Publications
Plaster is author of Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin, [6] which received the 2024 Joe William Trotter Jr. Book Prize for Best First Book in Urban History, presented by the Urban History Association, [7] [8] the 2024 Oral History Association Book Award, [9] and the 2024 Randy Shilts Award, presented by The Publishing Triangle. [10] [11]
Kids on the Street examines the informal support networks developed by queer and trans street youth in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district from the 1950s to the present. Drawing on archival sources, oral histories, and public humanities methods, Plaster explores how these networks functioned as systems of mutual aid and kinship. The book also critiques urban redevelopment and examines how such changes affected marginalized communities in the Tenderloin. [12] [13] [14] [15]
Plaster's article, "‘Homosexuals in Adolescent Rebellion:’ Central City Uprisings during the Long Sixties," published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies in April 2023, received an honorable mention for the 2024 Audre Lorde Prize for outstanding work in LGBTQ history. [16] Additional essays include “Safe for Whom? And Whose Families?” (The Public Historian, August 2020) and “Imagined Conversations and Activist Lineages” (Radical History Review, May 2012). [17]
Public Humanities
Plaster has led several public humanities projects focused on oral history, queer history, and community collaboration.
Plaster directed the Peabody Ballroom Experience, a multi-year collaboration between Johns Hopkins University and Baltimore’s ballroom community. The project involved oral history interviews, archival work, undergraduate teaching, documentary film, performance workshops, and ball competitions at the George Peabody Library. [18] [19] [20] The project won the National Council on Public History’s 2023 Outstanding Project Award [21] [22] [23]
At Johns Hopkins, Plaster directs the Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center, which supports participatory research methods, public humanities scholarship, and collaborative approaches to knowledge creation using the university’s archives and special collections. [24]
In 2017–2018, he led the San Francisco ACT UP Oral History Project, which documented the AIDS direct action movement through recorded interviews, a museum exhibition, and a digital archive. [25] [26] [27] The oral history recordings, [28] 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. [29]
From 2010-2011, 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. [30] The Vanguard Revisited zine is archived by the Digital Transgender Archive. [31]
From 2007-2009, Plaster directed Polk Street: Lives in Transition, which interpreted 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. [32] The project was awarded the Allan Bérubé Prize for outstanding work in public GLBT history in 2010. [33]
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