Kids on the Street: Queer Oral History, Performative Storytelling

Joseph Plaster’s prize-winning Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco’s Tenderloin (Duke University Press, February 2023) explores the informal support networks that enabled abandoned and runaway “kids on the street” to survive in central city tenderloin districts across the United States, and San Francisco's Tenderloin in particular, over the past century.

Centering the experiences of street kids enabled him to articulate — indeed excavate — a history of queer sociality that has been overshadowed by major narratives of gay progress and pride. He ultimately represents a politics where the marginal position of street youth — the self-defined “kids on the street,” hair fairies, hustlers, queens, and “undesirables” — is the basis for a moral economy of reciprocity and mutual aid.

About the speaker

Joseph Plaster is an interdisciplinary scholar trained in queer studies and public humanities, with teaching and research fields at the intersection of American 20th-century urban history, oral history, performance studies, public history, and LGBTQ studies of religion. He is a lecturer in the Program in Museum and Society and director of the Winston Tabb Special Collection Research Center at Johns Hopkins University, where he develops cross-departmental, community-based research initiative in collaboration with Baltimore’s ballroom and voguing scene, grassroots trans and non-binary activities, and local artists of colour.