This is a story of friendship, love, loss, and drag told with humour and compassion. In 1977, the author, then a naïve young man, escapes his pulp and paper mill town in northern New Brunswick and goes in search of his gay self. After two years studying in Toronto, he moves to Edmonton, begins his career as a prison guard and timidly comes out into the gay scene. A lasting and sometimes tumultuous friendship develops with Joe, a drag queen and in the summer of 1982 they move to Vancouver in anticipation of fun times and promising futures. Their world changes when they're swept into the eye of the AIDS storm, a time when testing positive for HIV was considered a death sentence. Written in diary form this is an unflinching account of Joe from before testing positive for HIV until his death. This is an intimate look at the impact AIDS had on the author's family of gay friends and those around them.

Robert has called Vancouver home since 1982, but grew up in the small town of Northern, New Brunswick. As he reaches his golden years, it feels like he's been writing forever - poetry, short stories, scripts for stage and film, and journaling his gay life since 1988. He is a past Canadian Film Centre Writer Resident, twice Praxis Fellow, and most recently a participant in the Playwright Theatre Centre's Wrightspace Residency program, work shopping his current stage play, based on his memoir, Our Story: Coming Out in the Times of HIV and AIDS.

He has been in love with theatre, the movies, and television all his life, and writing has saved his sanity. His heroes in high school were not the jocks, but those who acted in the school plays. If high school was not prison enough, he followed that up with eighteen years of working in Corrections, as a jail guard, Probation Officer, and Community Correctional Worker. For the last fifteen years, in his favorite "day job" of all, he's been working on the front lines of poverty, addiction, and homelessness, with the disadvantaged in Vancouver's Downtown South.

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"A brilliantly told and riveting memoir. Told with frank honesty, Our Story brought me into a time that I had never experienced before but after reading has left me changed for the better."

Jamieson Wolf, author of Little Yellow Magnet