Look down as you walk the route and you’ll cross the Rainbow Honor Walk: bronze sidewalk plaques set into the pavement along Castro Street and Market Street, each honoring an LGBTQ pioneer. The first twenty were installed in 2014 and new rounds have been added since, with honorees including Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Alan Turing, Sylvia Rivera, Keith Haring, and José Sarria, the drag performer who in 1961 became the first openly gay candidate for public office in the United States.
Each plaque carries a portrait and a line about the person’s work. They run along both sides of Castro between Market and 20th and along Market toward Octavia, so the walk threads through the whole tour. Reading even a handful turns a stroll up the street into a history lesson the neighborhood wrote into its own sidewalk.
