Joseph Plaster’s Kids on the Street is a welcome exploration of San Francisco’s lesser known, seedier, grubbier queer past and the conflicts raised today by its progressive erasure and by attempts to preserve it. The author self-identifies as a queer public historian, an identity that informs many of the methods he uses and much of the book’s content as well as the original research that substantiates it. Plaster not only documents the past and makes sense of the “performative moral economy” that developed from the 1960s among queer people living or working on the street in San Francisco’s Mid-Market, Tenderloin, and Polk Street areas, but he also seeks to address the underlying, intersecting issues of sexual, racial, and economic injustice.

Plaster begins his narrative by situating San Francisco’s Tenderloin among a network of similar derelict central-city areas in other U.S. cities, from New York to Los Angeles and from Chicago...

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