All posts tagged "Harvey Milk"

The LGBTQ community is galvanizing to prevent Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth from renaming a U.S. Navy ship as part of the Trump administration's anti-DEI initiative.

CBS News reported Tuesday that the Pentagon was formatting a timeline to rename the USNS Harvey Milk, which honors the Navy veteran and the first openly gay politician in California's history, who was assassinated in 1978.

Other ships under consideration for renaming include the USNS Thurgood Marshall, USNS Ruth Bader Ginsburg, USNS Harriet Tubman, USNS Dolores Huerta, USNS Lucy Stone, USNS Cesar Chavez and USNS Medgar Evers....

In its continued attempt to erase diversity, equity, and inclusion from U.S. history, the Trump administration is planning to rename several navy ships currently titled for civil rights leaders like Harvey Milk, Thurgood Marshall and Harriet Tubman, among others, CBS News reported.

The first ship to be renamed, according to documents reviewed by CBS, is the USNS Harvey Milk, which honors the navy veteran and the first openly gay politician in California's history. Milk was assassinated while serving on San Francisco's board of supervisors in 1978 and became an LGBTQ icon.

CBS News noted that the proposed timeline for renaming the ship comes during Pride Month, "the monthlong observance of the LGBTQ+ community that also coincides with the anniversary of the Stonewall uprising of 1969."...

By Jeff Mason

On the recommendations of many readers, I checked out "The Times of Harvey Milk". Obviously, it covers a lot of the same ground as Gus Van Sant's new biopic "Milk" (please drag your on-the-fence friends to see it so they get closer to getting it), but I think because of the constraints of a documentary it covers some political ground that's hard to really cram into the biopic. A couple of observations:

[rebelmouse-image 24748426 original_size="352x530" expand=1]Though it's been out for a couple of weeks, the theater was packed last night for the showing of "Milk", and it's obviously so popular that the Alamo Drafthouse downtown had opened up both screens for it. And it definitely deserved that turnout, and not just because Harvey Milk is such an interesting character from history. I have my issues with some of Gus Van Sant's choices in the past, but he turned out to be the perfect director for this movie for a couple of major reasons. The most obvious is that he's comfortable with homosexuality and confident in his film-making, which meant that he portrayed the subculture of the 70s era Castro district with a realistic ease. But he also had the smarts to avoid certain traps of biopics that make them so often tedious and hard to watch. He avoided the tendency to render complicated real life people into stereotypes of pure evil or pure good, and he didn't dwell in sensationalism.

How many ways of wrong is this? CEO of Cinemark, Alan Stock, who gave $9999 to Yes on 8, be allowed to earn one dime on the back of Harvey Milk's legacy by running Gus Van Sant's "Milk" in his theaters (it opens wide on Nov. 26)?