About Roger DeGennaro

I met Roger in 1987 through a mutual friend. We soon started dating and were together for 3 years. Roger was handsome, and had a sharp, and sometimes acerbic, wit. He was an aspiring playwright, and he introduced me to the downtown theater scene. We saw a lot of Off Off Broadway shows at places like PS 122, Dixon Place, La Mama, Theater for the New City, and Wow Cafe.  We went to see live music at local venues like the Gas Station, Webster Hall, the Pyramid Club and even the 6BC Garden. The East Village in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a relatively inexpensive place, and we could go out to eat a good meal at the Indian Restaurants on East 6th St. and the Ukrainian and Polish restaurants in the East Village. Yafa Cafe, Cafe Mogador, Sidewalk Cafe, 7A and Life Cafe were also popular places for us to go for brunch.

 

After we broke up, we still enjoyed going to theater and concerts, although there were gaps where we didn't see much of each other.  In more recent years, we would  occasionally meet up at the Boiler Room or the Phoenix Bar, some of Roger's favorite haunts. The past 2 years, Roger often often came to my house to cat sit while I was traveling. He liked getting out of his studio apartment and coming to my place to enjoy the backyard garden. He was an avid gardener, and a longtime member of the garden at 6 and B. He sometimes brought me seeds to plant. I'm glad I have some perennials in my garden to remember him by.

 

I had read a couple of Roger's works when he was alive and seen his play "Pressures of the Flesh" which was really good, but it was only after he passed in February, 2025 that I found out he had written a number of other pieces. I'm glad to be involved in helping to preserve and share his writing with this website. 

Steve Herrick

 

I met Roger around 1980 when we both were undergraduates—he was at Amherst College, and I was then attending the nearby University of Massachusetts at Amherst (I used my nickname Ned then). We were part of a ragtag group of rebellious artistic types who loved English post-punk and new wave, and our lives centered around Main Street Records and the club Rahars in nearby Northampton. Roger was also a DJ at the local college radio, on an overnight shift as I recall. I wasn’t a DJ myself, but I knew them all, which made me “cool” as well. Roger was wickedly funny, and even then, he loved wordplay and Wildean witticisms. Unlike me, he was completely out of the closet. By 1984, most of us left Northampton and we settled in the Lower East Side or East Village. Roger moved into an apartment on Avenue B that had been previously inhabited by a couple from Northampton. Madonna’s brother lived in the building for a while.

The neighborhood was changing and in conflict. Art galleries were moving in, drug dealers were being pushed further east to Avenues C and D, new gay bars and clubs were opening. The real estate industry wanted to take over and kick out the queer bohemians and Latinos and make the neighbor safe for Yuppies and NYU undergrads. Roger was a regular at The Bar (now a straight bar) and The Tunnel (now a hardware store). Though raised in an analog world, he handled the transition to the digital easily--he was great at computers, and he worked as a word processor. And always he wrote—I even remember we started a screenplay together…

Roger became committed to his neighborhood--I wasn’t surprised to learn he had become involved with a garden and an art gallery later in his life. Back in the later 80s, he curated a series of poetry and fiction readings at a café. He was also part of a writers’ group that met weekly, and he joined the Columbia Gay Men’s Study Group all the way uptown, which I later joined too. We read Michel Foucault and Gayle Rubin and other writers who formed the basis for Queer Theory. Roger was key in maintaining this group once he joined, which consisted of Columbia students as well as New York City intellectuals and artists. He was active with ACT-UP and Queer Nation, and he was instrumental in starting a branch of the Pink Panthers (a militant civilian street group patrol) in the East Village after an increase in homophobic violence in our neighborhood. I remember him gathering a group of us that he knew from the bars. We met in his apartment, and we trained to go on our protective walks around the queer hangouts. Roger organized. He went to meetings, marched, chanted, patrolled, worked for change. He hated the rightwing and he was astute and unafraid in standing up for his rights and his community. Roger was a force to be reckoned with for sure. And it was tough times and he wasn’t affluent. We lost many friends to AIDS.

Roger’s writing reflected his verbal style: it was witty and clever. But his writing also reflected his underlying attitude for those he cared about—he was sympathetic to the characters he created, and he was loyal to them. Rajah (we sometimes called him that) certainly deserved more notoriety and acclaim during his life, and I am pleased to see his writings posted on this site.

Roger had relationships with some wonderful men while I knew him, but none more lovely than Steve Herrick who has posted his memories of Roger here. I wish that our friendship could have endured those turbulent times, and I was saddened to learn of his death. We shared some wonderful laughs over 20 years of friendship. From this site I sense that Roger was loved and that he continued to find community. I am heartened to see his smile in the photos here.

Ed Miller

 

 

I met Roger on the first day of orientation, and we became friends immediately. Though he was fiercely intelligent, he was also one of the kindest, most unassuming people I’ve ever known. We bonded in particular over our interests in music: I remember an evening spent debating the relative merits of Culture’s Two Sevens Clash versus their Baldhead Bridge album. Roger was also my first openly gay friend, coming as I did from a high school in Tennessee where anybody who was lesbian or gay (quite a few, I’ve since learned) was deep in the closet.

After Amherst, Roger lived on Avenue B in the East Village. He worked as a copy editor and was both a writer of fiction and drama and a visual artist. His play Pressures of the Flesh was produced at the Cooper Square Theatre, and several radio plays were aired on WBAI. I saw Roger a few times over the years, on occasional visits to New York and then a bit more frequently after I moved to New Jersey. We had some quiet dinners together with friends, but we also attended a rowdy rooftop party that had something to do with people who write about the fashion industry.

Since I left Princeton, we’d been in touch on social media and exchanged yearly birthday greetings. In his last greeting, which must have been only a couple of months before his passing in February, he urged me to “Go do something you like.” Life is short, we’re reminded again, and that seems like advice we would all do well to follow every day. 

Jon Wallace (Amherst class of ’82)

 

I will always remember Roger with love and affection. And, I will always deeply miss his company, incomparable intelligence, wit and humor. He was a remarkable, compassionate and wonderful person. Gone far too soon from this Earth, but he touched many lives and lots of stars while he was here. Rest in peace, Rog.

Kathy Tannert Niang