“Kids on the Street is a beautiful, powerful contribution to an inspiring tradition of activist queer and trans public history scholarship. It’s about people marginalized by gender and sexuality finding each other in abjected urban places, sinking down and rising up over and over again, individually and collectively, each time with a promise—partially fulfilled yet never fully realized—of forging new socialities that repair the injustices of the dominant social order.” - Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution
“Representing an innovative approach to queer history, Kids on the Street challenges LGBTQ historiography that often privileges trajectories of community formation and political development that fail to capture the experience of people living in precarious circumstances. Writing with fluidity, beauty, and clarity, Joseph Plaster offers a stunning analysis of the contested processes of memory making and public historical and preservation practices in the context of neoliberal urban development. One of the most exciting and innovative interdisciplinary queer historical works I’ve read recently, this fascinating book makes a major contribution.” - Kevin P. Murphy, author of Political Manhood: Red Bloods, Mollycoddles, and the Politics of Progressive Era Reform
"Kids on the Street is an admirable, thoroughly researched, and carefully documented history of the once vibrant queer culture of the Tenderloin and Polk Street. Featuring scores of interviews with one-time Polk Street denizens, it is also a lament for the displacement of the multiracial, multigender culture of San Francisco’s first post-Stonewall queer district. Drawing attention to that once-thriving, often overlooked culture, the book is a valuable contribution to queer history." - Hank Trout, Gay and Lesbian Review
“Kids on the Street showcases how performance and movement itself, religious practices and a culture of mutual aid helped people overcome a variety of social traumas…This is an exceptionally well-researched book that uplifts marginalized voices and perspectives with profound implications which transcend disciplinary boundaries. [It] is essential reading for historians of twentieth-century California, youth, urban development, and queer history at the very least.” - Jack Hodgson, European Journal of American Culture
“This book is a must read. I love [Plaster’s] deep involvement with his narrators and his beautiful writing: this is the only academic text that literally brought me to tears. . . . It’s so impressive to see such a rich work emerge out of the decades-long praxis of doing public history and oral history.” - Elspeth H. Brown, University of Toronto, LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory
"Filled with fresh insights and original archival and ethnographic research, Kids on the Street is an outstanding book, which deserves a wide readership among urban historians, religious studies scholars, historians of childhood, performance studies scholars, and cultural historians of gender nonconformity, race, and sexuality." - Alex Melody Burnett, The Metropole
"Plaster intricately entwines the historical and the ethnographic by drawing on major works in queer studies, performance studies, and affect theory, as well as by organizing two brilliantly conceived and beautifully narrated public humanities projects." - William Stell, American Religion
"Kids on the Street offers a valuable account of young people, sexuality, marginalization, and mutual support in San Francisco. . . . Readers may wish to dive straight into the detail: they will find a set of moving stories and thoughtful authorial interventions. This powerful book will repay its readers’ persistence." - Chris Brickell, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth
"Kids on the Street is an extremely enlightening book and a great contribution to our understanding of the development of San Francisco’s LGBTQ community and movement, the centrality in that history of the sex economy and its marginalized actors, and the prevalence of subtle continuities between dignity and exploitativeness, sex work and self-affirmation, abjection and pride, mutual aid and activism in street kids’ experience from the 1960s to the 2010s." - Guillaume Marche, California History
"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. . . . 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, The Public Historian
"Joseph Plaster has written a landmark work of queer history. For its examination of ephemeral networks of care, queer moral economies, street churches, and an intimate examination of fully embodied Tenderloin per formative characters, it is a triumph. For its innovative temporal blending, methodological innovations, and awareness of the impact of gentrification on public memory, it should serve as a blueprint for LGBT historians. For its poetic and self-reflective prose, it is a captivating read for all. In his study of ephemeral queer social worlds, Plaster has written a work that will have an enduring influence on the field of LGBT history."
- Chris Aino Pihlak, Journal of the History of Sexuality
"[Kids on the Street] makes significant contributions to queer religious history." - Elissa Branum, Journal of Religion
"Plaster’s work ... demonstrate[s] that storytelling can be a valuable tool for knowledge and future acts of resistance." - Mario Guevara, Oral History Review
