Washington Blade - March 6, 2007
Katherine Volin

Hattoy died of complications resulting from AIDS, according to his friend and former partner Bob Pelham.

Hattoy sprang into public life a mere two months after he developed AIDS. In 1992, while working on Bill Clinton's campaign, Hattoy discovered that his HIV status, which he'd learned of two years earlier, had developed into AIDS.

Clinton suggested he speak at the Democratic National Convention that July in New York. Hattoy was initially reluctant, thinking that a person of color or a woman should speak instead of him.

"I don't know how to do this," Hattoy told the Blade prior to his DNC speech. "I don't know how to be a national speaker about AIDS, let alone how to do AIDS. There are some real highs and lows. The lows are the medical treatments, the spinal taps, the constant checking and constant fear - the uncertainty of it all has had an amazing and profound effect on my life."

He and the late Elizabeth Glaser, who contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion, spoke together that July 14, when Hattoy pointed the finger at then-President George H.W. Bush, saying he had largely ignored AIDS.

"Mr. President, your family has AIDS," Hattoy said at the Convention. "We're dying and you're doing nothing about it. Listen, I don't want to die. But I don't want to live in an America where the president sees me as an enemy."

The statement made an impact.

"His prime-time speech on AIDS at the 1992 Democratic Convention à forever changed the way millions of Americans viewed people living with HIV/AIDS," said Joe Solmonese, president of Human Rights Campaign, in a statement released Monday.

Like many activists, Hattoy made his reputation as a man with chutzpah. At a 1991 pediatric AIDS fundraiser, he was assigned to tend to Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

"I said, 'Mr. Reagan, it's really nice that you're here today at the Pediatric AIDS Foundation Event,'" Hattoy told the Blade at the time. "He said, 'Yeah. Nancy and I did this last year and we thought it was a good thing to do.' And I said, 'Well, it was a good thing to do. But I just have to say that for eight years when you were president you did nothing about AIDS and a lot of my friends died. And that was a really horrible thing to do.' And he looked like someone had hit him with a shovel and he walked away."

After the '92 election, Hattoy joined Clinton's White House as associate director of personnel. It was there that Hattoy's activist attitude and candid manner of speaking - the New York Times' front page quoted him in 1993 as equating gays' limited military duties to "restricting gays and lesbians to jobs as florists and hairdressers" - quickly sent him from the personnel job to the Department of Interior where he worked on environmental issues.

"I think he was on the forefront of [the idea that] it was OK to be gay and that there was nothing wrong with it and that we were people too," Pelham said about Hattoy's contribution to gay Americans.

Howard Dean, chair of the Democratic National Committee, called Hattoy a "true champion for justice" in a statement Monday, in which he also noted Hattoy's legendary sense of humor. Hattoy once said he realized he was gay when "I was in love with Sandy on the 'Flipper' show."

Prior to working at the White House, Hattoy worked for the Sierra Club, where he demonstrated that his wit could extend to the environment as well.

"Substantive issues aside, naming a national forest after Ronald Reagan is like naming a day care center after W.C. Fields," he once said.

Hattoy was born on Nov. 1, 1952 in Rhode Island and moved to Los Angeles as a teenager. His college experience was spotty: he attended five colleges in seven years but never earned a degree. He worked in politics before joining the Sierra Club in 1981, where he worked until joining Clinton's campaign in 1992. After his White House stint, Hattoy worked as a political consultant.

Memorials for Hattoy are planned for April in four cities: New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington.

"He never did anything small," Pelham said. "He wants to be cremated. He wants to placed in one of my antique martini shakers because he always drank martinis."

Donations can be made in his name to the Sierra Club or to Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.

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