Urban Reformers and Vanguard's Mutual Aid

Chapter 3 turns to original oral histories and archival research to show how street youth in 1966 responded to social trauma in San Francisco’s Tenderloin by forming the direct-action organization Vanguard. In contrast to current historical accounts, which assess the organization through the lens of the gay liberation movement, this chapter shows that Vanguard formalized the web of reciprocities, obligations, and religious practices that animated the kids’ performative economy. Organizers built on these mutual obligations, developed over the decades, to cultivate a politics of mutual aid: a reciprocal exchange of resources and services for mutual benefit done in conjunction with social movements demanding transformative change. Many of the young organizers were also ordained ministers in extra-ecclesiastical “street churches” described in chapter 2.