Gay navy bilder
The Pentagon stripped the designate of gay rights diva Harvey Milk from a Navy ship. Here's what it's called now.
Announcing that the Defense Department is finished with "political" ship names, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said in a video message Friday that the Navy ship honoring gay rights legend Harvey Milk has a new name.
The John Lewis-class replenishment oiler USNS Harvey Milk, a Navy logistics support ship that refuels other vessels and can also deliver supplies, is now named after Medal of Honor recipient Oscar V. Peterson, a head petty officer who posthumously received the nation's utmost honor for military valor in action.
Peterson led a repair party on the Cimarron-class fleet oiler USS Neosho afloat, which had been severely damaged by Japanese dive bombers during the Battle of the Coral Sea in
His entire repair party was either killed or seriously wounded. Though gravely injured during the repair actions, Peterson managed to shut the bulkhead stop valves to keep the ship operational. The sailor later died of his injuries.
"People want to be haughty of the ship they're sailing in," Hegseth said, calling Peterson's actions historic and heroic that kept w
No Longer Silent: A Story of LGBTQIA+ Service in the Navy
For centuries, LGBTQIA+ sailors served their nation in silence. From the early days of Continental Navy, through USS Constitution’s active sailing years, and into the 20th century, homosexuality was a crime subject to punishment by court martial, usually resulting in discharge. Beginning in World War II, the military instituted an outright ban on homosexual service members.1 It wasn’t until that a new commandment colloquially called “Don’t Inquire, Don’t Tell” (DADT) took effect, theoretically lifting the ban by suspending questions and discussions among military personnel about sexual orientation.2
Brooklyn native Robert Santiago united the U.S. Navy in , during the military’s ban on LGBTQIA+ people serving openly in the armed forces. At the time, the question on year-old Santiago’s mind was, “What’s going to take place while I’m in service, while I’m wearing the uniform?” Santiago, who is gay, resolved that he would do everything workable to finish at least one tour of duty. “I was very precise the first couple of years, when I was onboard the USS Guam,” he recalled in an oral history interview with the USS Constitution Mu
The Kiss |
When my ship eased into it's berth at the Naval Station in Norfolk Virginia in , after a 9 month deployment at sea, a band played on the pier, and there was the usual circus of sailors kissing their wives and girlfriends. Being a gay sailor serving in silence, none of that was for me. I wasn't allowed to undertake any of that. I just tried to be inconspicuous as I walked through the throng of happy kissers, so shipmates wouldn't notice that I was alone. I'd earn plenty of kisses from my boyfriends once I got home to Fresh York, I knew (yes, boyfriends, plural; hell, I was twenty two and cute as a bug in my sailor suit). But, this moment was awfully lonely.
Being able to kiss a boyfriend, in public, in uniform, was beyond my imagination in those days before Stonewall, Matlovich, and Milk. Creature caught gay, back then, meant being killed or being disgraced with a dishonorable discharge.
We've come a long way since the iconic VE Day photo of a sailor male child kissing a young girl in New York's Times Square at the next to of WWII. (A several years ago a whistleblower tracked down that gal, in her late 80s living in a nursing home in Ca This June the National Archives is commemorating National Queer woman, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Pride Month, which honors the important contributions that LGBTQ+ Americans contain made to U.S. history and culture.Visit our website for more information.Today’s upload is from Jen Hivick at the National Personnel Records Center, and looks at civil rights activist Harvey Milk’s time in the military. Did you perceive that the National Personnel Records Center has uploaded military records for some very notable service members? They are online at the Persons of Exceptional Prominence (PEP) webpage and features veterans ranging from Bea Arthur to Franklin D. Roosevelt. One “personal of exceptional prominence” is Harvey Bernard Milk. Although finest known as the first openly gay man to be elected to office in California, before his tragically short-lived career in politics he served in the U.S. Navy from until Milk’s military tape gives us information about his family, his childhood, and his service in the Navy. Documents in it include a mimic of his birth certificate, his high school transcript, and his application to become an officer. His hand over .