Oct 03, 2003  |  By: JOE CREA  | COMMENTS     

The U.S. Navy asked defense contractor Lockheed Martin to change the name of a new warship because the proposed name too closely resembled that of the Washington Blade and sounded too gay, according to the U.S. News & World Report.

Lockheed was selected in July as one of three finalists to design and build the Sea Blade, or as it is now called, Littoral Combat Ship, a vessel that will move quickly in “shallow waters surrounding an enemy’s shores” and be capable of projecting offensive naval operations. Officials say that the ship will be deft at defeating enemy mines, diesel-electric submarines, and fast swarming small boats.

Lockheed Martin denies the claim by an unnamed source that Navy officials requested a name change for the future ship. But the Sea Blade name was dropped shortly after the Navy awarded the defense conglomerate a $10 million contract for a preliminary design.

Keith Mordoff, a spokesperson for Lockheed Martin, said that “at no time did the Navy ask us to change it” and said the name Sea Blade was simply a “branding idea” designed to set Lockheed Martin apart from the other 16 defense companies vying for the contract.

“We are a large system integrator, and we needed to differentiate our program from the competition so we did some branding and came up with the name Sea Blade which set us apart from our other competitors,” Mordoff said. “We felt that we were successful and now that we are entering the next phase of the process, we are just calling it what the Navy has called it before.”

The U.S. Navy did not return calls for this article.

Chris Crain, executive editor of the Blade, said that the story as reported in U.S. News seemed credible in that it was “an unusual story for someone at the Navy to make up and leak to the media.”

“I’m somewhat surprised that there are apparently officials high up in the Navy who are aware of just what gay publications are out there,” said Crain, who said he and other Blade staffers were “amused” rather than “offended” by the report.

“Perhaps in our next edition, we should publish an article saying that we homosexuals are changing our symbol from the pink triangle to the pink pentagon to see if the Defense Department changes the shape of its building to avoid any association with us,” he quipped.

The first issue of the Washington Blade, then called the Gay Blade, was a one-page newsletter copied on a mimeograph machine in 1969. Former publisher Don Michaels, who sold the paper to Window Media in May 2001, said that the term “gay blade” was a tongue in check reference to the 1920s.

“If you were a ‘gay blade,’ you were suspected of being a homosexual,” Michaels said. “Over a period of time, the gay movement used that in a satirical way.”

In September 1975, the publication became known as the Blade, after it was first incorporated as a nonprofit entity. According to Blade archives, some complained that the name change was designed to make the paper “more closeted” but management at the time explained that another publication in New York already owned the name The Gay Blade, so the paper filed its application for incorporation as The Blade.

The Gay Blade in New York was, according to Michaels, a “hideous anti-gay pamphlet” that Anita Bryant sold at her anti-gay rallies.

In 1980, when the paper reincorporated as a for-profit, employee-owned company, management again changed the name of the paper, this time to the Washington Blade because they wanted a name that included a reference to its location.

Former Blade editor Lisa Keen said that name change resulted from a lawsuit brought by a national paper in Toledo, Ohio called, The Blade. Michaels said that the Ohio paper’s owners told him to get rid of the name because it infringed on their trademark rights. A lawsuit was settled out of court and an agreement was made that the paper could call itself, the Washington Blade.