front cover of Kids on the Street
Kids on the Street
Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin
Joseph Plaster
Duke University Press, 2023
In Kids on the Street Joseph Plaster explores the informal support networks that enabled abandoned and runaway queer youth to survive in tenderloin districts across the United States. Tracing the history of the downtown lodging house districts where marginally housed youth regularly lived beginning in the late 1800s, Plaster focuses on San Francisco’s Tenderloin from the 1950s to the present. He draws on archival, ethnographic, oral history, and public humanities research to outline the queer kinship networks, religious practices, performative storytelling, and migratory patterns that allowed these kids to foster social support and mutual aid. He shows how they collectively and creatively managed the social trauma they experienced, in part by building relationships with johns, bartenders, hotel managers, bouncers, and other vice district denizens. By highlighting a politics where the marginal position of street kids is the basis for a moral economy of reciprocity, Plaster excavates a history of queer life that has been overshadowed by major narratives of gay progress and pride.
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front cover of Kingdom at Any Cost
Kingdom at Any Cost
Right-Wing Visions of Apocalypse in America
Johnnie Chamberlin
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2009
Director Michael Wilson and producer Natalie Zimmerman, in their documentary film Silhouette City, have dramatically captured the religious right's concerted effort to form a theocracy in America, with an aim to spread control worldwide. This insightful book, Kingdom at Any Cost, includes valuable interviews and writings not covered in the film, but further revealing the impact of the ominous religious movement. It serves as a powerful resource: a handbook for studying the film and a reader for examining America's contemporary Christian extremes.
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