The move comes after Utah’s capital city adopted modified pride flags to circumvent Rep. Trevor Lee’s ban.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall hosts the annual raising of the pride flag at City Hall to kickstart a month of festivities for Utah Pride on Friday, May 30, 2025. It is especially notable this year given the state tried to stop the pride flag from flying over government grounds.
The Utah lawmaker who pushed the bill banning pride flags at government buildings, setting up another standoff between Salt Lake City and the supermajority Republican Legislature, has set his sights on erasing another symbol of LGBTQ+ belonging in the capital city: Harvey Milk Boulevard.
In a post to social media Friday, Rep. Trevor Lee, R-Layton, referenced a move by President Donald Trump’s administration earlier this month to rename the ship USNS Harvey Milk, which was launched in 2021 and received its name in 2016.
After inaccurately attributing the removal of Milk’s name to the U.S. Navy, Lee wrote, “To go in line with this change at the federal level. I am going to propose simple easy legislation to change the name of Harvey Milk BLvD in Salt Lake City.”
A spokesperson for Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
According to a memo obtained and reviewed by Military.com, the order to change the name of USNS Harvey Milk came from Trump appointee Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense. In a statement to the outlet, a defense official specifically noted Navy Secretary John Phelan was ordered by Hegseth to strike Milk’s name and that the decision was timed to coincide with Pride month.
Milk was a gay rights activist and became the first openly gay elected official in California when he was voted onto the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977.
He and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone were murdered a year later by Dan White, who had recently resigned as city supervisor. White cast the sole vote against a policy Milk proposed banning discrimination based on sexual orientation.
In his post, Lee said, “Utahn’s [sic] don’t want streets named after pedophiles,” likely referring to a relationship Milk began with a 17-year-old when he was 33 years old while he was living in New York. The current age of consent in New York is 17 years old.
Even before he was elected as a state lawmaker, the Davis County representative had a long history of making derogatory public comments about the LGBTQ+ community. When Lee first ran for a seat in the House in 2022, The Salt Lake Tribune reported on him making such remarks from a personal social media account, including calling Pride month “satanic.”
The Salt Lake City Council voted to add Milk’s name to 900 South in 2016 under the leadership of its first openly gay mayor, Jackie Biskupski.
“I am here today because of people like Harvey,” Biskupski said at the street’s dedication. “He was a hero of mine, somebody I looked up to, who inspired me years after he was gone.”
City Council member Alejandro Puy, who is also gay, said the damage of legislation like Lee is proposing goes beyond “communities that value the sacrifice of Harvey Milk.”
“We are not solving any issues, but creating new ones,” Puy said of policies targeting the LGBTQ+ community, adding that public officials have bigger problems to tackle that affect Utahns’ everyday lives.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Mayor Jackie Biskupski and sign shop supervisor James Aguilar hang the first of the Harvey Milk Blvd. street signs along 900 South in Salt Lake City, Friday May 13, 2016.
“I invite Rep. Lee to walk the streets of my neighborhood, and I’m more than happy to walk the streets of his neighborhood, talk to neighbors, talk about the issues that are pressing to them,” Puy continued. “I will bet money that no one is going to talk about the issue of Harvey Milk Boulevard needing to be renamed, or any flag. But they will be talking about economic issues, they will be talking about the air quality, they will be talking about water and the growth of our state.”
A possible bill going after the capital city’s street names comes after Lee introduced a bill earlier this year meant to bar some flags from classrooms, which he has repeatedly said was meant to target pride flags. He amended the bill in the middle of the legislative session to impact all government entities in the state.
Lawmakers acknowledged in debate that the bill would have a disproportionate impact on Salt Lake City, a liberal stronghold in red Utah that annually hosts the state’s largest gathering of the historically marginalized LGBTQ+ community.
It passed anyway — with the Republican governor allowing it to become law, absent his signature — and Utah became the first state in the country to ban pride flags.
The Salt Lake City Council, hours before the law took effect and just weeks before Pride month began, voted to adopt modified versions of the LGBTQ+ pride and transgender flags as some of the city’s official banners.
Gov. Spencer Cox, at his monthly news conference this week, called both the new law and the city’s new flags “dumb.”
Shortly after the elected majority-LGBTQ+ City Council’s action, Lee posted, “Does Salt Lake City really want to play these games? Good luck!”