This neighborhood around you became the center of the LGBTQ liberation movement, and paid for that distinction with tremendous loss. The Castro was a working-class Irish Catholic neighborhood in the 1950s and early 1960s, with little to distinguish it from dozens of similar neighborhoods in American cities. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, gay men began moving here in large numbers — drawn by cheap rents, tolerant landlords, and the critical mass that builds on itself once a community forms.
Bars, bookstores, bathhouses, and community organizations proliferated. Harvey Milk, a camera shop owner, ran repeatedly for San Francisco supervisor and lost repeatedly before winning in 1977. He became the first openly gay elected official in California history, a position of visibility that made him both a symbol and a target.
On November 27, 1978, Milk and Mayor George Moscone were murdered at City Hall by former Supervisor Dan White. The assassinations were devastating, and when White received a lenient sentence, the White Night Riots shook the city. Then came AIDS.
Beginning in the early 1980s, the epidemic tore through the Castro with devastating force; the neighborhood lost thousands of residents. The Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt was created here in 1987. The community survived, organized, fought for research funding, and helped transform American medicine and law.
The rainbow crosswalk at Castro and Market is painted fresh each year.