Then Ensign Harvey Milk

At NASSCO in San Diego, they have begun cutting steel for a new Navy oiler, T-AO-206, to be named the USNS Harvey Milk. When completed it will be the second of the John Lewis class of underway replenishment oilers, operated by the Military Sealift Command to support ships of the United States Navy. 

Raised in a Navy family, Harvey Milk joined the US Navy in 1951 during the Korean War. He served aboard the submarine rescue ship USS Kittiwake (ASR-13) as a diving officer. He was later transferred to San Diego to serve as a diving instructor. Then in 1955, he was forced to resign from the Navy for being a homosexual. He held the rank of lieutenant, junior grade.

Milk would go on to become the first openly gay elected official in the history of California, where he was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977.  On November 27, 1978, Supervisor Harvey Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone were shot and killed in San Francisco City Hall by an ex-supervisor. When Milk was shot he was wearing his U.S. Navy diver’s belt buckle.

Naming a ship after Milk, “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,” said Milk’s nephew Stuart Milk in a statement to San Diego LGBT Weekly in 2012. 

San Francisco is known as a gay-friendly city. Paradoxically, some credit the Navy’s World War I “blue discharge” practice, which discharged known homosexuals in port cities for helping to create a gay community in San Francisco.

All ships of the John Lewis class are to be named after civil rights leaders. Subsequent ships are to be named after Chief Justice Earl Warren, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, women’s rights activist Lucy Stone, and abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth.