In June 1969, Chicagoan Roger Goodman was in New York City, visiting a lover, Michael, with whom he was in a long-distance relationship. The two were walking through the West Village, in Sheridan Square, when they stumbled across an event that changed Goodman—and the entire LGBT community—forever.
"We went out and found ourselves in the middle of a rebellion," Goodman recalled. "It was the first night of the Stonewall uprising. Beer bottles were being thrown. Bricks were being thrown. Police were barricaded in the bar—they couldn't get out."
Goodman, 68, has been sick from AIDS-related illnesses for some time. His prognosis is not good, and he told this reporter that doctors did not expect him to live through the spring. He has had HIV since 1982, and has been living with AIDS since 1995. A longtime resident of Rogers Park, he only recently moved along with his partner, Jerry Scholle, to Lake View, so the couple would be in close proximity to Goodman's physicians.
Stonewall was not the beginning, or end, of Goodman's activism, however.
He first said he knew that he was gay at age three. "I knew that I was different then, and I knew that this difference had to be hidden at all costs," Goodman, a native of New York City, said.
One of his first loves was music and he enrolled for undergraduate work at Oberlin College, where he was the first person to publicly declare their homosexuality. Despite an introverted disposition, he said, he felt the times called for someone to take a stand. After he came out, "My friend Bart shook me by the shoulders and said, 'You can't come out. Do you know what this campus is going to be like in 30 years because of this?' Thirty years later, it was one of the queerest college campuses in the country."
He moved to Chicago for graduate work at Northwestern University. Shortly after settling in Rogers Park, he took that fateful trip east to New York City, where he and Michael ended up at Stonewall.
"When the police raided the bar, people refused to give up their IDs," Goodman said. "It was illegal to be gay. Not just to have gay sex, to even be gay was illegal. It was a normal thing for police to raid bars. But the Stonewall Inn was making a payoff to the mafia, who owned the bar, and that payoff was to keep the raids from happening. The payoff didn't happen, so the bar was raided. The corruption was outrageous.
"I don't usually call it the Stonewall riots," he added. "It was the Stonewall rebellion. Riots are chaotic and have no purpose. This had a great purpose, and I really believe that Stonewall was an end to shame."
He knew that the uprising was going to be a major catalyst for change. "The people in the bar were drag queens, street people, people who were down and out. It was not a high-class bar—very lower-class. There's a myth, which I think is outrageous, that Stonewall had happened because Judy Garland had just died. That's crazy. You don't have a rebellion just because an actress died, no matter how iconic an actress she was. It bothers me when I hear that."
Goodman admitted he didn't know why that particular moment was different from all others, why that night people decided to fight back.
"It just was different," he said. "People had just had enough."
Goodman returned to Chicago, but was unable to focus on his studies. "Music had left me, and I was just obsessed with politics. All music had gone out of my head. My department chair supported that and told me, 'You'll know when to come back.'"
He was one of the founders of the Chicago chapter of the Gay Liberation Front. Among their goals was extricating the city's gay bars out from mob control.
"There were no gay-owned gay bars. They were dark caves with water-down, super-expensive drinks. You could talk, but you couldn't touch anyone. … The men in the Gay Liberation Front decided this was intolerable. We started to boycott the bars until they really began losing money, and we were told that we had hits put out on us by the mafia, which I don't doubt, because we were taking away all that business from them," Goodman said.
By the early '70s, his musical inspiration had returned, so he went back to school and became a music teacher and performer, specializing in harpsichord. Goodman did not hide his gayness from audiences either. "My music became my politics. The music world is very homophobic, and ( it was ) rabidly homophobic back them. But I performed as a gay man, and it was very clear that I was performing as a gay man."
He wore flowing robes and leather onstage, and was the first openly gay performer many in the audience had ever seen, he said. "I felt that that was my political call, to do that through my art."
Goodman retired from teaching in 2010, after 23 years at DePaul University.
Citing his introversion, Goodman said he undertook a more quiet form of activism during the early days of the AIDS crisis, though he was one of the founders of Bonaventure House, a facility for people living with the disease. In recent years, he also attempted to produce a documentary about that era, and how Chicagoans reacted to the crisis. "My [main] political work during the AIDS crisis was doing pastoral care. I was not a member of ACT UP. It just wasn't my style."
Goodman has for much of his life struggled with drug and sex addiction. In 2005, after a former partner found out that he was injecting meth and threw him out, Goodman had a breakdown and was admitted first to the psychiatric unit at Lakeshore Hospital, then the Valeo Pride program for LGBT persons in recovery.
He has been in recovery ever since. "That's a pretty big accomplishment, when you consider the statistics on recovery for crystal meth. Twenty percent in recovery for that make it in recovery without relapsing."
Spirituality has long been an important part of his life. He had almost no engagement with Judaism, the religion he was born into, but Goodman eventually came close to becoming an Episcopal priest. Church officials found many of his beliefs, many centered around the body, to be too unorthodox and he was not ordained.
"I've explored every major religion of the world, and now my spirituality is purely 12-step spirituality," Goodman said. "But my higher power is female and her name is Durga, the mother of the universe in Hinduism. She has protected me my entire life."
He further described himself as a "tribal elder" of the LGBT community, although he said, "It doesn't feel like a tribe anymore. It feels very mainstream and assimilated into the straight world. We create change and now the tribe is concerned with six-figure salaries, condos on the lake, joining the best gyms, having two dogs and living in the suburbs."
He and Scholle had a ring-exchanging ceremony in Los Angeles, but cannot get married, since Scholle is his paid-caretaker; Scholle would not qualify for compensation from Goodman's assistance if the two were legally wed. Goodman said that he has few regrets about that, however, and called his relationship with Scholle "the most fulfilling thing I've ever experienced."
Indeed, one of Goodman's favorite stories is how he and Scholle met on Match.com . After chatting online often, they decided to meet up. At the time, Goodman lived in Rogers Park and suggested that they meet at the Starbucks across from his apartment on Sheridan Road. Scholle then wrote back, and said that that he too lived on Sheridan Road, across from that Starbucks. They were in the same building, just two floors apart, all along.
"I feel really blessed," Goodman said. "My life has always been blessed. But during these last years of recovery, I've really been blessed. My life has been so rich with relationships and career."
