
“Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco’s Tenderloin” with Joseph Plaster
February 13 @ 8:00 pm - 9:30 pm
Tracing the history of the downtown lodging house districts where marginally housed youth regularly lived beginning in the late 1800s, Kids on the Street focuses on San Francisco’s Tenderloin from the 1950s to the 2010s. Drawing on archival, ethnographic, and oral history research, the book explores the social trauma inflicted on street youth and the ways they have worked, collectively and creatively, to reframe and reinterpret those brutal realities. Plaster focuses on four world-making practices: kinship networks his informants call “street families,” which resemble the moral economies common among people with severely limited resources; syncretic religious formations he calls “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.
There will be a talk at 12PM, followed by a workshop on oral history and digital humanities at 5PM.
Joseph Plaster is an interdisciplinary scholar trained in queer studies and public humanities, with teaching and research fields at the intersections of U.S. 20th century urban history, oral history, performance studies, public history, and LGBTQ studies of religion. He is a Lecturer in the Program in Museums and Society and Director of the Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center at Johns Hopkins University, where he develops cross-departmental, community-based research initiatives in collaboration with Baltimore’s ballroom and voguing scene, grassroots trans and non-binary activists, and local artists of color. His book Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco’s Tenderloin (2023) was awarded the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction by The Publishing Triangle, the Joe William Trotter, Jr. Book Prize for best first book in urban history by the Urban History Association, and the Oral History Association Book Award.