 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.”

Phelan’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the decision, which was first reported by Military.com.

The USNS Harvey Milk was named in 2016 by then-Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, who said at the time that the John Lewis-class of oilers would be named after leaders who fought for civil and human rights.

Milk, who was portrayed by Sean Penn in an Oscar-winning 2008 movie, served for four years in the Navy before he was forced out for being gay. He later became one of the first openly gay candidates elected to public office.

Milk served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and had sponsored a bill banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in public accommodations, housing and employment. It passed, and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone signed it into law.

On Nov. 27, 1978, Milk and Moscone were assassinated by Dan White, a disgruntled former city supervisor who cast the sole vote against Milk’s bill.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat representing San Francisco, said in a statement Tuesday that “this spiteful move does not strengthen our national security or the ‘warrior’ ethos. Instead, it is a surrender of a fundamental American value: to honor the legacy of those who worked to build a better country.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom also slammed the move, saying Milk was a Korean War combat veteran whose commander called him “outstanding.”

“Stripping his name from a Navy ship won’t erase his legacy as an American icon, but it does reveal Trump’s contempt for the very values our veterans fight to protect,” the Democrat wrote on X.

The ship was christened in 2021, and during the ceremony, then-Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro said he wanted to be 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.”

The ship is operated by Military Sealift Command, with a crew of about 125 civilian mariners. The Navy says it conducted its first resupply mission at sea in fall 2024, while operating in the Virginia Capes. It continued to resupply Navy ships at sea off the East Coast until it began scheduled maintenance at Alabama Shipyard in Mobile, Alabama, earlier this year.

While the renaming is rare, the Biden administration also changed the names of two Navy ships in 2023 as part of the effort to remove Confederate names from U.S. military installations.

The USS Chancellorsville — named for the Civil War battle — was renamed the USS Robert Smalls after a sailor and former enslaved person. And the USNS Maury, an oceanographic survey ship originally named after a Confederate sailor, was renamed the USNS Marie Tharp after a geologist and oceanographic cartographer who created the first scientific maps of the Atlantic Ocean floor.

Maritime lore hints as to why renaming ships is so unusual, suggesting that changing a name is bad luck and tempts retribution from the sea gods.