At the start of Pride Month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the renaming of the USNS Harvey Milk, marking the end of a short-lived plan to remove all civil rights leaders’ names from Navy ships. But as June closes, it’s now clear: only the gay rights pioneer Harvey Milk’s name is being removed.
Recently, Hegseth confirmed the ship will now be called the USNS Oscar V. Peterson, honoring a decorated World War II Navy hero. His Twitter post said,
“We are taking the politics out of ship naming.”
While the Defense Department claimed it would rename ships named for other civil rights icons like John Lewis, Sojourner Truth, and Cesar Chavez, a Pentagon spokesperson has since admitted there are no plans to rename any other ships. Only Milk’s name is being stripped away.
An anonymous defense official told Task & Purpose,
“There are currently no plans to rename other ships in this class.”
During a Senate hearing last month, Hegseth declared,
“We’re not interested in naming ships after activists.”
But Milk was more than that—he served in the Navy during the Korean War before being pushed out for being gay.
Milk went on to become one of the first openly gay elected officials in the U.S. before his assassination in 1978. President Obama posthumously awarded him the Medal of Freedom in 2009.
The group VoteVets slammed the decision, saying,
“To erase his name now — during Pride Month — is no innocent bureaucratic decision. It’s part of Hegseth’s broader campaign to purge the military of anyone who doesn’t fit his narrow, outdated vision.”
For many queer Americans, this doesn’t feel like politics being removed from ship naming—it feels like erasure.
