“We were the best musicians…”
Raised in a middle class, Jewish, suburban family, Roger Goodman remembers a childhood “filled with monstrosity.” His family maintained a respective, “healthy” façade, but Goodman recalls “emotional, physical, [and] sexual abuse, all hidden behind closed doors.” He was aware of his attractions to men from a very early age, but knew enough to keep it a secret; homosexual “was a word of terror,” he recalls. His parents, both members of the Communist Party, nonetheless helped instill a sense of “justice” in Goodman; he remembers watching the McCarthy hearings on television with his family as a seminal moment in his life.
Oral history conducted in Oberlin, OH, Oct. 1 and 4, 1999, by Joey Plaster. An ellipsis (…) indicates that material has been omitted.
I grew up with music, which was very important…My only emotional outlet as a child was my piano, and so I became, at least interpretively, a child prodigy…I remember I used to enter piano competitions [and] the judges would always…take notes on each performance and send the notes and remarks and comments to the teachers for the teacher to see. My teacher showed me one of the sets of remarks from one judge. And it said no child of this age should ever be able to express such pain, such sadness, such rage, such depth of emotion. Something is not right here. And I am convinced now as an adult that what I was expressing was not only all of that stuff [that] was happening in my home, but it was about being gay. I knew I was a freak, and that I had to hide at all costs this truth about myself…
Why I chose Oberlin as a place to come I’m not sure; I auditioned at four or five different music schools. I didn’t have to come to Oberlin, but there was something so loving and so embracing about the town, about the architecture, about the committee that listened to my auditions…and I told my parents I don’t want to go to Juilliard School of Music in New York, I want to go to Oberlin College in Ohio…
There was something that drew me here and I didn’t know what that something was. Now I know what that something was, but that’s in retrospect and has to do with my spiritual training. I had to be here because I had to meet and work with [head of Oberlin Psychological Services] John Thomson in a psychotherapeutic relationship in order to come blasting out of my closet after one semester of psychotherapy. I came here as a very frightened, very fat, very socially awkward, highly egocentric and yet frightened Jewish pianist, among all the other frightened, fat, egocentric Jewish pianists, you know. I wasn’t any different than any of the students in the Conservatory my freshman year, I don’t think…
When I first got here I felt isolated. I still carrying around my closet on my back, like a monkey on my back, and I went crazy. I had a small little nervous breakdown and…locked [my roommate] out of the dormitory room. I wouldn’t let him in because I was terrified to go out, because there were all these men around and my parents weren’t around. So my sexual energy started to just get so directed towards the reality of man possibilities instead of the fantasy of man impossibilities…When I got here at Oberlin I knew that my fantasies could become a reality; that’s what made me crazy!…
I told [John Thompson] that I was a homosexual and I didn’t know what to do with this, and he said, “Well if you’re coming to see me because you want me to make you straight then I’m telling you that you should see another therapist because I won’t do that to you.” And he explained to me that I had opportunities…throughout my years prior to Oberlin to dig around inside myself so much, because I had to live a completely interiorized life, that I was finding out truth about myself that most students would never have to even think about because the world was made for heterosexuals. So as a homosexual, I was forced to go deep inside and that his job was to help me bring those truths and that self-knowledge to the surface…[Thompson] was a compassionate man who worked from his heart. And he was the first man who accepted me just as I am. With no judgment of any kind…
He would show me [the work of] Evelyn Hooker…[that showed] homosexuality was not a mental illness. It was her work that started that whole thing with the American Psychiatric Association taking [homosexuality] out of the DSM…And John would come in waving these articles that he had read, showing me the graphs and the statistics and saying, “You see, you are not sick! Believe me, I told you that you are not sick! So does Evelyn Hooker! She tells you that you are not sick!”…I can’t really pinpoint want John did to make me love myself but love me. He loved me! And that enabled me to love myself…He began to teach me that being gay was a beautiful and wonderful thing, and this was a straight psychotherapist in the 1960s, which is outrageous when I think about it. So after one semester I just threw that closet door open and came out like a whirlwind!…
Oberlin at that time was a wildfire word-of-mouth community. So all I needed to do was tell a few people, and they told a few people, and they told a few people…’til everyone on campus knew…People I didn’t even know knew…On Parent’s Weekend…someone in the liberal arts college I had absolutely no contact with and didn’t know…whisper[ed] to their parents, quite enough for me to hear, “That’s Roger Goodman. He’s homosexual and he doesn’t care who knows it!”…
And it was actually quite wonderful because I was considered very exotic and people wanted to know me because they couldn’t figure out why someone would do this…
My circle of friends were the most brilliant students on campus, the most creative, the most dynamic. And we flocked together because we were all those things, but they also swarmed around me because there was something outrageously creative about saying, “I’m gay and I’m happy! And you will deal with me!” So I became kind of a celebrity, which I loved because, you know, I grew up being told I was absolutely nothing and that I would never be anything…And when I got here to Oberlin with all the messages that I would be nothing that I wasn’t smart enough I wasn’t clever enough I wasn’t adept enough I would never be able to do anything that a male was supposed to be able to do, I found that at Oberlin, I was something. And that something was being gay. And for a man in the ‘60s, eighteen years old, nineteen years old, to know that was a marvel…
And I would sit exotically draped over a chair, you know, very Oscar Wilde-y-ish…with my long hair and all my beads and all my scarves…I carried this thing over my shoulder where I kept all my pens and pencils and journals and such things, you know sometimes the jocks on campus would tease me and say, “Hey is that your purse, Goodman?” And I’d say, “I actually just call it my bag.” But no one ever harassed me. They didn’t dare harass me, because my self-identity came from such a strong source of power! An occasional tease from a jock, but usually people kept their distance. They would just cross the sidewalk if I was walking down the sidewalk. Because I felt so empowered by being out in a world where being out was certainly not done.
And my friends loved me for it, and I loved me for it and I loved them back. I would say, I’m fifty-three years old, and it would be an honest thing for me to say that some of the very best years of my life were the years I lived here as a student, learning to be a faggot. An honest to God in your face faggot…
[After coming back from a study-abroad program in England in 1967,] I couldn’t believe what was going on with the faggots in that Con lounge. It was outrageous. It was blatant faggotry. Just blatant faggotry, without any qualms, or any sense of needing to hide a thing…And our part of the Conservatory lounge was when you walk into the doors from where that pond is…we were in the corner on the left. That was our corner. We had it….’Cause it was comfy, and the couches were L-shaped so you could see each other. We also had a very good view of who was walking by, so we could make nasty, catty comments about them…
There was a young man whose name was “Needs-a,” which was short for “Needs-a dress.” “Needs-a dress” was very femme, but “Needs-a dress” never said anything about being gay. So there would be all these faggots standing in the Conservatory lounge…and he would come walking through…and Steven [Lord (OC 71)] would say, “Oh, Needs-a!” And then he’d put his hands up to his mouth like this and say, “Do you think she’ll ever know who she is?” And we’d laugh…We had the sharpest senses of humor and the sharpest tongues, and we could destroy with a word if we wanted to…
The wit was so sharp, so right on target, so utterly riotous. People were even starting to snap fingers back then, and nobody was snapping fingers back then. I remember Steven Lord would stand in the Con Lounge, with his hand like this on his mouth, and one hand on his hip and he’d watch these men walk by. And he’d go [Snap! Snap! Snap!] with a sneer on his face like, “Who the fuck do you think you are girl?”…It meant that someone walked by who was not out enough. Cause we really wanted everybody out. Out out. So there was out and there was not enough out.
[Being “out”] meant to be outrageous in the Conservatory lounge. Being heard, being audible and visible and very queer. And it had a wonderful “fuck you” attitude…Very quick, dry, sharp-witted commentary on life. And some of us were very much the aesthetes…Oberlin had its aesthetes. It also had its outrageous campy queens…
[Camp] was outrage, but it was also a way for us to have community of identity. We were the special ones. We were the ones who the other Conservatory students looked to for our gifts, for our talents. We were the most gifted. There were lots of better technicians, you understand. There were better pianists, at least in terms of technique. There were better violinists, there were better singers. But we were the most gifted in terms of our musical gifts. We were the most emotional, we were the most expressive, we were the most exciting in performance…
I studied with an incredible piano teacher and pianist in London, at Trinity College of Music, who was a student of a student of Brahms. So my Brahms interpretation came directly down from Brahms himself; it was a wonderful lineage. And I came back to Oberlin and…played some Brahms on a student recital. And I remember that the audience was very uncomfortable about it, because it was outrageous. And it was angular and it was round and it was beautiful and it was passionate. And I remember Steven Lord, I heard him saying afterwards to some students in the Con lounge, he said, “Well you may not like it, darling, but you can’t argue with it, can you?” And that’s who we were. That’s who the queer men students—because there were no out lesbians—were; we were the ones you couldn’t argue with interpretably in our music. We may not have been the best technicians, but we were the best musicians in the Conservatory. There was no questioning that. And it made us feel special. It made our closet doors disappear. Not just open up, but disappear…
And you know, that was before Stonewall…Oberlin had its Stonewall before Stonewall…Stonewall were all my magnificent, brilliant, bright, lit-up queer friends…We were special, we were spotlighted, we were respected, and we knew it. And we played it for everything it was worth…
I didn’t spend all my time with this Conservatory circle, you understand. I had a number of straight friends, who were dear friends. I was even part of a rock and roll band. I was the lead singer. I’m a has-been [laughs]. I’m a has-been that never was. There was a band here at Oberlin that was quite remarkable. And I’ve come to find out that the recording that we did became a cult recording, a cult LP and has now been digitalized into a CD. And the group was called the Ant Trip Ceremony…It was very much a drug-involved name, because drugs were the mode of life for me, and for the circle of friends who were not gay. The gay boys in the Conservatory did not do drugs. I did lots of drugs, and I did those drugs with my straight friends. The Ant Trip Ceremony came out of our drug experience, of three of us…
And we all hung out together; me, those men, and their girlfriends. And those girlfriends were very woman-identified. And those men had a sense of their maleness that allowed for physical affection between me and them without them cringing. I could walk around campus with my arm around their shoulder or their arms around my waist. They knowing full well that they were straight, but being completely comfortable with their sexual orientation…In some ways they were as dear to me as my fabulous queer circle. And in some ways they understood me better. Because they saw me as more than queer. They saw me definitely as queer, but they saw me as much more than queer. Whereas, when I was with my circle of bright young friends in the Conservatory, our main identification was as queer artists. And I think that had a lot to do with the drug culture. You cannot take hallucinogenic drugs every weekend with the same people without developing a completely different kind of friendship dynamic than you have with those with whom you don’t take those drugs…
We were not just smoking marijuana. Not by a long shot. Marijuana was just our daily smoke, like a cigarette. The weekends were spent with absolutely hallucinogenic drugs…We were drinking LSD in its purest form…We were going to Mexico and picking mushrooms and we were going to the Southwest and picking cactus…There was one guy who flew to Nepal and brought back hashish. And part of the drugs opened me into a doorway of my greater consciousness to that which is me. I never misunderstood the drug as God, [but] drugs opened the door to a level of consciousness…
And it’s interesting to me that Oberlin was the beginning of my conscious journey as a spiritual human being. I wanted something more than just being human because I knew there was something more than just being human, that there was something more than just being a snail. And it was the ‘60s, and the Eastern spiritual paths were very popular. People read Buddhism and read Hinduism…I looked at Christianity, I looked everywhere to find an answer to questions that were not being met by me being a scandal…Part of spirituality came because of the drug culture at Oberlin.
The interesting thing that I found about sex at Oberlin with me was that so-called straight men felt free enough to be able to, through various kinds of subterfuge, to explore their gayness because they trusted me…So I would get stoned with a friend who I’d think was very hot; I remember one particularly who I thought was just divinely beautiful…These straight boys, I tell you, they really used to love to walk around in front of me with their shirts off. They were looking for blow jobs and they were looking for a blow job with this out gay person who wouldn’t mind givin’ it to ‘em! And who wouldn’t ridicule them for wanting it because they were being themselves and I was being myself…And I think back to a number of those sexual encounters and I think “they used me!” But that’s not what I thought back then…
I [also] had sex with the faggots in the Conservatory, and the college and the theatre department. We were all art faggots!…Sex with faggots with much more love-making; it was an extension of friendship. My years at Oberlin allowed me to distinguish between having sex and making love. It also let me learn to feel what it was to be an object…
There were orgies in the dormitories in peoples’ rooms. I was never invited to them, which pissed me off a lot. And they were always around Bart Pitman [OC 70]; he was the focal point of the orgies…One of the people I never did have sex with was Bart. And that made sense to me because we loved each other too much and we didn’t know back then how to make love as an extension of the emotional bond; we [only] knew how to fuck. And Bart really knew; he was very precocious. Bart…would get on his motorcycle with a tube of KY Jelly stickin’ out of the rear pocket of his Levis and go to Cleveland and go to the baths…I looked to Bart Pitman as a magical man. Because he had the nerve, he had the audacity and the courage, to go into Cleveland to go to the baths…
My sexual vocabulary I got here at Oberlin. I learned a great deal about anal sex here, which was wonderful. It was actually here at Oberlin that I came to know a very important politic of mine, which is “get to know your asshole get to know yourself.” And I still think that’s true; that men who don’t get fucked don’t know themselves well enough as those who do. Because once you learn how to be penetrated, and to give that up, to sort of surrender, then you really learn a great deal about yourself as a man…I codified that in my head [at Oberlin], that getting fucked was a major political statement…
[In classrooms,] I didn’t allow professors to get away with not naming it…When we’d look at Michelangelo’s David, and the professor would talk about the beauty of the body, and isn’t this wonderful, and how could a man create such magnificent male beauty as the David? And I would say, “It’s because he loved boys! Because Michelangelo was a gay man, so he knew the bodies of men. Intimately.” Or we’d be talking about the paintings of David Hockney of naked boys swimming in swimming pools…and no mention of Hockney being gay. And I would say something in class about it and how it reflected who David Hockney was. Or talking about Gertrude Stein in an American Lit class and not talking about her being a lesbian. And I would say, “How can you talk about The Autobiography of Gertrude Stein, written by Alice B. Toklas, without recognizing that they were life partners?”…And people were shocked. They were scandalized. Because I was a scandal. Being out was a scandal. But I really thrived on scandal. I loved being the Oberlin College scandal. And so why not extend that scandal into the classroom where truth needs to be told…
[At my senior perspective,] the room was filled with students. And I think one reason the room was filled with students was because I had had four years here to be the outrage that I was…And I was pissed. I was really angry. That was 1968 and the country was in turmoil. Oberlin was a hotbed of radicalism. We published one of the finest radical journals in the entire country…And the ending of segregation, and Bull Conner down in Alabama, and the dogs attacking black people and the fire hoses on the marchers to Selma, and all of that was happening. The sit-ins in Cleveland, which I went to, a lot of them, which were terrifying things for me because mounted police were there, and the police would bring their horses right up to our bodies…And the whole thing was beginning to ferment around what was going on in Asia.
And the one thing that nobody was talking about was queer stuff. SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] was on campus, the NAACP had a chapter on campus. It was an extraordinary place. And there was no place for a queer man to be queerly involved with that radical movement. So my senior perspective was essentially a finger pointing session: “This is my experience at Oberlin over four years, and you think you all are so radical, and in fact, you are conservative and bigoted and biased, and you don’t give a shit about me or my people.” Because I was beginning to have a sense of my people at Oberlin…I guess because there were a number of out students in the Conservatory by that time…
I think that [watching the McCarthy hearings as a child] was a moment that somehow instilled in me a sense of justice versus injustice. And part of me being a scandal at Oberlin was me fighting for justice. Justice for myself and certainly justice for my friends in the Conservatory. I had no concept of justice outside of Oberlin until I got to Chicago after I graduated and I was very much involved in the formation of the Gay Liberation Front after Stonewall…I realized at Stonewall [that] there was indeed this thing, this community of angry gay men who bore this same anger towards society that I bore for making us hate ourselves! The anger was directed at the police during the riots. It was a release of self-directed anger…Once you say, “No, I cannot do this anymore,” you are beginning to love yourself. Put up your hand and say, “Stop, in the name of love!” And it is in the name of love—the name of self-love…
The biggest thing that I got here from my years as an undergraduate at Oberlin was that I learned to love myself, and I came here the most self-hating, self-loathing worm…Those years helped form me into the person who took to the streets, baths, restrooms, and the subway stations of New York, and the dirty movie theatres and the backroom bars. Those years at Oberlin helped form me into the person that [I became] in the early eighties. And that was the person that contracted HIV. But how can I regret any of that? If I regret that I would have to regret my years at Oberlin. And how can I regret my years at Oberlin? I can’t.
