That’s what he kept calling himself, after his ground-breaking speech to the Democrats in 1992 as a gay man with AIDS. He now is officially a Has-Bob. Bob Hattoy died yesterday in Sacramento. He was a fantastically funny, pathologically indiscreet, wildly irresponsible, AIDSy queen with great hair. And he had more integrity in his little finger than all the other gays in the Clinton administration put together. He looked into the face of death and laughed so hard God left him with us for a while, just so we could remember what so many of the dead once were, how loud and brash they once had been, how defiant and screwed up and loving so many of the best were, the dead ones, the ones we left behind. His sudden death brought all those faces back to me. I saw him only a few weeks back in Washington for the Pelosi-palooza. He was loving it. We were ideologically miles apart, but Bob was so real, petty issues like politics never got in the way. He refused to play the Clinton game of fleecing gays for money in return for power for Democrats, and was thus quickly deemed a "ticking time bomb" among the Clintonistas. He refused to sell "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell," refused to lie and spin, and so got shunted off to an Interior Department job and muzzled. "They thought I’d be dead in a few months, that’s why they gave me the White House job," he once said to me, bursting into laughter.
I wish he’d written his book about life as a gay man in the Clinton administration. One working title – among many – was "It’s The Economy, Faggot," which was roughly the attitude of most senior Clintonites to the gays who worked for them. But Bob and muzzles were not a natural fit. His stories were often at his own expense (and often completely made up), his credit was always dodgy, and his life was dedicated in many degrees to others and to causes much larger than himself. If you knew and loved him for his faults as well as his constantly "flarin’ AIDS", come by the Duplex Diner tonight in Adams Morgan to drink and laugh and remember. Or just drink.
The Dish 