Book Review: Kids on the Street

Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, by Joseph Plaster (2023). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Throughout Kids on the Street, Joseph Plaster offers a layered account of queer and trans life in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. He traces how marginalized youth have built infrastructures of kinship, care, and survival within spaces marked by abandonment, surveillance, and gentrification. Via oral histories, archival research, and ethnographic engagement, Plaster situates these “street kids” within the broader histories of migration, vice economies, and urban restructuring in the United States. He traces these histories from the late nineteenth century, through the early and mid-twentieth century – with particular attention paid to Polk Street in the 1960s and 70s, and into the 2010s. This interdisciplinary work shows how sexuality, class, and economy intersect to shape queer life at the margins. The most important contribution of this book is in the way in which it has been written and researched. Plaster has thought through the ethics of research and what would make the work authentic and not transactional. The project is grounded in four years of fieldwork (2007-11) during which he recorded oral histories with more than seventy people and explored the archives of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco.

Consider this scene from 2008 that Plaster reconstructs through months of oral history with Coy Ellison, one of his key interlocutors and a bartender and former street kid in the Tenderloin. Coy describes John Hauser, the bartender at the Q.T. hustler bar in the mid-1980s, as “basically the madam of Polk Street,” someone who “gets the hustlers to go with the johns, the johns to go with the hustlers, and make sure it’s safe in between, that there’s no problems in between.” Hauser “was able to get tipped from both sides and make money from [his work] at the same time and provide a safety net for everybody.” He could, in Coy’s words, “team you up with a date or a legitimate job or a place to stay.” Many of the Polk Street bartenders, Coy noted, “had come off the streets themselves” (191). They were former kids who had moved up the local employment ladder, becoming what Ron Huberman, a gay activist who worked in the District Attorney’s office, called “the eyes and ears of Polk Street” and his “first source of information” (192). This was skilled labor; it required social knowledge, discretion, the management of different actors, and the performance of trustworthiness to multiple parties at once. The bartender who absorbed information, brokered introductions, vouched for regulars, and quietly ensured that exchanges remained fair was not acting out of charity. His role helped reproduce relationships of trust and mutual obligation that equipped people to navigate the sexual and social worlds of Polk Street. Read in conjunction with Plaster’s discussion of the street’s moral economy, this instance highlights forms of labor that sustained community life while extending well beyond the formal responsibilities of bartending.

A second vignette further deepens this analysis. Coy Ellison himself, as a young runaway in the late 1970s, changed his name, affected an Irish accent, and began passing himself off as an “illegal Irish immigrant” on the run. As Plaster records, the performance was explicitly economic; “People were giving me jobs left and right because I was like the new thing” (190), Coy told him. “And most of the bartenders knew I wasn’t [Irish] but they’re like ‘The tourists are getting a kick out of this one, so let’s have him sweeping outside the front”’ (190). Plaster is careful to note that this self-fashioning was not simply cynical: “Coy’s self-fashioning performance was the labor that brought him the recognition of Polk Street bartenders” (190). The masquerade also enabled Coy to confront and creatively reinterpret the abuse from which he was running, developing over twenty years as a street kid, bouncer, and bartender into something more than a survival strategy. It was a form of self-fashioning that required effort, skill, and social intelligence, and that yielded material returns in the form of shelter, work, and belonging. Building on Plaster’s account, Coy’s story draws attention to forms of labor that are central to survival yet difficult to categorize within conventional definitions of work (Van Der Laan et al., 2023; Pettinger, 2019).

The above cases are not exceptional in Kids on the Street; they are what make the book, in fact. In Chapter Three, “Urban Reformers and Vanguard’s Mutual Aid,” Plaster turns to Vanguard, the youth-led street organization founded in San Francisco’s Tenderloin in 1966, and extends his analysis into its collective political action. Plaster shows how the kids who organized the group understood their situation in explicitly economic terms: “[we] instinctually knew if we’re gonna make it at all, we’re gonna have to all help each other” (134), as founder Joel Roberts told him. “The choices are to die or to create some kind of family” (134). If a Vanguard member “turned a trick, you spent that money on your other friends, because when they turned a trick they did the same” (134). Vanguard also collected donations for a “T. L. Welfare Fund,” which organizers used to provide street youth and others in need of basic necessities, operated referral services for jobs, connected kids to welfare and disability benefits, and listed in its magazine the locations of free meals and free haircuts. What is striking, from the perspective of labor anthropology, is the continuity rather than the rupture; Vanguard did not replace the street’s economic practices but extended and politicized them, transforming everyday acts of resource-sharing and mutual protection into a collective demand for a “Coffee House, Emergency Housing, Medical aid and a VD clinic, employment counseling, and Police cooperation” (134). Plaster is careful not to romanticize this mobilization, noting the internal tensions and class exclusions that shaped Vanguard’s politics – as well as the persistent friction between reformist social workers, who sought to integrate street kids into formal, respectable economies, and the youth themselves, who insisted on the value of the world that they had built.

The Chapter Two, entitled “Street churches,” is among the book’s most arresting, and it extends the question of what counts as work in an unexpected direction. One of Plaster’s most vivid depictions in this chapter comes from his own experiences of community outreach alongside River Sims, a Polk Street minister in the 2000s. After an afternoon of cooking together, Plaster realizes halfway that he and a trans-woman volunteer named Jennie are already partway through an improvised communion, with River quietly reciting scripture as they prepared plates and plastic forks for a street meal, substituting “Mother” for “Father” in the liturgy. When it ends, Jennie turns to Plaster: “That’s the first communion I’ve had ‘out.’ That’s the first communion I’ve had as Jennie” (70). The three then push a baby stroller loaded with a pot of rice and beans down Polk Street, handing food to kids on the corner. What this scene makes visible is that care, ritual, and material provision are inseparable here and that all three constitute a form of labor. River approached street kids as sacred figures, took as his inspiration the life of Christ, and “sought out the most loathsome and unclean” (70), creating a ministry that identified with those “who find themselves abandoned and isolated in their suffering” (70). This was not voluntary work in the casual sense; it was a sustained, skilled, and emotionally costly practice of social reproduction that the formal economy did not provide and would not recognize.

Kids on the Street’s sharpest argument about the relationship between work, recognition, and social reproduction comes in Chapter Five – which traces what Plaster calls the “death knell,” urban neoliberalism: “a set of practices and laws designed to make urban spaces attractive to global capital and the creative classes that comprise the high-tech new economy” (223). Tax breaks for tech corporations, public-private partnerships, and new policing strategies “radically undermined the preexisting social patterns – the reciprocities, obligations, and moral codes kids developed for limiting competition and controlling pricing” (223). The consequences were not abstract; James Harris, a black gay man and former resident of Polk Street told Plaster that when he returned in 2001 after a few years away, he could barely recognize Corey Longseeker, the “urban cowboy” of Chapter Four who had once made more money than many of the street’s legitimate businesses. “What was once a strapping, good-looking young man” (209), James said, had been reduced to “this homeless, toothless guy.” The gay bars that had provided employment ladders, where a kid could become a “swamper” (assistant), then a bouncer, then a bartender were closing. “When there were gay bars here,” Corey’s friend Dan Diez reflected, “there were affluent men, and that’s not here anymore” (215). Megan Rohrer, a street minister who knew Corey, put this situation into particularly stark terms: the homeless along Polk Street were now, she said, “the litter of a changing economy” (215).

Where Kids on the Street occasionally becomes strained is in its ambition. Oral histories with approximately eighty people across four years is an extraordinary fieldwork achievement, and the richness that this produces is evident on every page. But there are moments, particularly in the middle chapters, where the density of individual life histories makes it difficult for the reader to hold the book’s analytical arguments in view. Plaster uses the term “performative economy” which he defines as

a shared repertoire of creative strategies for managing the affective and economic impacts of abandonment. More precisely, a performative economy references the reciprocities, obligations, and moral norms shared by a population and the ways they are materialized and transmitted inter-generationally via performance, broadly defined to include religious ritual, storytelling, kinship, and gesture (5).

This concept sometimes recedes behind Plaster’s interlocutors’ stories, re-emerging most forcefully in Chapter Five’s account of the moral economy’s breakdown. This is not a fatal flaw, however, as the oral histories are at the book’s heart; it is obvious, as such, that Plaster has thought deeply about the ethics of making people’s survival stories legible to academic readers. But readers seeking a tighter theoretical thread will occasionally find themselves having to do some of that connective work themselves.

The conclusion – which reflects on memory, erasure, and urban change – is quietly devastating. It opens with the “Tenderloin History Awards,” a grassroots ceremony organized by Coy Ellison at a tavern off Polk Street in 2013. Coy, concerned that gentrification was erasing the neighborhood’s history, asked people to nominate those who “represented the best of the district” (276). The awards went to Latiya Pryor, known as Miss Classy, a black trans woman and hospice worker who led night classes teaching “the working girls” their rights; Three Finger Susie, who once managed a Tenderloin trans bar; and Megan Rohrer, for providing resources to marginally housed people on Polk Street. “Coy honored those people, in other words, who animated the webs of reciprocity, mutual support, and mentorship that comprised the Tenderloin’s performative economy” (277). As Plaster observes, the point of such stories in the neighborhood “is not always to describe an objective reality but to call forth and create a social world of fantasy and belonging” (28). Memory here is not archival but performative; it creates belonging in the present.

Taking a similar stand against erasure, Plaster documents how official “preservation” can often work to the opposite effect. To conclude, he examines the “efforts in the late 2010s and early 2020s to remember (and forget) queer and trans histories on Polk Street and the Mid-Market corridor” (280), documenting initiatives that commemorate the district’s history, often directly countering urban neoliberalism. In 2018, the Gangway bar got converted into a Laundromat, skyrocketing rents forced the closure of trans venues such as Divas, and the city’s Board of Supervisors offered tech companies payroll-tax cuts to establish themselves in the Mid-Market Tenderloin corridor. “Most of our community has left the city” (279), Divas manager Alexis Miranda told Plaster in 2019. “Gentrification has ruined San Francisco,” Miranda added (279). The neighborhood association, which had long policed street people from the corridor, commissioned murals depicting Polk Street’s queer history yet was outraged when the artists depicted sex workers and clashes with police. The murals, the association insisted, were intended to “establish a positive street identity” and “contribute to the economic vitality of the merchant district” (281). What the city preserved instead was a sanitized past that served redevelopment. Remembering, as Plaster argues, can also produce forgetting.

Kids on the Street is a significant book for those in queer studies, for urban anthropologists, and for scholars of work willing to follow Plaster into the uncomfortable and generative territory where labor, survival, kinship, and performance refuse to come apart. At a moment when anti-gender rhetoric is intensifying globally and hard-won gains are under renewed attack, the book’s insistence that these lives were structured, strategic, and dignified – that they constituted, as Plaster puts it, “a counterpublic complete with rituals” (5) and a “moral economy of reciprocity and mutual aid” (7) – feels not only scholarly but also politically necessary.

References

Pettinger, L. (2019). What’s Wrong with Work? Cambridge: Policy Press.

Van Der Laan, L., Ormsby, G., Fergusson, L., & McIlveen, P. (2023). “Is This Work? Revisiting the Definition of Work in the 21st Century.” Journal of Work-Applied Management, 15(2), 252–272.