Welcome. I am an interdisciplinary scholar trained 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. I am a Lecturer in the Program in Museums and Society and Director of the Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center at Johns Hopkins University, where I develop cross-departmental, community-based research initiatives in collaboration with Baltimore’s ballroom and voguing scene, grassroots trans and non-binary activists, and local artists of color.
My book Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco’s Tenderloin (Duke University Press, Feb 2023) explores the informal support networks that enabled abandoned and runaway “kids on the street” to survive in central city tenderloin districts across the United States, and San Francisco's Tenderloin in particular, over the past century. Centering the experiences of street kids enables me to articulate—indeed excavate—a history of queer sociality that has been overshadowed by major narratives of gay progress and pride. I ultimately represent a politics where the marginal position of street youth—the self-defined “kids on the street,” hair fairies, hustlers, queens, and “undesirables”—is the basis for a moral economy of reciprocity and mutual aid.
My public humanities initiatives bring together artists, curators, historians, and activists as partners in research and advocacy. The Peabody Ballroom Experience — winner of the National Council on Public History’s 2023 Outstanding Project Award — is a collaboration between Johns Hopkins University and the queer and trans people of color who animate the ballroom scene. Since 2018, I have 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. In 2010, I was awarded the Allan Bérubé Prize for Polk Street: Lives in Transition, which mobilized over seventy oral histories to intervene in debates about gentrification, homelessness, queer politics, and public safety in the polarized setting of gentrifying San Francisco. I have launched other public humanities projects to address the history of AIDS activism, youth homelessness, and trans histories in Baltimore.
I am currently at work on several projects:
Unleashing Power: Direct Action and the San Francisco AIDS Crisis, a short, accessible book, based on oral histories with twenty-three Bay Area AIDS activists, offering a communal portrait of the unique challenges, debates, and triumphs of the AIDS activism movement in San Francisco. Drawing on traditions of direct action from the labor, civil rights, feminist, and antiwar movements, San Franciscans turned to civil disobedience to address the AIDS crisis by the mid-1980s through a wide array of groups including Enola Gay, the ARC/AIDS Vigil, AIDS Action Pledge, ACT UP/Golden Gate, Prevention Point, and ACT UP/San Francisco.
Vanguard: A Queer History of Mutual Aid tells the story of a militant “self-help” organization founded in 1966 by an unlikely alliance of street kids, sex workers, hair fairies, urban ministers, homophile organizers, and anti-poverty activists in San Francisco. Drawing on archival research and oral histories, I show how Vanguard worked to meet survival needs—providing free meals, emergency housing, and medical aid—while developing a multi-issue activist analysis that remains vital and relevant today. Organizers protested urban policies and policing practices that targeted, surveilled, and punished sex workers, drug users, trans women, and unhoused people in the name of gentrifying a “vice” district where youth had long forged a vibrant social world.
Grants & Awards
Joe William Trotter, Jr. Book Prize, Urban History Association, 2024
Oral History Association Book Award, 2024
Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, presented by The Publishing Triangle, 2024
Honorable mention, Audre Lorde Prize for outstanding article on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, transsexual, and/or queer history, 2024
National Council on Public History Outstanding Project Award, 2023
MAP Fund grant, The Peabody Ballroom Experience, 2020
American Historical Association’s Allan Bérubé Prize for outstanding work in public GLBT history, 2010
National Council on Public History, Outstanding Public History Project Award,” 2011.
California Council for the Humanities “Humanities for All” grant, ACT UP San Francisco Oral History Project, 2017.
Education
Yale University, PhD in American Studies, May 2018
Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, May 2018
Yale University, M.A. and M.Phil in American Studies, 2013
Oberlin College, B.A. in History, Oberlin, OH
Experience
Director, Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center and Curator in Public Humanities, Johns Hopkins University, October 2020-present
Curator in Public Humanities, Sheridan Libraries and Museums, Johns Hopkins University, July 2018-present
Lecturer, Program in Museums and Society, Johns Hopkins University, Aug 2019-present
Lecturer, Department of American Studies, Yale University, Fall 2016-Spring 2017
Public Humanities Director, GLBT Historical Society, San Francisco, 2005-2011