Humanities in the Village returns for the 2024-25 year with this first event featuring Joseph Plaster, author of Kids on the Street, Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, in conversation with Drew Daniel!

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, excavating a history of queer life that has been overshadowed by major narratives of gay progress and pride.

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Audience Q&A after the reading—all are welcome! And while you’re there, pick up some recommended titles from Bird in Hand, and enjoy the offerings of nighttime beverages.

Joseph Plaster is Curator in Public Humanities and Director of the Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center at Johns Hopkins University.

Drew Daniel is associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Twenty Jazz Funk Greats and The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology of the English Renaissance. He book from University of Chicago Press, Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature came out in 2022.