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.

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

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction  1
1. A Performance Genealogy of US Tenderloins  33
2. Street Churches  69
3. Urban Reformers and Vanguard’s Mutual Aid  108
Intervention 1. Vanguard Revisited  155
4. The Urban Cowboy and the Irish Immigrant  174
5. Polk Street’s Moral Economies  220
Intervention 2. Polk Street Stories  258
Conclusion  276
List of Abbreviations  291
Notes  293
Bibliography  329
Index  345