Why does Donald Trump want to erase 1970s LGBTQ+ activist Harvey Milk?

Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man elected to public office in the United States. In 1977, with LGBTQ+ rights, housing issues, and workplace discrimination as his priorities, he won the election to become a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He was 47 years old and had a wealth of activism under his belt. He arrived in the Castro neighborhood in 1972, where he opened a photo shop (at the counter of which he met photographer Dan Nicoletta, who would later portray his life, death, and legacy). He had previously served in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War, though he only lasted four years before being discharged due to his sexuality.

In San Francisco, he became a local leader and, noticing the lack of visibility for diverse people in the political arena, he ran for various public offices. He tried on three occasions until he was successful in 1977. He was known as “the Mayor of Castro Street.” One of his campaigns was against the Briggs Initiative — California Proposition 6 — as the legislative attempt to ban lesbians and gay men from working in public schools was known. Milk won that battle. He also got the City Council to move forward with the approval of an anti-discrimination law.

Furthermore, the rainbow flag is also part of his legacy. It was Milk who commissioned artist Gilbert Baker to create a symbol to represent the LGBTQ+ community. Until then, the triangle had been employed, which was used by the Nazis to denote homosexuality and later reinterpreted as a symbol of resistance. Baker presented the politician and activist with the multicolored flag. The first time it was waved was at San Francisco Pride in 1978.

“Milk was a leader in this idea of not hiding in the shadows,” said LGBTQ+ history expert Craig Loftin in The Guardian. For this professor of American studies at California State University, “in the big-picture history of LGBTQ+ people, the quest for public visibility and recognition is at the core and center of that narrative.”

In November 1978, after 11 months in office, Milk was shot and killed alongside San Francisco Mayor George Moscone. After his death, he became an icon of the LGBTQ+ rights movement. In 2009, Barack Obama awarded Milk the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2016, a U.S. Navy ship was named after the activist and politician: the USNS Harvey Milk. A few weeks ago, the Trump administration renamed the ship.

“I am pleased to announce that the United States Navy is renaming the USNS Harvey Milk to the USNS Oscar V. Peterson. We are taking the politics out of ship naming,” U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth posted on social media on June 27, formalizing the renaming.

“This is a shameful attempt to erase the contributions of LGBTQ+ people to society,” the Harvey Milk Foundation, which defends the activist’s legacy and now sells T-shirts featuring the ship and its original name, stated. This criticism has been echoed by other organizations within the collective, as well as by the Democratic opposition, which also considers the name change “an affront to the fundamental American values of honoring veterans and those who worked to build a better country.”

The figure of Harvey Milk was chronicled in The Times of Harvey Milk (1984, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary a year later) and also in 2008 in Milk, by Gus Van Sant and starring Sean Penn, who won the Oscar for Best Actor for his portrayal of the politician and activist. The film’s promotion had to be delayed slightly because in November 2008, California voted on Proposition 8, which threatened to ban same-sex marriages throughout the state. Those responsible for the production didn’t want people to confuse the clips from the film with the political debate of the moment. In the end, they both broached similar subjects: LGBTQ+ rights, although 30 years apart.

Proposition 8 advocated eliminating the right of same-sex couples to marry through an amendment to the State Constitution to recognize marriages only when they are between a man and a woman.

Fifty-two percent of California voters supported the proposal: same-sex marriages were suspended in California. In 2010, a federal court declared the amendment unconstitutional. Three years later, the Supreme Court upheld it. In 2015, the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling granted legal protection to same-sex marriage throughout the United States, as the Supreme Court held that the Constitution guaranteed this right.

Now, in 2025, radical movements in the U.S., primarily in the religious sphere, are pushing to ask the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges. They want to repeat the sweep of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that protected abortion rights nationwide and was overturned in 2022 thanks to the court’s conservative supermajority.

After Trump’s second victory in November of last year, same-sex marriages increased in the United States. Couples saw marriage as a legal framework that granted them greater protection. In 2022, Democrat Joe Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act, specifically to protect same-sex marriages in the event of future changes to the law.

“My optimistic thought is that because they’re hitting us so hard and so fast, the pendulum will swing back the other direction, hopefully harder and faster,” Professor Loffin said in the aforementioned Guardian article. “[Trump] is awakening a dragon.”

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