The paper suggests ‘reading cities as texts’ by analysing the semiotic structure of urban space and focussing on the socio-cultural implications of urban communication. At the intersection of urban studies, space studies, eco-semiotics, and urban language research, the new approach of investigating linguistic and semiotic landscapes is applied to a district in Northern Schöneberg (South of the Tiergarten park) which, for more than a century, has been considered the centre of the gay subculture of the German capital. The neighbourhood thus also represents the history of a social taboo that served a heteronormative majority of society to stigmatise a social group of people who, by having the courage to become publicly visible and to claim public space for themselves, contributed to the removal of taboos surrounding gay identity. In a time of increasing and ever more self-confident homophobia, this removal of taboos must also be defended in the so-called Rainbow Quarter, thus illustrating the current explosive nature of the topic.