Kids on the Street

Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin

Joseph Plaster

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781478018957, 9781478016311
• eBook ISBN: 9781478023586
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. A Performance Genealogy of US Tenderloins
• 2. Street Churches
• 3. Urban Reformers and Vanguard’s Mutual Aid
• Intervention 1. Vanguard Revisited
• 4. The Urban Cowboy and the Irish Immigrant
• 5. Polk Street’s Moral Economies
• Intervention 2. Polk Street Stories
• Conclusion
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index