Drawing on archival, ethnographic, and oral history research, Kids on the Street (Duke University Press, 2023) explores 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.
“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.”
“…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 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.”
“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. There are also analytic categories to enrich the historical narrative: his ‘performative economies;’ mutual aid; the classic moral economy, and others. It’s so impressive to see such a rich work emerge out of the decades-long praxis of doing public history and oral history.”