[1] He was born in Manhattan in 1926 as Richard Walter Hirshfeld to Jewish parents, who later changed the family's name to Hall after experiencing an antisemitic incident.
[3] He worked in advertising and public relations, and taught at Inter American University in San Juan, Puerto Rico in the 1970s.
[3] As a book critic and essayist, he contributed to publications including The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Village Voice and The Advocate.
[3] His other published books included the short story collections Couplings (1981), Letter from a Great Uncle (1985) and Fidelities (1992), the novel Family Fictions (1991) and Three Plays for a Gay Theater (1983), a compilation of his stage plays Happy Birthday Daddy, Love Match and Prisoner of Love.
[5][6] Couplings was the subject of an essay by Jonathan Harper in the 2010 non-fiction anthology The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered.