Navy Spokesman Saylor: “We’re very disappointed. We really thought that we were past this sort of thing. But then, we do have a lot of 18-year-old boys in the service.”

Before Harvey Milk was the first openly gay elected official in California history, he was in the Navy. His time as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors ended tragically when he and mayor George Moscone were assassinated by former Board of Supervisors member Dan White. His time in the Navy ended, as he told it, when he was discovered to be gay. Though there is no evidence for this claim, the Navy made plans to correct its mistake some 60 years later by naming a replenishment ship after the fallen gay-rights hero.

Sadly, the Navy has decided to delay that honor in the wake of multiple and sustained outbursts of what it calls “unbecoming giggling” in the wake of announcing its decision to sailors on Naval bases around the world. “The Milk will be an oiler,” read the statement, “sailing up from behind to provide much-needed replenishment to depleted vessels. The oiler will sidle up alongside and get in close enough to get its big hose into the needy ship’s port. Then it will pump it full of precious fuel before disengaging and moving on to the next ship that calls it. It may not sound as sexy as a battleship firing its great big guns or a submarine launching missiles from the depths, but it gets the job done when you’re under way. We in the Navy couldn’t be prouder.”

A source close to SDQT said that in response, the Navy was considering giving the Milk name to a new aircraft carrier, “because there’s no way to make any kind of gay sex joke about the kind of boat that launched the flyboys in Top Gun.”