Three recent scenes in the affective life of gentrification in San Francisco’s Polk Gulch

The introduction explores the concept of performative economy, defined as the reciprocities, obligations, and moral norms that are shared by a population and the ways they are materialized and transmitted intergenerationally via performance—broadly defined to include religious ritual, storytelling, kinship conventions, body language, and gesture. In doing so, the chapter introduces 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. Additionally, the introduction provides an overview of the book’s interdisciplinary approach, which draws on ethnographic research, oral history interviews, and archival research, and employs methods from performance studies, which approaches performance, broadly defined, as a system for transmitting cultural memory.

Introduction

2023

A Performance Genealogy of US Tenderloins

2023

Chapter 1 draws on original oral histories, archival research, and the published archive of surveys, sociological studies, reportage, and memoirs to survey the central city “stems” and amusement districts in and through which “throwaway” youth regularly circulated, usually in sync with the seasons or the local political climates, from the late nineteenth century through the 2010s. The chapter explores the reciprocities, moral norms, and performance practices street kids created through migration, including conventions for collective housing, self-policing mechanisms, and networks for pooling resources to increase the chances of mutual survival. Street youth ultimately developed a flexible view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions and performances of the many actors that made up the vice and entertainment economies—among them johns, chicken queens, bartenders, hotel managers, and bouncers.

Street Churches

2023

Chapter 2 juxtaposes archival and ethnographic research to explore the lives and ministries of four queer people who established their own extra-ecclesiastical congregations, claimed religious titles, and/or ministered to street youth in central city districts: the Reverend River Sims (contemporary Polk Street), the Reverend Raymond Broshears and the Reverend Michael Itkin (San Francisco’s Tenderloin, 1960s–1980s), and Sylvia Rivera (Times Square, 1960s–1970s). Street churches were part of the accumulation of obligations, mutualities, and reciprocities that constitutes the performative economy. Queer ministers offered a powerful critique of the moral order that cast queer street youth as unclean, damaged, and deserving of abandonment. They drew on Christian scripture to establish the supremacy of weakness over strength; the superiority of the poor and “lowly” over the wealthy and powerful. Many reinterpreted individual experiences of abandonment as collective sources of power, fueling their pathbreaking activism.