Kids on the Street (Paperback)

Joseph Plaster

ISBN 10: 147801895X / ISBN 13: 9781478018957

Published by Duke University Press, North Carolina, 2023

About this Item

Paperback. 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. Focuses on San Franciscos Tenderloin to explore the informal networks of economic and social support that enabled young people marginalized by gender and sexuality to survive in tenderloin districts across the United States. Plaster excavates a history of queer life that has been overshadowed by major narratives of gay progress and pride. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9781478018957

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Kids on the Street (Paperback)
• Publisher: Duke University Press, North Carolina
• Publication Date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 147801895X
• ISBN 13: 9781478018957
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

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