An outspoken anarchist, pacifist, and bisexual, Goodman maintained his commitment to individual freedom even when his beliefs jeopardized his reputation and his career.

Goodman was born into a poor Jewish family in New York City in 1911. His father abandoned the family soon after Paul’s birth, and he was raised by his bohemian mother, aunts, and older sister. Free to explore the city’s streets, museums, and libraries as a boy, Goodman would later advocate self-learning and denounce the formal education system—although he snuck into classes at Columbia and Harvard.

A Columbia professor invited him to teach at the University of Chicago while he earned his doctorate in literature, but Goodman was fired for having an affair with a male student. He was later dismissed from two other teaching jobs for the same reason. Although he maintained an outwardly traditional family life—with two successive wives and three children—he made little attempt to hide his sexual liaisons with men, who were often many years his junior (though not always his students). "I have been fired three times because of my queer behavior or my claim to the right of it," Goodman once wrote.

Despite his lack of formal training in psychology, Goodman and psychoanalyst Fritz Perls developed a new model of humanistic psychotherapy known as Gestalt. Goodman believed that a repressive society, rather than an individual’s failure to conform, was responsible for psychiatric problems, and he saw therapy as a tool for social revolution. He also shared radical psychologist Wilhelm Reich’s view that institutions such as the family and formal schooling are designed to repress people’s natural desires, making them passive and better suited for their role as workers.

Goodman wrote numerous poems, short stories, and novels, many with homoerotic and mythological themes. Although popular within avant-garde circles, his early work was far from lucrative, and he spent much of his life taking on odd jobs to pay the bills. By the late 1950s he had largely abandoned fiction and devoted himself to social criticism.

His best-known work, Growing Up Absurd (1960), finally brought him widespread acclaim and some financial security. Appearing at the dawn of a countercultural revolution against the conservatism of the 1950s, his message—that American social institutions were geared toward instilling social, sexual, and political conformity—made Goodman an icon among disaffected students and youth.

Unfairly labeled an ivory-tower utopian by his critics, Goodman was a pragmatic problem-solver and an activist as well as a theorist. An advocate of community-based urban planning, he called for banning cars from Manhattan. In 1967 he famously lambasted attendees at a symposium of the National Security Industrial Association (a military industry trade organization), calling them "the most dangerous body of men at present in the world" and urging them to rapidly phase themselves out. Gay Gestalt therapist Patrick Kelley recalls encountering him among the crowd gathered outside the Stonewall Inn in June 1969, where Goodman proclaimed, "This is where tonight’s revolution is taking place."

Along with education, Goodman expounded on themes of alienation, community, and sexuality. He opposed censorship of pornography, believed monogamy was oppressive, and advocated sexual freedom for children and adolescents. Goodman also challenged the boundaries between public and private, consistently linking his political and psychological theories with his personal experiences. In "The Politics of Being Queer," an essay written near the end of his life, he addressed both societal homophobia and his own bisexuality.

Often abrasive and always uncompromising, Goodman came to deplore the mysticism, excessive drug use, and reactionary violence of the counterculture. By the end of the ‘60s his followers had largely moved on to new political gurus, and he felt a growing sense of disillusionment: "Frankly, my experience of radical community is that it does not tolerate my freedom." Goodman’s son Mathew died in a mountain-climbing accident in 1967, and friends said he never recovered from his grief. He died of a heart attack in August 1972.

Although Goodman himself fell out of favor, his ideas have had a pervasive influence. Today’s global justice activists embrace Goodman’s vision of ecological balance and direct democracy, while right-wing psychiatrist and reparative therapy advocate Charles Socarides credits him as one of "a few intellectuals [who] laid down the ideological underpinnings for the entire tie-dyed, try-anything-sexual Woodstock generation."