Description
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.
About the Author
Joseph Plaster is Curator in Public Humanities and Director of the Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center at Johns Hopkins University.
Reviews
"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) "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." - Jack Hodgson (European Journal of American Culture) "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." - Elspeth H. Brown (University of Toronto, LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory) "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." - Alex Melody Burnett (The Metropole) "Plaster intricately entwines the historical and the ethnographic by drawing on major works in queer studies, performance studies, and affect theory, as well as by organizing two brilliantly conceived and beautifully narrated public humanities projects." - William Stell (American Religion) "Kids on the Street offers a valuable account of young people, sexuality, marginalization, and mutual support in San Francisco. . . . Readers may wish to dive straight into the detail: they will find a set of moving stories and thoughtful authorial interventions. This powerful book will repay its readers' persistence." - Chris Brickell (Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth) "Kids on the Street is an extremely enlightening book and a great contribution to our understanding of the development of San Francisco's LGBTQ community and movement, the centrality in that history of the sex economy and its marginalized actors, and the prevalence of subtle continuities between dignity and exploitativeness, sex work and self-affirmation, abjection and pride, mutual aid and activism in street kids' experience from the 1960s to the 2010s." - Guillaume Marche (California History) "Joseph Plaster has written a landmark work of queer history. For its examination of ephemeral networks of care, queer moral economies, street churches, and an intimate examination of fully embodied Tenderloin per formative characters, it is a triumph. For its innovative temporal blending, methodological innovations, and awareness of the impact of gentrification on public memory, it should serve as a blueprint for LGBT historians. For its poetic and self-reflective prose, it is a captivating read for all. In his study of ephemeral queer social worlds, Plaster has written a work that will have an enduring influence on the field of LGBT history."
- Chris Aino Pihlak (Journal of the History of Sexuality)
Book Information
ISBN 9781478016311
Author Joseph Plaster
Format Hardback
Page Count 277
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 635g
About the Author
Joseph Plaster is Curator in Public Humanities and Director of the Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center at Johns Hopkins University.
Reviews
"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) "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." - Jack Hodgson (European Journal of American Culture) "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." - Elspeth H. Brown (University of Toronto, LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory) "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." - Alex Melody Burnett (The Metropole) "Plaster intricately entwines the historical and the ethnographic by drawing on major works in queer studies, performance studies, and affect theory, as well as by organizing two brilliantly conceived and beautifully narrated public humanities projects." - William Stell (American Religion) "Kids on the Street offers a valuable account of young people, sexuality, marginalization, and mutual support in San Francisco. . . . Readers may wish to dive straight into the detail: they will find a set of moving stories and thoughtful authorial interventions. This powerful book will repay its readers' persistence." - Chris Brickell (Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth) "Kids on the Street is an extremely enlightening book and a great contribution to our understanding of the development of San Francisco's LGBTQ community and movement, the centrality in that history of the sex economy and its marginalized actors, and the prevalence of subtle continuities between dignity and exploitativeness, sex work and self-affirmation, abjection and pride, mutual aid and activism in street kids' experience from the 1960s to the 2010s." - Guillaume Marche (California History) "Joseph Plaster has written a landmark work of queer history. For its examination of ephemeral networks of care, queer moral economies, street churches, and an intimate examination of fully embodied Tenderloin per formative characters, it is a triumph. For its innovative temporal blending, methodological innovations, and awareness of the impact of gentrification on public memory, it should serve as a blueprint for LGBT historians. For its poetic and self-reflective prose, it is a captivating read for all. In his study of ephemeral queer social worlds, Plaster has written a work that will have an enduring influence on the field of LGBT history."
- Chris Aino Pihlak (Journal of the History of Sexuality)
Book Information
ISBN 9781478016311
Author Joseph Plaster
Format Hardback
Page Count 277
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 635g
