To explain Joseph Plaster’s new book, Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, it is perhaps best to begin at the end. In 2014, San Francisco opened the Tenderloin Museum. This museum documented the supposed rise and fall of the Tenderloin neighborhood. Known in the 1960s for its upscale housing, the Tenderloin neighborhood was by the 1980s notorious for its visible population of economically marginalized “street kids,” who performed youth and vulnerability for white, adult male sexual consumers (10). Kids on the Street is the opposite of the Tenderloin Museum. It offers an intervention into the narrative of urban decay, and puts street kids at the center of academic and public storytelling.

As of 2023, Joseph Plaster serves as a Lecturer and Curator in Public Humanities for Johns Hopkins University. Kids on the Street reveals his long engagement with public humanities work, from when he was a recent college graduate exploring the archives of the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society after hours to his extensive experience coordinating community-based projects and exhibits. Examining what Plaster dubs the “performative economies” of San Francisco street kids, Kids on the Street provides a well-cited academic contribution to queer and urban historiographies while illustrating the potential of public history methods to document street-based activism (5). Drawing upon more than eighty oral histories of the Tenderloin and Polk Street communities, as well as archival research and secondary sources, Plaster argues that street kids survived by practicing a moral economy rooted in reciprocity and mutual exchange. Plaster writes primarily for an academic audience, adding to a historiography that rejects linear notions of queer progress from a supposedly closeted past to a present marked by marriage equality and consumerism. In his intervention into this literature, Plaster argues that queer historians often privilege housed populations, whose records are more likely to be archived, and asks historians to include economically and socially marginalized communities in queer history. For public historians, Plaster offers a model for connecting academic-facing and public-facing scholarship, as well as a methodological frankness that enriches conversations about the ethics of public history work.

Plaster depicts the Tenderloin and Polk Street area of San Francisco as one node in a broader national network of urban districts through which street kids circulated from the late nineteenth to early twenty-first century. Although Plaster is attuned to political and economic transformations during this extensive timespan (for instance, he lays out the impact of midcentury urban redevelopment and the 1980s methamphetamine crisis on street kids), he argues that the social worlds of street kids have shown significant continuities over time. Central to these social worlds, he claims, were the norms of reciprocity that enabled street kids’ survival, the presence of “street churches”—which provided both economic support and a moral order that affirmed street kids were worthy of belonging—and the use of riots in response to state and business violations of the community’s norms (15).

Of particular interest for public historians is Kids on the Street’s structure and methodology. Plaster juxtaposes chapters about the world of street kids with two sections, titled “interventions,” that describe his public history work in the Tenderloin and Polk Street. The first intervention featured in the book, which Plaster titles “Vanguard Revisited,” brought together a cohort of twenty-first century Tenderloin youth to reconstitute the street theater of Vanguard, a 1960s organization of street kids, and engage in conversations that cut across past and present. The second intervention, titled “Polk Street Stories,” included mediated storytelling sessions with groups seeking to commemorate different aspects of Polk Street’s past as well as an exhibit of audio portraits of longtime Polk Street community members. When conducting these public history projects, Plaster aimed to counter gentrification in the Tenderloin and Polk Street, keeping the neighborhood a home for street youth. By including descriptions of these projects in the book and having them “intervene” into his more conventional academic chapters, Plaster emphasizes both the community-based process through which he developed Kids on the Street and its political stakes. Through Kids on the Street and his many years of associated public history work, Plaster seeks to center street kids in queer historical memory—not just in San Francisco (although his commitment to the city is clear), but in broader narratives of queer life. Whether or not he has succeeded, however, remains an open question by the conclusion of the text.

Although Plaster’s interventions most directly outline the importance of public history to his scholarship, his descriptions of his methodology throughout the text are also valuable for a public history audience. In order to conduct his research, Plaster emphasizes, he had to become part of the networks of reciprocity that he describes. At times, Plaster began his research as a consumer, turning drinks at bars or nights with tricks into connections for oral histories. At other times, he was a volunteer serving meals, or an organizer who leveraged connections to the wealthier parts of queer San Francisco for funds that encouraged street kids to participate in his project. Plaster depicts these multiple roles as part of the trust-building necessary to get sources to speak with him. His frankness about the role of money in making this project possible is provocative, and it deserves to be included in graduate public history classes. It will enrich discussions about reciprocity in oral history, the nonprofitization of activism, and the ethics of community engagement.

Nora Kassner, University of Nevada, Las Vegas