[1] Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba and Ottawa, Ontario,[1] Hardy studied creative writing at the University of Alberta and took a law degree at Dalhousie University before settling in Toronto, where he was a staff writer and editor of The Body Politic, a noted early Canadian gay magazine.
[1] He moved to New York City in 1984, where he was an editor for Cloverdale Press and a founding member of Publishing Triangle.
[1] He also wrote poetry throughout his life, although this was never published as a book,[1] and submitted a short story, "Ghosts", to the annual CBC Literary Competition.
[1] On October 28, 1995, Hardy died in a hiking accident in Arizona's Tonto National Forest.
[2] His unfinished non-fiction manuscript The Landscape of Death: Gay Men, AIDS and the Crisis of Desire was completed by David Groff, and was published in 1999 under the title Crisis of Desire: AIDS and the Fate of Gay Brotherhood.