Tracing the history of the downtown lodging house districts where marginally housed youth regularly lived beginning in the late 1800s, I focus on San Francisco’s Tenderloin from the 1950s to the 2010s. Drawing on archival, ethnographic, and oral history research, I explore the social trauma inflicted on street youth and the ways they have worked, collectively and creatively, to reframe and reinterpret those brutal realities. I focus on four world-making practices: kinship networks my informants call “street families,” which resemble the moral economies common among people with severely limited resources; syncretic religious formations I call “street churches,” which are often based on a streetwise, gothic Catholicism; storytelling strategies that enabled youth to secure employment in the district’s vice and bar economies and, at times, to reinterpret the abuse from which they were running; and migratory circuits that connected far-flung tenderloin districts across the country and the people who traversed them, all the while fostering alternative socialities, cooperative economies, and novel forms of mutual aid.
Winner, Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, The Publishing Triangle
“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. ”
“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.”
“Plaster writes about street kids with a remarkable amount of generosity and care, and his book offers an exceptional model of ethically engaged, queer historical scholarship. 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”
Kids on the Street narrator Alexis Miranda, Imperial Court Empress and former Divas manager
“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.”
“…show[s] the remarkable resilience of poor and housing-unstable queer family—a ‘moral economy of reciprocity’ as the book puts it—that has held strong in San Francisco’s Tenderloin and other ‘tenderloin’ zones throughout the country, and which has ‘been overshadowed by major narratives of gay progress and pride.’ Along the way, and through dozens of fascinating interviews, we get colorful histories of organizations like Vanguard...and indelible characters like Reverend River Sims, the ‘punk priest of Polk Street.”
“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.”
“By including descriptions of these projects in the book and having them “intervene” into his more conventional academic chapters, Plaster emphasizes both the community-based process through which he developed Kids on the Street and its political stakes. Through Kids on the Street and his many years of associated public history work, Plaster seeks to center street kids in queer historical memory—not just in San Francisco (although his commitment to the city is clear), but in broader narratives of queer life.”