I have conducted more than 600 oral histories and have produced a wide array of radio documentaries and audio portraits. I specialize in queer oral history: a form of insider ethnography that is often interdisciplinary and community-based; denaturalizes notions of self, sexual identity, and community; and exhibits an inclination toward creative interpretation.
Polk Street Stories
An hour-long oral history piece distributed nationally via NPR’s HearingVoices, Jun. 21, 2010. Adapted for the stage and produced by Georgetown University’s Mask and Bauble Dramatic Society in 2013.
Baltimore Queer Oral History Collection
Archived and transcribed more than thirty oral histories with queer Baltimoreans. Oral histories conducted by students and Dr. Plaster are available, free of charge, via Johns Hopkins University J Scholarship
San Francisco ACT UP Oral History Project
Designed project chronicling San Francisco’s AIDS direct action movement and trained young adult volunteers in collaboration with San Francisco’s GLBT Historical Society. Oral histories with ACT UP veterans are available online.
Audio Portraits and Commissioned Projects:
The Nob Hill Theatre Oral History Project, Summer 2023. One of the first establishments in the city to show gay pornographic films starting circa 1968, the Nob Hill evolved over its five decades in business to offer live sex shows, a video arcade, and other erotic services.
“Re-Interviewing the San Francisco Street Patrol,” audio piece commissioned by “OUT/LOOK & The Birth of The Queer: Today’s Artists and Writers Respond,” University of California Santa Cruz Arts Research Institute, Fall 2017
Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn School of Inquiry Project, Jan. 2012-2015. For three successive years, recorded “life histories” from roughly three hundred precocious six-year-olds.
San Francisco Night Ministry 50th Anniversary Audio Project, Summer 2013. Commissioned to create seven audio portraits profiling Night Ministry staff
LGBT Family Histories Project, Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities, Summer 2012. Conducted oral histories with leaders of the GLBT families movement in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
“Growing Home Community Garden,” Project Homeless Connect, San Francisco, 2011. Commissioned to create audio portraits of six homeless participants.
“Polk Gulch: the Story of Corey Longseeker,” radio documentary distributed via KALW’s Crosscurrents, Oct. 1, 2009.
Teaching:
Lecturer, Johns Hopkins University, Program in Museums and Society, “Queer Oral History,” Spring 2022
Lecturer, Johns Hopkins University, Program in Museums and Society, “Participatory Archives, Collaborative Oral History, and Social Justice,” Fall 2019
Lecturer, Yale University American Studies Department, “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Oral History Narrative,” Fall 2016