Pete Hegseth and other malevolence

A few reflections on Pride Month

My father would have turned 80 if he had lived to see the sun rise today.

Robert Paul Foser was a gay man born at the tail end of World War II. Two decades later, he was drafted and sent off to Vietnam. In thanks for his service and that of countless others like him, his country and its government stigmatized, harassed, and oppressed gay people. Would he have died in 1996, two months after his 51st birthday, if his government gave a damn about the “gay plague” that killed him? Would he have contracted AIDS in the first place? I can’t answer that definitely, of course, but we know many like him would have lived longer than they did.

After Vietnam, my father opened a small florist shop in Ithaca. Families in his community marked births and deaths, graduations and promotions, with flowers from his store. He stood all day on a hard concrete floor making bouquets and arrangements for couples celebrating engagements, weddings, and anniversaries – events his government would not allow for gay people like himself.

June is Pride Month. The month the Stonewall revolution began in 1969. The month the Supreme Court acknowledged in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) that a ban on “Homosexual Conduct” was unconstitutional, and the month it acknowledged in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) that the constitution guarantees the marriage rights of same-sex couples.

The concurrence of these anniversaries and that of my father’s birth often leads me to spend much of June thinking about the passage of time, and the progress America and its people have made since his death in 1996.¹ Often, that reflection has brought me comfort and joy the thought that current and future generations of LGBTQ people are able to more fully and openly participate in American society than those of my father’s lifetime.

Ten years ago this month, I thought of my father when the Supreme Court recognized the constitutional basis for marriage equality:

The next day, I posted a celebratory Twitter thread with headlines from across the country, headlines I wished he could have seen:

This year’s headlines are different. Nobody should have to see these — but we can’t look away from them. Here’s one from today:

Pete Hegseth – the talk show host Donald Trump made Secretary of Defense after Hegseth promised to quit drinking if he got the job but before Hegseth started discussing national security on a text messaging thread with a journalist – kicked off Pride Month by ordering the Navy to rename a ship currently named for civil rights icon and Navy veteran Harvey Milk, who was discharged from service “after being threatened with a court martial because of his sexual orientation.” According to an official the timing of the announcement was intentional, because Pete Hegseth is a jerk²:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the Navy to strike the name of pioneering gay rights activist Harvey Milk from one of its ships, orchestrating the change as Pride month celebrations take place, according to sources. A defense official said the timing of the decision was intentional.

The symbolism of all this — a regime headed by Donald Trump, who faked an injury to avoid serving in Vietnam and later said he felt “like a great and very brave solider” for avoiding STDs, which he called “my personal Vietnam,” kicking off Pride Month by ordering the Navy to stop honoring a gay civil rights icon, and the news breaking on the birthday of my late father, a gay man who served in Vietnam before dying of AIDS — is a bit much.

But the Trump regime’s attacks on LGBTQ people go far beyond the symbolic. They are stigmatizing people, denying them health care and equality. They are killing people.

I don’t have a good ending for this thing, so I’ll just wrap it up the way my father might have: Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump, and the whole sleazy lot of them are a bunch of assholes.

1. June is also my birth month, and my own 50th birthday looming just a few weeks from now probably contributes to my current state of reflection on the passage of time and the changes it brings.

2. That last part is according to me. As far as I know, no defense department officials have publicly acknowledged that Pete Hegseth is a jerk. Yet.