Joseph Plaster

Joseph Plaster is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in queer studies and public humanities, with teaching and research fields at the intersections of U.S. 20th century urban history, oral history, performance studies, public history, and LGBTQ studies of religion. He is a Lecturer in the Program in Museums and Society and Director of the Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center at Johns Hopkins University. He also serves on the faculty board of the Johns Hopkins University Alexander Grass Humanities Institute and the advisory board of OutHistory. Plaster wrote the award-winning Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin (Duke University Press, 2023).

Publications

Plaster is author of Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin. Kids on the Street is the winner of the 2024 Joe William Trotter Jr. Book Prize for Best First Book in Urban History, presented by the Urban History Association, winner of the 2024 Oral History Association Book Award, and winner of the 2024 Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, presented by The Publishing Triangle.

Kids on the Street examines the informal social networks that helped abandoned and runaway queer youth survive in the Tenderloin district from the 1950s to the present. Through archival research, oral histories, and public humanities methods, Plaster uncovers how these youth created kinship systems and practiced mutual aid in precarious circumstances, often relying on relationships with vice district workers like bartenders and hotel managers. The book highlights their resilience and creativity in the face of social trauma, offering a counter-narrative to dominant LGBTQ histories focused on progress and pride. It also critiques neoliberal urban development and its impact on these marginalized communities while celebrating their collective strategies of survival and memory-making. According to the Urban History Association, "the inclusion of ‘interventions’ offers a model for incorporating public humanities projects into our urban histories, a refreshing mode of storytelling that probes the links between past and present. Kids on the Street is a tour de force, setting a new bar for the craft of writing urban, queer, and public histories."

Plaster's article "‘Homosexuals in Adolescent Rebellion:’ Central City Uprisings during the Long Sixties,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, April 2023, won an honorable mention, Audre Lorde Prize for outstanding article on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, transsexual, and/or queer history in 2024. “Safe for Whom? And Whose Families? Narrative, Urban Neoliberalism, and Queer Oral Histories on San Francisco’s Polk Street" was published by The Public Historian in Aug 2020. “Imagined Conversations and Activist Lineages: Public Histories of Queer Homeless Youth Organizing in San Francisco’s Tenderloin" was published by the Radical History Review in May 2012.

Public Humanities

Plaster's Peabody Ballroom Experience — winner of the National Council on Public History’s 2023 Outstanding Project Award — was a collaboration between Johns Hopkins University and the LGBTQ people of color who animate Baltimore's ballroom scene. Plaster brought together students, faculty, staff, and artists to record more than a dozen oral history interviews; archive ballroom ephemera; co-teach undergraduate courses; produce documentary films; organize vogue workshops; and, most dramatically, stage epic ball competitions at the opulent George Peabody Library. The National Council on Public History noted that the project was " a great example of how to co-create with surrounding communities. The occupation of a traditionally white space with culturally significant concepts from “gay, lesbian, transgender, and gender non-conforming people of color” was outstanding and thought-provoking. The blending of performance, oral history, and archival research was particularly innovative."

Plaster directed the San Francisco ACT UP Oral History Project in 2017 and 2018 in an effort to chronicle San Francisco’s AIDS direct action movement. He recorded and archived oral histories with ACT UP veterans; developed an exhibition at the GLBT History Museum; and created a multimedia Internet presence. The oral history recordings, include an oral history with Crystal Mason, an AIDS activist who worked with the direct-action group ACT UP/ San Francisco in the early 1990s. Plaster told Teen Vogue that organizations "were led by queer radicals who had been involved in progressive political movements for decades: people who had been involved in gay liberation, in Central American solidarity movements.”

Plaster directed Vanguard Revisited, a public history project through which homeless LGBTQ youth documented and interpreted the legacy of 1960s street youth organizing. Outcomes included youth-produced historical magazine; historical walking tours; street theater reenactments; intergenerational discussion groups; national speaking tour of GLBT homeless youth shelters and faith communities. The Vanguard Revisited zine is archived by the Digital Transgender Archive.

Plaster directed Polk Street: Lives in Transition, through which he interpreted more than seventy oral histories and archival research in an effort to shape debates about gentrification and public safety on San Francisco’s Polk Street. Outcomes included a multimedia exhibit; professionally mediated neighborhood dialogues; oral history “listening parties” and other public events; hour-long radio documentary distributed nationally via NPR. The project was awarded the American Historical Association’s Allan Bérubé Prize for outstanding work in public GLBT history.

External links

• Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin. Duke University Press (2023).
• Joseph Plaster personal website