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But there is a long list of vicious actions by President Clinton and his administration for which he owes LGBT people an unadulterated apology.

Let’s take his betrayal of his 1992 campaign pledge to end, “with the stroke of a pen,” the ban on gays serving in the military, which helped him raise millions of gay dollars for his campaign — especially from the Hollywood crowd he liked to hang out with.

Most presidents, when they take office, have a plan on how to fulfill their campaign promises. But Bill had no plan for allowing gays to serve in uniform. And so he got rolled by the military. With Colin Powell in the lead, the generals staged what was, in effect, a silent coup d’état that throttled our tradition of civilian control over the military with a revolt of the brass hats. And Bill then did what every cynical politician does when he wants to avoid a confrontation over principle — he appointed a commission. The one that gave us Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell — which was, of course, like DOMA, the writing of bigotry into law. As I reported in a cover story for The Nation, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell unleashed a wave of persecution and violence against gays in the armed services that included murders. The blood of those victims of violence is on Bill’s hands.

Sure, Bill gave jobs to a few gay boys and girls — just enough to keep his gay campaign donors happy, but never in any positions that would have affected the daily lives of gay people.

In 1996, when ENDA — the pathetically inadequate Employment Non-Discrimination Act for gay people — came within one vote of passing the Senate, Bill and his White House didn’t lift a pinkie to help secure pro-ENDA votes. That swing vote was Senator Dale Bumpers, a Democrat from Clinton’s own home state of Arkansas, who took a walk.

And then, there was AIDS. Bill fired Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders for having championed teaching the use of condoms in the schools and advocated masturbation as a safe alternative to risky sex at a time when teenage infection rates were soaring.

In the second Clinton administration, one of my gigs was writing a column on the politics of AIDS for POZ magazine. And back then I wrote a series of columns exposing how Bill and his administration used aid and trade blackmail targeting Third World countries to stop them from buying or manufacturing cheaper, generic versions of the AIDS-fighting drugs needed to prolong life. Al Gore was the point man in this odious extortion campaign, which is why he was dogged by ACT UP in his 2000 presidential campaign. How many thousands died because Clinton, in his subservience to the greed of Big Pharma, engaged in this shameful arm-breaking? We’ll never know for sure — but their blood, too, is on Bill’s hands.

Whenever I see Bill parading around these days as a champion of the fight against AIDS, I think of those who died from the epidemic because of him. He has always reminded me of a line of Goethe’s, in “The Sorrows of Young Werther”: “Each step he takes costs the lives of a thousand poor little worms.” And my late partner, Hervé Couergou, was one of the worms crushed under the heel of Bill Clinton’s cynical opportunism.

I fell in love with Hervé shortly after I moved to France for a decade. But not long after I moved back to the US to lay the groundwork for Hervé to join me here, Bill signed a renewal of President George H.W. Bush’s executive order banning admission into this country of anyone who was HIV-positive. This obscene act of Bill Clinton’s broke up many families, including mine. And because Hervé had sero-converted, he felt the full force of Clinton’s ukase — which, I’m convinced, didn’t win the president a single vote.

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