Probably the most famous image of Harvey Milk is of him sitting on the roof a car with his legs through the sunroof, waving to the excited crowds and wearing a Hawaiian flower lei around his neck as he was driven along in San Francisco’s Gay Parade in 1978.
What many people don’t know, and what many won’t notice when they see that scene recreated in Milk, the powerful biopic about the assassinated gay politician, is that the car was being driven by his young lesbian campaign manager, Anne Kronenberg – and she was terrified. Harvey was smiling away for the public, but they both had a secret that day. ‘Harvey had asked me to figure out the way to the hospital if he got shot. That was a very scary day,’ Kronenberg reveals to DIVA.

As Milk rose to prominence, before finally being elected to San Francisco’s city council after his fourth campaign in 1977, he began to receive death threats from homophobes. He was not being melodramatic when he told Kronenberg to be ready to rush him to hospital. He was shot dead by a fellow city council member in November 1978, just a few months after that triumphant Gay Parade.