Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin
by Joseph Plaster
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Description
"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 show more 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."-- show lessTags
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138 works; 54 members
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1 Work 11 Members
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Common Knowledge
- First words
- San Francisco's Polk Street was a whole world to itself: about ten blocks of old-stock rooming houses, dive bars, coffeehouses, and nightclubs sandwiched between the downtown Tenderloin "vice" district, City Hall, and the aff... (show all)luent, residential Nob Hil. The city's premiere gay business corridor in the 1960s and 1970s, Polk Street later became a national destination for runaway and "throwaway" youth, many surviving through sex work, and an old, paternal social world of survivors, caregivers, and clients. -Introduction
I met one of my first ethnographic informants, in 2007, through a trick. I was in my late twenties when I messaged a boy around my age online, probably via Craigslist m4m, and caught a bus to his San Francisco apartment. -Cha... (show all)pter 1, A Performance Genealogy of US Tenderloins - Canonical DDC/MDS
- 362.709794
- Canonical LCC
- HV1426.P53
Classifications
- Genres
- Nonfiction, Sociology, History, Sexuality and Gender Studies, LGBTQ+
- DDC/MDS
- 362.709794 — Society, government, & culture Social problems and social services Social Welfare Child welfare Biography; History By Place North America West Coast U.S.
- LCC
- HV1426 .P53 — Social sciences Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Protection, assistance and relief Special classes Young adults. Youth. Teenagers
- BISAC
Statistics
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- 12
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- 1,873,485
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 3
