Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin

by Joseph Plaster

Overview

In Kids on the Street Joseph Plaster explores the informal support networks that enabled abandoned and runaway queer youth to survive in tenderloin districts across the United States. Tracing the history of the downtown lodging house districts where marginally housed youth regularly lived beginning in the late 1800s, Plaster focuses on San Francisco’s Tenderloin from the 1950s to the present. He draws on archival, ethnographic, oral history, and public humanities research to outline the queer kinship networks, religious practices, performative storytelling, and migratory patterns that allowed these kids to foster social support and mutual aid. He shows how they collectively and creatively managed the social trauma they experienced, in part by building relationships with johns, bartenders, hotel managers, bouncers, and other vice district denizens. By highlighting a politics where the marginal position of street kids is the basis for a moral economy of reciprocity, Plaster excavates a history of queer life that has been overshadowed by major narratives of gay progress and pride.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478023586
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	01/30/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	34 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Joseph Plaster is Curator in Public Humanities and Director of the Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center at Johns Hopkins University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction  1
1. A Performance Genealogy of US Tenderloins  33
2. Street Churches  69
3. Urban Reformers and Vanguard’s Mutual Aid  108
Intervention 1. Vanguard Revisited  155
4. The Urban Cowboy and the Irish Immigrant  174
5. Polk Street’s Moral Economies  220
Intervention 2. Polk Street Stories  258
Conclusion  276
List of Abbreviations  291
Notes  293
Bibliography  329
Index  345

What People are Saying About This

University of Toronto, LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory - Elspeth H. Brown

“This book is a must read. I love [Plaster’s] deep involvement with his narrators and his beautiful writing: this is the only academic text that literally brought me to tears. . . . It’s so impressive to see such a rich work emerge out of the decades-long praxis of doing public history and oral history.” 

Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution - Susan Stryker

“Kids on the Street is a beautiful, powerful contribution to an inspiring tradition of activist queer and trans public history scholarship. It’s about people marginalized by gender and sexuality finding each other in abjected urban places, sinking down and rising up over and over again, individually and collectively, each time with a promise—partially fulfilled yet never fully realized—of forging new socialities that repair the injustices of the dominant social order.”

Political Manhood: Red Bloods, Mollycoddles, and the Politics of Progressive Era Reform - Kevin P. Murphy

“Representing an innovative approach to queer history, Kids on the Street challenges LGBTQ historiography that often privileges trajectories of community formation and political development that fail to capture the experience of people living in precarious circumstances. Writing with fluidity, beauty, and clarity, Joseph Plaster offers a stunning analysis of the contested processes of memory making and public historical and preservation practices in the context of neoliberal urban development. One of the most exciting and innovative interdisciplinary queer historical works I’ve read recently, this fascinating book makes a major contribution.”

Editorial Reviews

"Filled with fresh insights and original archival and ethnographic research, Kids on the Street is an outstanding book, which deserves a wide readership among urban historians, religious studies scholars, historians of childhood, performance studies scholars, and cultural historians of gender nonconformity, race, and sexuality."

The Metropole - Alex Melody Burnett

Kids on the Street showcases how performance and movement itself, religious practices and a culture of mutual aid helped people overcome a variety of social traumas…This is an exceptionally well-researched book that uplifts marginalized voices and perspectives with profound implications which transcend disciplinary boundaries. [It] is essential reading for historians of twentieth-century California, youth, urban development, and queer history at the very least.

European Journal of American Culture - Jack Hodgson

"Kids on the Street is an admirable, thoroughly researched, and carefully documented history of the once vibrant queer culture of the Tenderloin and Polk Street. Featuring scores of interviews with one-time Polk Street denizens, it is also a lament for the displacement of the multiracial, multigender culture of San Francisco’s first post-Stonewall queer district. Drawing attention to that once-thriving, often overlooked culture, the book is a valuable contribution to queer history."

Gay and Lesbian Review - Hank Trout

"Kids on the Street is an admirable, thoroughly researched, and carefully documented history of the once vibrant queer culture of the Tenderloin and Polk Street. Featuring scores of interviews with one-time Polk Street denizens, it is also a lament for the displacement of the multiracial, multigender culture of San Francisco's first post-Stonewall queer district. Drawing attention to that once-thriving, often overlooked culture, the book is a valuable contribution to queer history."--Hank Trout "Gay and Lesbian Review" (9/1/2023 12:00:00 AM)

From the Publisher