Two decades after first being conceived, a history project honoring LGBT people will debut in San Francisco's gay Castro district next week.
Known as the Rainbow Honor Walk, the project consists of 20 bronze plaques memorializing deceased LGBT individuals who left a lasting mark on society.
The honorees, 14 men and six women, run the gamut from musical legends and beloved artists to LGBT rights pioneers and a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
"Twenty years ago this idea came to me. It is incredibly moving to me to see the hundreds of people who came together over the years to make it happen," David Perry, a gay local public relations professional, told the Bay Area Reporter this week as he surveyed the sidewalk along Castro Street where the plaques will be installed.
Perry is putting the finishing pieces together for the official dedication of the first batch of plaques, scheduled to take place at 11 a.m. Tuesday, September 2. Both Perry and Tom DeCaigny, a gay man who is the city's director of cultural affairs, will make remarks at Harvey Milk Plaza that morning.
Then local LGBT community leaders and honor walk board members will help officially dedicate the plaques in a cascading ceremony at all 20 locations.
"We will have 20 unveilers; it is still being mapped out," said Perry.
The Rainbow Honor Walk is separate from the 20 historical factoids about the Castro neighborhood that will also be installed in the sidewalk along Castro Street as part of the city's streetscape improvements currently under construction.
The honor walk plaques are being laid out in alphabetical order, starting with social worker Jane Addams, who in 1931 was the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Her plaque will be on Castro Street near Harvey Milk Plaza above the Castro Muni station.
Both sides of the 400 and 500 blocks of Castro Street between Market and 19th Street will have four plaques. The remaining four will be located on 19th Street between Castro and Collingwood streets.
Kate Kendell, the executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, will be stationed at the plaque for LGBT rights activist Del Martin, whose widow, Phyllis Lyon, plans to also attend the ceremony. The plaque for Martin, who co-founded the Daughters of Bilitis with Lyon, will be located on 19th Street near where the couple once lived.
"I think it is absolutely wonderful. Why haven't we done it before?" Lyon, 89, told the Bay Area Reporter .
Author Armistead Maupin has agreed to dedicate the last plaque for author Virginia Woolf, which will be located near the Twin Peaks bar at the corner of Castro and 17th streets.
"A great literary giant unveiling a great literary giant," said Perry.
This week city workers with the Department of Public Works began installing the plaques Tuesday morning into the sidewalks.
"I just can't quite believe it," said Perry about seeing the project come to fruition.
Long time coming
In 1994 Perry first floated the idea to install markers in the Castro in honor of famous LGBT people, but his proposal never gained traction. Then, in 2009, longtime Castro resident and business owner Isak Lindenauer began pushing for the creation of an LGBT sidewalk memorial project that he dubbed the Rainbow Honor Walk.
After the B.A.R. first reported on Lindenauer's concept in March of that year, he and Perry teamed together to push for its implementation and formed a volunteer committee to help oversee it.
In early 2011 the names of the first inductees were announced, culled from a list of more than 150 people who had been submitted for consideration by the public. They ranged from the internationally famous, such as poet Allen Ginsberg and pop artist Keith Haring, to relative unknowns like Japanese playwright Yukio Mishima.
The list includes three black men: civil rights activist Bayard Rustin; disco drag star Sylvester James; and author James Baldwin. The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and the Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca also made the cut. (The honor walk committee decided to use Sylvester's first name and Lorca's middle name, which is his paternal family name in Spanish, in determining the placement of their plaques.)
George Choy, a San Franciscan who was an early member of the Gay Asian Pacific Alliance, was picked in part for his AIDS activism and work to support LGBT youth.
Other local LGBT leaders chosen are Harry Hay, who founded one of the first gay rights groups in the U.S. called the Mattachine Society; San Francisco Chronicle journalist Randy Shilts, one of the first out reporters to cover a gay beat; and Gay Games founder Dr. Tom Waddell.
Other famous authors selected are Gertrude Stein, Oscar Wilde, and Tennessee Williams. Rounding out the group are Christine Jorgensen, who in 1952 became the first person to receive widespread media coverage of her sexual reassignment surgery, and Alan Turing, who cracked the German's coded messages in World War II but was later prosecuted for being homosexual and opted to be chemically castrated to avoid a prison sentence.
In a stark reminder that suicide within the LGBT community is not a new phenomenon, three on the list �" Mishima, Turing, and Woolf �" took their own lives. And five were lost to AIDS �" Choy, Haring, James, Shilts, and Waddell.
"These people courageously stood up as openly and self-expressed members of the LGBT community and made the world a better place through their work," said Perry. "They have walked the walk for human dignity and equality and so created a pathway the rest of us are humbled to tread."
Spanish-based architect Carlos Casuso won the competition to design the plaques. He is the brother-in-law of Perry, who had no involvement in the blind jury selection process and informed the committee overseeing the project about his relationship to Casuso prior to its approving the jury's decision.
Mussi Artworks of Berkeley, California manufactured the 3-foot by 3-foot bronze plaques. Lawrence Noble, head of the sculpture department at San Francisco's Academy of Art University, oversaw the creative process.
The $100,000 cost to produce the first 20 plaques was raised privately, with $10,000 raised through two crowd-funding campaigns on the Indiegogo website held specifically for the Sylvester and Turing plaques. Among the major donors were AT&T, which gave the largest single gift of $25,000, and Marin art collector Ron Collins, who contributed $22,000 on behalf of his gay brother, Donald O. Collins, who died of cancer, by purchasing four artworks by the late Castro neighborhood artist Beth Van Hoesen.
The E. Mark Adams and Beth Van Hoesen Adams Trust bequeathed a number of Van Hoesen's original artworks to the Rainbow Honor Walk that were put up for sale earlier this year at the George Krevsky Gallery in downtown San Francisco.
"This is the gift that gives twice," said Collins in a statement to the B.A.R. "The art now hangs in my home and reminds me of my brother, and every time I see it, I know that the funds generated by their sale continue an educational and historic legacy."
Work on selecting the next 20 honorees for the walk will begin in September when the project's oversight committee meets to discuss the criteria to use for evaluating the next round of inductees. It is unclear if it will use the same criteria as it did for the first 20, with honorees having to be deceased, self-proclaimed as LGBT during their lifetimes, and made considerable contributions to society.
The plan is to eventually have honor walk plaques embedded in the sidewalks along 19th Street up to Diamond; on a section of 18th Street, and along Market Street north to Octavia Boulevard where the LGBT Community Center is located.
Sometime later this year or in early 2015 the public will again be invited to submit suggestions of people to include in the next installation, said Perry.
"We want to make sure we are as transparent and inclusive as possible," he said.
For more information about the Rainbow Honor Walk, including a full list of donors to the project, visit its website at www.rainbowhonorwalk.org.