We Need You to Be Who You Are ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
June 8, 2025

This week, during the parade of daily adventures that range from the absurd to the corrupt to the cruel to the merely incompetent, a memorandum from the Secretary of the Navy obtained by the news media stated that the United States Navy is going to begin renaming some of its ships. (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/navy-new-name-usns-harvey-milk-ships-named-for-civil-rights-leaders/)

Some of the ships being proposed for future renaming include the USNS Harriet Tubman, the USNS Thurgood Marshall, the Medgar Evers, the Dolores Huerta, the Lucy Stone, the Cesar Chavez, and the Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But the ship that is going to be renamed this coming week is the USNS Harvey Milk.

Of course, this is just the next round in the concerted effort to remove the names and the contributions of people of color, and women, and LGBTQ+ people from our historical narrative and our national consciousness, to hide the contributions of people who have been instrumental in breaking down barriers and helping us become a more just and inclusive society.

The memo obtained by the media stated that, “the renaming of naval ships was to realign the U.S. military with Trump administration priorities of “reestablishing the warrior culture.” (Ibid.). I suspect we all know what that is code for.

As I have noted many times in recent months, resistance to authoritarianism can and must take many forms, from protests to joy to rest. Today, resistance calls us to refuse to allow the names of people threatened with being expunged from history to be lost. It is our work, our duty, to lift those names up, and to not allow them to be forgotten.

For starters, we should broaden our definition of who is called a warrior. Harriet Tubman, not a warrior? Medgar Evers, not a warrior?

But today, here in June, when we honor Pride month by celebrating the presence and the contributions and the lives of LGBTQ+ people, we will resist by remembering the life of Harvey Milk.

Harvey Milk was a New York native, who after graduating college, joined the United States Navy during the Korean War. He was a diving officer on two submarines, and a diving instructor. In 1955, he resigned from the Navy with the rank of Lieutenant Junior Grade with an ‘other than honorable’ discharge instead of facing court martial for homosexuality. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Milk).

Milk then spent years as a public school teacher and as a stock analyst, while trying to find a home in different parts of the country. Ultimately he settled in San Francisco, as did a growing number of LGBTQ+ people, and opened a camera shop on Castro Street. Over time, he became more and more active, grew rapidly as a leader and speaker, and began running for elected office. He lost every election in the beginning. But along the way Harvey Milk proved to be a tireless campaigner who knew how to build coalitions and focused on neighborhood issues such as public transportation. As he became more and more prominent, he was the frequent target of death threats, and at one point was quoted as saying, “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door”. (Ibid.)

Finally, in 1977 he was elected to the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco; the first openly gay man in America to be elected to public office.

Harvey Milk’s lifelong quest to live authentically as an out gay man took many acts of courage. And of course, we know the horrific end of his story, how he was assassinated in San Francisco’s City Hall on November 27, 1978 by a conservative member of the Board of Supervisors, Dan White, who also murdered Mayor George Moscone.

Harvey Milk’s story continues: he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009, and a ship was named for him in 2021.

We remember Harvey Milk’s life, and his lifelong quest for authenticity, and his courage.

Our spiritual theme for the month of June is Freedom. It’s a topic much on our minds these days, especially as we are forced to ask ourselves what sort of government we will accept. But there are other types of freedom beyond the political, and here in June, we take time to envision the basic human freedom, the personal freedom, to live as our authentic selves, to be who we really are. As our poet wrote,

“I wish you no need to hide.
No reason to live in shadows or half-truths.
No need to cover the spark and sparkle of your heart,
to keep it from catching the light of sun or moon.
I wish you whole-heartedness that arises
from the liberty before needing to be freed,
the completeness that precedes breaking,
the integrity of your being, a unity,
undivided and boundless…”. (Sean Parker Dennison, “Blessing for Kin,” in Breaking and Blessing, Skinner House Books, 2020, p. 54.)

Harvey Milk’s travels, his inability for years to follow a career path, were really a search for freedom. In the end, he found freedom within himself, by embracing whole-heartedness, not living in the shadows. As he put it, “If you are not personally free to be yourself in that most important of all human activities… the expression of love… then life itself loses its meaning.” (in “An Archive of Hope: Harvey Milk’s Speeches and Writings”, 2013, p.214, Univ. of California Press)

A few weeks ago, the topic of our service was moral imagination – the kind of imagination that is defined as the ability to imagine a healthier, more just, and more loving world, one in which everyone has a place. Harvey Milk possessed moral imagination, and not just for himself, but for everyone whose lives he tried to change for the better. Moral imagination calls on us to seek equality and equity for everyone, to love our neighbors, to foster the dignity and humanity of others. In other words, moral imagination calls us to fight for freedom; not just our own, but everyone’s.

Now, there is irony present in the quest for freedom. As we so often see, we all tend to be champions for our own freedom, but for yours? Not so much.

Theologian Frank Thomas wrote, “There is a basic and perverse strain of self-preservation in human nature that those who have freedom protect their privilege, not just from ‘tyranny’, but also from others… it is human nature to constrict freedom to one’s group and be perfectly contented that freedom is limited, restricted, and privileged to a few.” xxv

Frank Thomas goes on to point out that freedom, then, exists more in the moral imaginations of those who are denied freedom by those with privilege. “Freedom is kept free,” he wrote, “by the moral imagination of those who do not have the rituals and benefits of freedom.” As Thomas put it, “America had to be carried, kicking and screaming every inch of the way, by the sacrifice, blood, and death by many innocent people to move America toward freedom and equality for all in the mid-twentieth century. Therefore, if we are looking for freedom, it is important to look to the moral imagination of the marginalized, disenfranchised, and vulnerable in any society and culture…”

Let’s pause to think about this. Think about the leaders of the Civil Rights movement, and the leaders of the LGBTQ rights movement. The imagination, the dream, and the courage was emerging from those who had the least privilege, the least safety.

Today we look to the moral imagination of Harvey Milk, and all the warriors for freedom for all members of the queer community. It’s a day to celebrate, but also to resist. It’s a time to parade and to party but also to watch carefully to make sure that the freedom that has come so slowly and still feels so fragile, can be preserved. There is much to worry about. The assault on freedom might start with the renaming of a ship in order to remove the name of Harvey Milk from American history. Where else might these attacks proceed from here? We already know. The assault on the rights of transgender people is well underway, from the right to choose which public restroom feels safest to the choice of how to identify oneself on a passport. From there where does the effort to silence and erase history go? We can guess what could happen – the loss of marriage rights, of parental rights, of basic but critical needs such as insurance. And at the heart of all of these potential losses is the most foundational loss; the potential loss of peoples’ ability to live as their authentic selves. This diminishes all of us. When one group loses privileges, we are all lessened. The body, the society, is weakened as a result. When all are strong and free, we are all stronger.

We need everyone to be who they truly are, not hiding, not diminished.

I leave you with the words of our poet, the Reverend Sean Parker Dennison:

“I wish you a far-reaching welcome from within,
full and absolute acceptance, nothing withheld
from yourself, unrealised or unfinished.
And I wish you a place and a people who
do not want you in pieces, incomplete and partial,
a world that no longer asks anyone
to wrench apart their heart or divide soul
from mind, from nature, from core.” (“Blessing for Kin”)

May it be so.
Blessed Be.