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.
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