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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 traces the emergence and impact of Vanguard, a street-based activist organization forged in mid-1960s San Francisco by an unlikely coalition of sex workers, street queens, urban ministers, young adults, and War on Poverty reformers. Facing displacement, policing, and economic exclusion in the downtown “vice” district, organizers pooled food, housing, and medical aid while staging militant street theater and protests against a social order that treated street kids as disposable. Drawing on original oral histories and a newly assembled archive, Plaster follows Vanguard from all-night cafeterias to church basements to psychedelic shops. Its organizers developed drug-safety tools and published underground magazines while using federal antipoverty resources to establish experimental drop-in and employment centers. Vanguard’s irreverent tactics and uncompromising sexual and gender visibility drew national attention, helping catalyze gay liberation and trans organizing while laying the groundwork for harm reduction and LGBTQ shelter activism. In Vanguard, Plaster recovers an electrifying history of mutual aid in action, showing how those pushed to the margins remade care, kinship, and political struggle.