Roger Goodman, Producer/Director
I am a 64-year-old Gayman who considers myself to be a Queer Tribal Elder. I carry with me an oral history and a mythology of a people neither of which can be found in textbooks, but much of which will be found in From The Ashes Risen.
After a miserable childhood and adolescence, filled with abuse and a great deal of self-hatred, I came out publicly in 1965 at the age of 18, when relatively few LGBT people were out at all anywhere in this country. Because of some great psychotherapy with a therapist who was a disciple of Evelyn Hooker, I fell in love with myself as a Queerman, and spent the next four years living an openly Gay life, confronting my fellow students at Oberlin College, as well as the faculty members, about their homophobia and heterosexism in the classrooms and in their curricula. I graduated from Oberlin in 1968 and moved to Chicago for Graduate School at Northwestern University. In June 1969, I went to New York City to visit a very special man, and the two of us found ourselves caught up in the Stonewall Rebellion.
It was at the Stonewall Rebellion that I experienced Queer Community for the first time. It radically changed my life forever. It began my journey into the Community of Humankind.
In the ensuing years after the Rebellion, I worked in Chicago with the Gay Liberation Front, helping to found it, wresting the Gay bars from the corrupt hands of the Mafia, so that LGBT people could own our own bars and leave a world of darkness and shame. I then left Chicago for Cambridge, MA, where I helped found that chapter of the Gay Liberation Front, learning feminist politics from radical Lesbian feminists, until my consciousness was raised to that of a Queermale feminist. During that time, I lived in a political collective with eight other radical Queermen. Again, I was learning about community.
After three years of work with homeless Queer street youth in Cambridge, I went to live in Lawrence, KS with five Queermen in the arts, one of whom was a filmmaker. That began my love of film as a medium of creativity and self-expression. After one year in Lawrence, I then returned to Chicago to complete my Master's Degree in Musicology at Northwestern University and begin a performing and teaching career in 1974. I enjoyed an international career as a concert harpsichordist and teacher both privately and in the School of Music at DePaul University until September 2009, performing in such venues as Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center, Carnegie Recital Hall, the Abraham Goodman House in NYC, Orchestra Hall in Chicago, the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts and the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis, and the Wigmore Hall in London.
Because of all the AIDS death all around me, in 1984, I entered Chicago Theological Seminary where I was named the Albert W. Palmer Fellow for the duration of my student career. While attending Seminary, I helped institute the field of Queer Liberation Theology. I earned my M.Div. degree in June 1987, hoping to become an Episcopal priest, but because I was deemed to be too Queer in my theology and spirituality, the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago blocked my ordination one month before it was to take place. I left the church then, and eventually gave up on institutionalized religion completely. I have not been back to the church since, but that has not stopped my priesthood. Queer Mythology, Mystical Sex, Buddhism, Taoism, Tantric Hinduism, and 12-Step Recovery now and for the past two decades, inform my spirituality.
Today I use my seminary training, as well as my training in grief and bereavement counseling, as a Spiritual Director in private practice for Gaymen. I use it also as a Producer/Director of From The Ashes Risen. I was never meant to be an Episcopal priest, but, rather, a priest for my People, ordained by God to serve selflessly and passionately. The film is a continuation of that service. I began my Spiritual Direction practice in 1989, during the Death Years when Gaymen needed some spiritual peace from which to die. I worked as a hospital and hospice Chaplain until my own AIDS diagnosis in 1995, which ended my career as a concert harpsichordist. That time of working with my brothers with AIDS was extraordinary; for me, however, those years of death were also years of grace, when the Queer Community came together to take care of our own. As a dear friend said, those years of death were the worst of times and the best of times. They were times of intense and constant grief and mourning, and times of unbridled love, compassion, and grace. I learned a whole new meaning of Queer Community, a meaning much larger than that of the Stonewall Rebellion. I held my brothers in my arms and kissed them gently on their mouths as they took their last breaths. I facilitated their funerals and memorial services on a daily basis for ten years. I comforted grieving families, both families of origin and families of choice. I brought sick men hot meals, cleaned their apartments, changed their diapers and linens, did their laundry, administered their medications, read to them, cooked for them, and took them to emergency rooms.
Throughout this time, ever since my graduation from Northwestern University, I have on numerous occasions spoken on college and university campuses about all things Queer: Queer Politics, Queer Spirituality, Queer Mythology, Queer History, Queer Culture, Queer Identity, etc. I have spoken in convocation settings and in classroom settings on Queer History, Gender Studies, and in theology classes on such topics as Spirituality and the Queer Body; in 2009 I was invited to be convocation speaker during Pride Month at Earlham College. I have also facilitated a variety of college and university workshops focusing on Queermale Spirituality, Spirituality and Queer Politics, and Spirituality and Sexuality.
Currently, I am hard at work producing and directing this film entitled From The Ashes Risen. The film, a fully produced feature length documentary, will focus on the stories of ten Gaymen who are at least 50 years old, who are either HIV+ or who have AIDS, and who have lived through the horror of the Death Years of the 1980's and 1990's, surviving and in some cases even thriving. I will also be interviewing three nurses from Unit 371, which was the dedicated AIDS Unit at Illinois Masonic Medical Center in Chicago, and which became the model for AIDS units across the country. The film will be shown at film festivals around the world, and on college and university campuses throughout the United States. I see this moment as a very important juncture in my life, when I can now devote my time and energy to making the film, speaking and facilitating workshops on college and university campuses, and appearing before civic organizations and HIV/AIDS service agencies.
My life is about relationship and I believe that only through mutual, justice-filled relationships can we learn the real meaning of community. When we touch all of our myriad Male and Female archetypes and combine them in our relational lives, we create the ultimate Male/Female balance inside ourselves and also within those to whom we are relating. Friendship, i.e. relationship, is the refining fire where we turn dross into gold, where we turn a seemingly simple act into a profoundly spiritual act, an act that changes us at our very core. I think I want this change more than anything else for the betterment of our world. When we can make this profound change in ourselves, and learn to live as the non-violent, peaceful, altruistic, and loving people that we can be, we can then bring that self-knowledge and real community out into the world and change it for the better. We can dispel the dark Male shadow that envelops the world in war, poverty, famine, hatred, bigotry, oppression, and disease, and bring in a new reality of peace, non-violence, abundance, altruism, wellness, liberation, and compassion. It is our role to bring a new Light into the world, by discovering our own inner Divine Feminine, our own inner Light, through our relationships. This is the basis of revolution, our ability to change the world for the betterment of humankind. This is the purpose of From The Ashes Risen, to teach the world compassion and love as those in the film have learned it for themselves and for others as they journey in a world of HIV/AIDS, dispelling the Dark Masculine and replacing it with a new Masculine through a deep and abiding love of the nurturing Divine Feminine.
Indeed, the holocaust of the AIDS War was "the best of times and the worst of times" because it taught us a truth about relationship for which the world, at this time in history, is aching at its core. From The Ashes Risen hopes to create real community, not just for LGBT people, but for the entire world, a world in which difference is not just tolerated, but celebrated, a world in which the Community of Humankind can prosper and thrive.
Karen Coleman, R.N.
My name is Karen Coleman, and I am a nurse. I have been a nurse for more than forty years, having graduated from the University of Illinois College Of Nursing. I was born and raised and educated in this great city of Chicago and as a young girl, always planned to be a nurse.
Three years after graduating, I moved to California. In Los Angeles, I worked at the "hospital to the stars", Cedars of Lebanon. I was assigned to cardiac care and worked among the most progressive doctors of the era. There was much research happening in the area of cardiac care then and two of the pioneers were my colleagues. I witnessed the development of the Swan-Ganz catheter. In my eleven years in California, my career moved into administration and away from the bedside. When I decided to leave the west coast, I did so compliments of the US Air Force. I joined the nurse corps and went to Dover AFB, Delaware. There, I was back in patient care but did not like the regimentation of the military. After three and a half years, it was time to come home.
I returned to Chicago in 1982. My friends were in California but I soon found a wonderful circle of friends here. They were my brother's friends who warmly welcomed me into their fold. In 1987, AIDS started affecting my inner circle. As a nurse, I felt there had to be something I could do. I became involved in volunteering with organizations such as Chicago House and the Names Project. Through the grapevine, I heard about a head nurse position on the AIDS unit at Illinois Masonic Hospital and I rushed over for an interview. I started working there in 1989 and was there for 12 years. Never before had I felt such a calling. Never before had I felt so gratified to be a nurse. Caring for those patients defined for me my reason for being a nurse and I learned that I COULD make a difference. I have learned so much about life and death from my patients and I have been involved in HIV/AIDS care in some capacity ever since.
The face of AIDS has certainly changed over the years. Medications are improved and have fewer side effects so that the quality of life for PWA is so much better. However, the rate of new infections is alarmingly high, especially among young people coming into their sexuality. They haven't witnessed 50 or more of their close friends dying from AIDS. They don't know the history that I know. I am very proud of the work I do and I am extremely proud to be a part of this very important documentary, "From The Ashes".
Tom Fransen
Originally from Rockford, Illinois, I currently reside in Chicago and work as a psychotherapist in private practice. My path towards this project is winding, first involving the complexities of recognizing my homosexuality when AIDS first appeared and later evolved into the pandemic it has become. I was 11 years old in 1981, experiencing puberty during the early days of the epidemic, which also happened to be the most spiteful. One need only recall Ryan White's story or the myriad religious organizations decrying AIDS as God's punishment. To be sexually aware at a time when being gay was equated with both illness and evil wounded my sense of self and shaped my relationship with both HIV and sexuality itself.
I have always been spiritual, intimately connected to the faith of my upbringing, the Catholic Church. This first led to a degree in English and Theology from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Later this, along with the avoidance of my sexuality, resulted in my entering the seminary. I left after two years, finding it difficult to reconcile my beliefs with those of the Church.
Nevertheless, my identity was still essentially rooted in spirituality and the service of others. This led me to clinical social work, where I graduated from the University of Chicago in 2000. Since then I have worked in a variety of environments, including an HIV clinic, a transitional housing program for people living with HIV/AIDS and a family service agency. My increased exposure to HIV, both professionally and personally, has inspired and fortified my interest and passion for HIV/AIDS in general.
My own belief is that everyone’s story need to be told, for if left untold, one can feel invisible, living a marginal life or one devoid of meaning or purpose. Therefore, my hope in being involved in this project is that Chicago's story will be told, as it has largely been omitted in the narratives that unfolded in San Francisco and New York City.
A defining characteristic of our story is one of loss and resilience; the decimation of community and the rebirth of another. This resilience and commitment to one another simply needs to be told – first to ourselves as a reminder of our enormous capacity for survival and love; second to queer youth who have a completely different experience of HIV/AIDS; and third, to the world at large to be inspired by those were at first engulfed in the conflagration of AIDS, but then rose from the ashes, stronger and more beautiful than before.