Writing

Peer-Reviewed Articles

“‘Homosexuals in Adolescent Rebellion:’ Central City Uprisings During the Long Sixties" (April 2023, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies)

In the late 1950s and 1960s, street youth staged a multitude of food riots, sit-ins, and pickets in downtown vice districts across the United States. We cannot appreciate the rage that sparked these rebellions without understanding the moral values and economic norms shared by those who took collective action: the self-defined “kids on the street” who migrated from central city tenderloin to tenderloin, connecting far-flung districts through migratory circuits. Sustaining themselves through sex work and other criminalized economies, street kids created in downtown districts a distinct counterpublic with its own rituals for renaming new members, conventions for collective housing, and networks for pooling resources to increase the chances of mutual survival. If we can understand the anger that prompted street kids to rebel, we can grasp what I call their performative economy.

Honorable mention, 2024 Audre Lorde Prize, which recognizes an outstanding article on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, transsexual, and/or queer history published in English in 2022 or 2023.

“The Category Is: Opulence! Performing Black Queer History in Baltimore’s ‘Cathedral of Books,’” Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies, Nov 2020

I reflect on the Peabody Ballroom Experience, a collaboration I launched between Johns Hopkins University and the queer and trans people who make up the ballroom scene. Like many elite institutions, Johns Hopkins tends to vacillate between viewing its black neighbors as a potential danger to be policed or, at times, the beneficiaries of charity. Academics too often approach public history as another form of charity: we create knowledge in the academy and then bestow it on those who, we imply, do not have knowledge of their own. This project took a different approach by cultivating an exchange of knowledge between Johns Hopkins and Baltimore’s ballroom community, bringing together faculty, students, and ballroom leaders as partners in education. Crucially, the project approached performance as a repository for history and knowledge, expanding what “public history” can look and feel like.

“Safe for Whom? And Whose Families? Narrative, Urban Neoliberalism, and Queer Oral Histories on San Francisco’s Polk Street,” The Public Historian, Aug 2020

From 2008–10, I recorded more than seventy oral histories from people experiencing the transformation of San Francisco’s Polk Street from a working-class queer commercial district to a gentrified entertainment destination serving the city’s growing elite. Oral histories enabled me to document a local past rich in non-biological family structures, which I interpreted through public “listening parties,” professionally mediated neighborhood dialogues, a traveling multimedia exhibit, and radio documentaries. The project challenged gentrifiers’ claims to be promoting “safety” and “family” by positing alternative understandings of both concepts drawn from oral histories with transgender women, queer homeless youth, sex workers, and working-class gay men who had made Polk Street their home. In this essay I reflect on my experience as director of Polk Street: Lives in Transition.

“Imagined Conversations and Activist Lineages: Public Histories of Queer Homeless Youth Organizing in San Francisco’s Tenderloin,” Radical History Review Issue 113, May 2012

By connecting homeless youth with a history stretching back half a century, the public humanities project Vanguard Revisited encouraged them to imagine their lives and political organizing as part of a historical lineage in which young people mobilized to confront the poverty and stigma they experienced on the streets of San Francisco. Instead of simply transmitting history to contemporary queer homeless youth, Vanguard Revisited sought to enlist today’s queer homeless youth in documenting the past — indeed, to enter into conversation with that history and to position themselves as part of that lineage. Youth broadcast their own stories and organized political actions in the spirit of the original Vanguard, prioritizing economic justice at a time when representations of GLBT life increasingly revolved around privatized family life and conspicuous consumption.

Additional peer-reviewed articles:

• “Black Queer Performance in Baltimore’s ‘Cathedral of Books,’” The Abusable Past, digital venue for the Radical History Review, Oct 2019

• “Race, Sexuality, and U.S. Culture Wars,” Public History Weekly, Open Peer Review, Nov 2022

• “The Peabody Ballroom Experience,” International Work, USA, Oral History, Autumn 2019

Book Chapters and Catalogues

“‘A Mecca for Young Hustlers and Daddies:’ Documenting Baltimore’s Meat Racks,” chapter in Lost Boys: Amos Badertscher’s Baltimore, edited by Jonathan D. Katz, forthcoming

“The 1990s,” chapter in Magnum America, Thames & Hudson Press, forthcoming

“Friendship as a Way of Life: 1966-1980,” catalog for “Transition Times: Re-membering Anticarceral Resistance in the Tenderloin,” Jan 2024

Digital Essays and Journalism

“Q&A with Joseph Plaster on The Peabody Ballroom Experience, Part I and II,” History@Work blog, National Council on Public History, Oct 2023

“History and Performance Collide: the Peabody Ballroom Experience,” Humanities for All blog, National Humanities Alliance Foundation, Sept 2023

“Behind the Masks: GLBT Life at Oberlin College,” thesis-length historical narrative based on more than seventy oral histories and archival research, published on a website that was maintained by Oberlin College and used as a teaching resource, 2006-2020. Read via the WayBack Machine.

“Polk Street: Lives in Transition,” commissioned by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York’s OutHistory Project, published online, Apr. 2009

“The Rise and Fall of a Polk Street Hustler,” San Francisco Bay Guardian cover story, Mar. 18, 2009

“Importing Injustice: Deregulation and the Port of Oakland’s Neighbors,” San Francisco Bay Guardian cover story, July 18, 2007

"Calling in the Feds," San Francisco Bay Guardian, 2007

“The Ruckus Society at a Crossroads,” Z Magazine, Feb. 12, 2004