Ft. author Joseph Plaster with Susan Stryker, Cecilia Chung, & Anthony Cabello
Thursday March 16, 2023 | 5:30pm - 7pm
At the Tenderloin Museum: 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102
Free with registration via Eventbrite ($10 suggested donation)
Interdisciplinary historian Joseph Plaster shares a presentation about his recently published book, Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, followed by a panel discussion moderated by Susan Stryker and featuring Cecilia Chung & Anthony Cabello.
Tenderloin Museum welcomes Joseph Plaster for a talk and panel discussion in celebration of his recently published Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco’s Tenderloin (Duke University Press). Focused on San Francisco’s Tenderloin, the book explores informal social support and mutual aid networks amongst abandoned and runaway queer youth, and in doing so excavates a history of queer life that has been overshadowed by major narratives of gay progress and pride.
Drawing on oral histories with more than eighty individuals, Kids on the Street constitutes a richly detailed and powerful entry into the history of San Francisco’s Tenderloin, performing essential documentary work for the queer Polk Street scene, their world-making practices, and their voices. The book contextualizes its focus–the 1950s to present– with a “performance genealogy” of downtown lodging-house districts where marginally housed youth regularly lived–”tenderloin” districts–that were a common feature in many American cities going back to the late 1800s.
However, Kids on the Street is also a chronicle of Plaster’s dynamic, interdisciplinary practices and methods; he utilizes archival and ethnographic research alongside participatory public humanities that often intersect with his subjects and their stories. This multivalent approach does more than just inform; it involves both its subjects and audience so as to form complex narratives that resist simple, superficial understandings.
Notably, the book highlights two of Plaster’s Tenderloin-centered public humanities initiatives: “Vanguard Revisited,” a project co-created with Megan Rohrer that put contemporary queer youth of the TL “in conversation” with 1960s Vanguard youth organizers through stories, art, and poetry; and Polk Street: Lives in Transition, a project that drew on oral histories to intervene in debates about gentrification, policing, queer politics, and public safety in the polarized setting of gentrifying San Francisco. For those unfamiliar with Plaster’s work and seeking an accessible introduction, tune into his 2010 radio adaptation of the “Lives in Transition” project, “Polk Street Stories” (listen via Transom).
For this event at the Tenderloin Museum, Plaster is joined by two of the voices featured in “Polk Street Stories”--Cecilia Chung, Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives and Evaluation at Transgender Law Center, and Anthony Cabello, who currently manages Palo Alto Hotel, a Polk St. SRO. Moderating this panel is Susan Stryker, co-director of Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, the 2005 documentary that helped resurface the TL’s seminal act of queer resistance, and former executive director of the GLBT Historical Society, the archives at which were a critical source of Plaster’s research.
For the Tenderloin Museum, Kids on the Street is an immediate addition to our core curriculum–it’s a substantive, nuanced, and innovative work that adds considerably to the field of our specific purview. We are honored to celebrate the work upon its publication in the place of its origin, as well as to welcome Plaster to present at TLM and be in dialogue with Stryker, Chung, and Cabello. Panel will be followed by a Q&A. Don’t miss this very special event! Registration is required (via Eventbrite) and free (or a $10 suggested donation).
About the Participants:
Joseph Plaster is the author of Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco’s Tenderloin (Feb 2023, Duke University Press) and currently Curator in Public Humanities and Director of the Tabb Center at Johns Hopkins University. In that capacity, he cultivates an exchange of knowledge between the university and greater Baltimore region through participatory action research, oral history, performance, and undergraduate courses taught through the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. His academic writing has appeared in Radical History Review, The Public Historian, The Abusable Past, Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies, and will appear in a forthcoming issue of GLQ. He was awarded the American Historical Association’s Allan Bérubé Prize for Polk Street: Lives in Transition, a project that drew on oral histories to intervene in debates about gentrification, policing, queer politics, and public safety in the polarized setting of gentrifying San Francisco. Plaster holds a PhD in American Studies at Yale University with a Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Susan Stryker is Professor Emerita of Gender and Women’s Studies. Since retiring from UofA, she has been Presidential Fellow and Visiting Professor of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University (2019-2020), Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women’s Leadership, Mills College (2020-2022), and Marta Sutton Weeks External Faculty Fellow, Stanford University Humanities Institute, 2022-23. She continues to serve as executive editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and as co-editor of the Duke University Press book series ASTERISK: gender, trans-, and all that comes after. She is the author of Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution (2008, 2017), co-editor of the two-volume Transgender Studies Reader (2006, 2013) and The Transgender Studies Reader Remix (2022), as well as co-director of the Emmy-winning documentary film Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria (2005). She is currently working to complete her book manuscript Changing Gender (under contract to Farrar Straus Giroux) as well as developing a variety of film and television projects.
Cecilia Chung is a transgender woman living openly with HIV who currently serves as the Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives and Evaluation of Transgender Law Center. An immigrant from Hong Kong, Cecilia has called San Francisco home since December, 1984; over her two decades of public service, she has worked locally and internationally to become a widely recognized civil rights leader who advocates for HIV/AIDS awareness and care, LGBT equality, and social justice. A few of the groundbreaking accomplishments in her career include being the first transgender woman and first Asian to be elected to lead the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Celebration; the first transgender woman and first person living openly with HIV to Chair the San Francisco Human Rights Commission; and, an architect of the nation’s most ambitious publicly funded program addressing economic justice within the transgender community. Chung’s life has inspired the character played by Ms. Ivory Aquino in the mini docudrama series, When We Rise, produced by ABC.
Anthony Cabello is manager of the Polk Street neighborhood’s Palo Alto Hotel, which houses people living with AIDS and people looking for affordable housing. Cabello came to Polk Street in the late 1960s shortly after moving to San Francisco to study theater at Lone Mountain College. As an actor, he performed locally and toured internationally for many years. Later, he managed the (no longer extant) Royal Theater on Polk Street. After doing some stand-in work on Nash Bridges, Cabello got his SAG card and now appears with some frequency on big and small screens, appearing in Looking, Sorry to Bother You, and Milk amongst others. Cabello’s stories are featured extensively in Joseph Plaster’s “Polk Street Stories” project, and he continues to live and work in the community whose networks of social support and mutual aid reared him.