Harvey Milk, the first openly-gay politician in San Francisco who was assassinated in 1978, often claimed to reporters that he had been dishonorably discharged from the Navy due to his homosexuality.

Many historians and even fellow activists discounted the boast as hyperbole, perhaps in an effort to demonstrate LGBTQ oppression and encourage lesbians and gays to advocate for their rights. They pointed to honorable discharge papers now archived at the San Francisco Public Library as evidence.

Now the Bay Area Reporter is reporting that Milk’s claim of being discharged for being gay appears to be true after all. They have produced paperwork from the U.S. Navy itself confirming Milk’s public claims – a 152 page document in which Milk was forced to describe the gay sex he had engaged in while serving in the Navy.

The library archive’s paperwork showing that the discharge was honorable was part of a collection of documents donated to the library’s archives in 1996 by Elvina Smith, mother of Milk’s former lover Scott Smith (played by James Franco in the 2008 Oscar-winning film Milk). Now it appears that the copy in the archives was a forgery, perhaps created by Milk himself in order to be employable.

In his acclaimed biography The Mayor of Castro Street, biographer Randy Shilts was skeptical of Milk’s public claims of dishonorable discharge, suggesting that Milk was too careful to be caught:

Milk later told voters that despite his accomplishments, the navy dishonorably discharged him after discovering his homosexuality. To be sure, exposure was a constant threat to his career. Like all branches of the service, the navy discharged thousands of gays on the most flimsy evidence…. But the Harvey Milk of this era was no political activist, and according to available evidence, he played the more typical balancing act between discretion and his sex drive…. Harvey lasted his three years and eleven months, getting the usual month cut off his enlistment because of his model behavior.

Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street, 1982

Shilts passed away in 1994, but the BAR reached another Milk biographer for comment. Lillian Faderman, author of Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death, said that when she wrote that Milk had been honorably discharged, she was relying on the archive document and at the time had no reason to believe was a forgery.

But when Harvey’s nephew, Stuart Milk, later repeated the story about Harvey’s dishonorable discharge, she asked him about the paperwork in the archives. Stuart said he believed the archived document was a forgery. Now it appears that the BAR has evidence corroborating Stuart’s belief.

Faderman plans to include a correction in the next paperback edition of her biography. The archive plans to include an annotation to the forgery, and if they can get it, a certified copy from the U.S. Navy of the real discharge papers.

Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in November of 1977 and was sworn into office in January of 1978, becoming the first openly gay elected official in San Francisco. He was assassinated less than a year later, on November 27, 1978, by former Supervisor Dan White, becoming a martyr to LGBTQ rights. He’s been recognized with a number of honors since then, including becoming the namesake of the Eureka Valley/Castro branch of the public library as well as a terminal of the San Francisco International Airport. In 2009, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to him.

And most fittingly for this story, the U.S. Navy decided in 2016 to name the second ship of the Military Sealift Command’s John Lewis-class oilers as the USNS Harvey Milk. All ships in this class are named after civil rights leaders.

Read the Bay Area Reporter’s story for much, much more.