Bob Hattoy, 56; witty and outspoken advocate for the environment, AIDS research

Bob Hattoy, a brash, often brutally witty environmental advocate and political consultant who made headlines in 1992 as the first openly gay person with AIDS to address a national political convention, died Sunday at UC Davis Medical Center. He was 56. Hattoy died of complications of AIDS, said Adrianna Shea of the California Fish and Game Commission, of which Hattoy was president.

A longtime Santa Monica resident who moved to Sacramento in January, Hattoy was well known in environmental circles as California regional director of the Sierra Club from 1981 to 1992. Soon after joining Bill Clinton's presidential campaign as an environmental advisor at the start of the 1992 primary season, he learned that he had AIDS-related lymphoma.

Two months later, he stood before thousands of delegates at the Democratic National Convention in New York City and assailed then-President George H.W. Bush for not making AIDS treatment and research a priority.

"Listen, I don't want to die. I don't want to die," Hattoy said at one point in the four-minute address when he fought to maintain his composure. "But I don't want to live in an America where the president sees me as the enemy. I can face dying because of a disease. But not because of politics."

The prime-time speech made Hattoy a "poster boy for AIDS," as he often jokingly described himself. After Clinton's election, he joined the White House staff as an associate personnel director but gained the most attention in his ad hoc role as administration critic.

His belittling of Clinton proposals to limit the deployment of gays and lesbians in the military was quoted on the front page of the New York Times and eventually led to Hattoy's redeployment to a less glamorous Washington job.

He told that newspaper in March 1993 that he "almost started to cry" when he heard Clinton say at a news conference that he would consider limiting the assignments of gay soldiers. Such a move, Hattoy said, would be akin to "restricting gays and lesbians to jobs as florists and hairdressers" in civilian life.

By the next year, he was reassigned to the post of White House liaison on environmental matters at the Interior Department, where administration officials thought he would be less likely to be consulted about issues affecting gays and lesbians. He remained in the job until 1999.

He remained active as a political consultant and in 2002 was appointed to the Fish and Game Commission by then-Gov. Gray Davis. He became commission president in February.