Hassle Free Clinic is deeply saddened by the sudden loss of Robert Trow, our Programme Coordinator for the last 20 years. Robert was a tireless advocate for the gay and HIV community his entire adult life. He was part of the foundation upon which the Hassle Free Clinic was built. The following pictures and comments are from some of Robert’s friends and colleagues.
From remarks delivered by Frank McGee during A Celebration of Life, Hart House Theatre, 27 October 2002
Robert will always be identified as one of the pioneering advocates and providers of anonymous HIV Testing.
In 1990, the newly elected NDP government decided it was time to implement anonymous HIV testing in Ontario.
The new AIDS Bureau, under the direction of Jay Browne, had the overwhelming task of developing law, policy and program guidelines for what was at that time still considered a radical idea. We struck a committee and ensured that Robert was involved.
Robert and his colleagues from the Hassle Free Clinic generously lent us their guidelines and protocols and Ontario became one of the first jurisdictions in North America to offer anonymous HIV testing. This was due in large part to Robert’s thinking and leadership.
In 1991 Robert was invited by then Health Minister Frances Lankin to become a member of the Ontario Advisory Committee on HIV/AIDS. He has served on that committee until his death, providing advice to more than seven Ministers of Health.
Robert participated in all issues discussed and debated at the advisory committee, and served on countless working groups. He assisted in the development of policy recommendations related to palliative care and end of life, and more recently he was a key member of a working group that explored options relating to the accessibility of non-occupational post-exposure prophylaxis.
Robert was a powerful intellect. His viewpoints were always based on an acute understanding of human behaviour combined with a gentle empathy. Robert always presented his views in a quiet, respectful manner. When he didn’t agree with someone’s viewpoint, he tried to understand it, and it was common to hear Robert asking questions that clarified what he didn’t agree with.
Robert’s thinking and ideas were also recognized on a national level. Just four weeks before his death I was sitting with Robert on a national committee discussing the complex issue of those who are unwilling or unable to prevent the transmission of HIV.
Of course he offered much more than just policy wisdom. He was well known across the province through the countless training workshops he provided on HIV test counselling and of course by hundreds of people who learned to take control of their illness through his Body Positive workshops.
However, most importantly to all of us at the AIDS Bureau, Robert was our friend. We looked forward to his humour and a delicious piece of gossip he wanted to share or hear. He offered support and friendship generously. He cannot be replaced.
From an article by Gerald Hannon that first appeared in Xtra!, 28 November 2002
I’m sitting at his desk, at Hassle Free Clinic. It’s tidy. Not at all the way it would have been in real life, when Robert Trow sat there, as he did, at one desk or another at this community health clinic, for 26 of his 53 years.
He could be sprawlingly messy. There would have been a cup of coffee, growing cold. Part of his lunch. Scattered memoranda and reports. Notes kept on tiny scraps of paper anyone else would have tossed in the garbage (I have a birthday message from him, written on a ragged scrap of paper an inch square, with a piece of yellowing scotch tape stuck to the back). An ash tray for sure, at least back in the old days (he never stopped smoking, but the clinic did). Perhaps a ratty pair of slippers under the desk. Perhaps a ratty cardigan nearby, insurance against the inevitable drafts.
I’m sitting at his desk, and I’m facing Jane Greer, with whom he worked for the last 13 years. We alternately talk of him and weep. Robert Trow died October 21, of a brain aneurysm. She lost a much loved co-worker. I lost a best friend, and the love of my life. The city, the province, the community lost its most ardent, zany and irreverent crusader for people with HIV and AIDS. Xtra’s publisher, Pink Triangle Press, lost part of its history. He is survivived by his partner of nine years, Denis Fontaine.
We met in 1973, when I was 28 years old, he was 24, and The Body Politic, “a Gay Liberation Journal,” barely a year and a half. Everything was new then-the idea that you, a fag, were not sick or sinning or shameful. That you could really build the life and world you wanted. That you needed neither permission nor expertise. That you could live in a commune. That you might fall in love. That someone might fall in love with you.
We marched together in demonstrations (something he always hated but always did). I am looking now at a photograph of him above his desk, standing outside the Ontario Human Rights Commission offices back in the 1970s, holding a placard that reads, “OHRC: Protector of Human Rights?” and it’s good to remember that they did not protect gay people until 1986 and it’s good to remember that they do so now because of people like Robert Trow.
We worked together at The Body Politic. He wrote and edited and did paste-up and proofed and corrected and attended collective meetings, but the job he did longest was the most thankless, least glamorous job of all, and that was distribution. The arduous task of getting the paper into stores, here and around the world. He pulled together a family, a world of loyal friends who worked with him each month to make sure that our paper reached as much of the greater world as we could.
Almost all of that time he also worked at Hassle Free Clinic. He helped make it, in Jane Greer’s words, “the busiest, most well known and highly regarded sexual health service in the country.”
HIV-positive himself since the early 1980s, he was fierce and dogged and wickedly funny in the face of government or medical establishment bungling and stupidity. He made the fight for anonymous HIV testing a personal crusade. It wasn’t legal in Ontario-but Hassle Free broke the law and did it anyway.
When the government finally caved and legalized the procedure in 1992, they adopted as their own the manual on anonymous testing guidelines that Robert had written.
He might also, as Jane remembers, sign a very serious letter to the province’s Chief Medical Officer of Health with, “I love you. I’ve always loved you.”
He developed the Body Positive Program, which brought men together for talk, information, and mutual support, trained others to be able to do the same work, wrote a manual to ensure that that knowledge stayed in the community.
He sat on the Ontario Advisory Committee on HIV/AIDS, on the Community Advisory Council of the David Kelly Community Counselling Program, and a long list of other working groups and committees. It was a contribution recognized, after his death, by citations both from the Ontario Minister of Health and Long-Term Care, and Toronto City Council.
We talk dutifully of those things, Jane and I. They are good things. He led a good life. And then she sighs and says, “this all makes him sound so one-dimensional,” and it does, and she says “we had such wicked fun together” and it’s true. The world is full of good people. Wickedly good is harder to find.
Wickedly good, that somehow lifts virtue out of the mire of solemnity. Wickedly good, that knows to drop its pants and moon the world (most of Robert’s friends will have at least one photograph of him mooning something).
Wickedly good, in his devastating skewering of pretension-even among his friends. In his delight in politically incorrect jokes. In the mythic frugality that saw sheets of toilet paper offered as napkins at a spare-rib dinner party-though good chunks of his always meagre salary went out in charitable donations each year.
I called him Bunny (as did most everyone else). He called me Pig. We were lovers for only nine of the 29 years we were together. I have loved others since, as did he. But what never changed was the lift and lilt and laughter of our being together, his unwavering, quiet conviction that the world is ours for the changing, the way he made so many of us heart-breakingly aware that, though among people it is the good we admire, it is the wickedly good we adore.
