The Urban Cowboy and the Irish Immigrant

Chapter 4 draws on oral history and archival evidence to tell the stories of two queer migrants who fled abusive homes for San Francisco’s Polk Street in the 1970s and 1980s. The chapter gives an account of Coy Ellison, a young man who reinvented himself on Polk Street as an “illegal Irish immigrant.” The masquerade enabled him to win under-the-table work at gay businesses and ultimately reinterpret the abuse from which he was running. The chapter then gives an account of Corey Longseeker, a once iconic “urban cowboy” in the 1980s. The chapter situates their stories and performances in the broader economic and cultural history of Polk Street, from the 1960s to the 1990s, weaving in cultural history, social analysis, and psychological insight to conceptualize the rise and fall of a historically and geographically specific site in which the kids’ performative economy took root.