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

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.

Author: Joseph Plaster
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 02/24/2023
Pages: 368
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.46lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.88d
ISBN13: 9781478016311
ISBN10: 1478016310
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | LGBTQ+ Studies | Gay Studies
- History | United States | 21st Century
- Social Science | Sociology | Urban

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