May 04, 2007  |  By: ZACK ROSEN  | COMMENTS     

Dan Mathews, vice president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, is hard to ignore. He looks like a model and swears like a sailor, and somewhere between his friendship with Pamela Anderson and his naked protests at Harvard University, he’s made deep and lasting changes in the field of animal rights. Mathews will appear at the K Street Borders on May 9 to sign copies of his new book “Committed: A Rabble-Rouser’s Memoir.”

Since he began as PETA’s receptionist in the late ’70s, Mathews has wrangled countless celebrities into posing for the “I’d rather go naked than wear fur” media campaign. He’s also convinced high-profile fashion designers to stop using animal skins in their clothing lines and has been arrested all over the world in support of his cause. Refreshingly, he’s been completely honest about his sexual orientation, refusing to separate who he is from what he does.

“People in the media will say ‘You have a job most guys would kill for, you see Pam Anderson naked,’” says Mathews, whose relationship with the actress began when she posed for a PETA campaign in a bikini made of lettuce. “I say to them ‘I’m a fag, so we just talk about hair and makeup.’ That’s come across even in interviews with People magazine. If people see that you’re comfortable with yourself, they will be comfortable with you.”

MATHEWS’ LIFE WASN’T always so glamorous. Growing up poor and overweight in Southern California, he was a frequent target of homophobic bullying. The nascent activist was first moved to become a vegetarian when, on a fishing trip with his father, he watched a flounder that lay gasping on the boat’s deck. The fish reminded him of lying on the floor of his own high school trying to compose himself after being called “faggot” and punched in the stomach.

Mathews went on to attend American University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in history.

Currently living in Portsmouth, Va., Mathews has parlayed his easy nature into relationships with many high-profile animal lovers. He met Morrissey on The Smiths’ 1985 “Meat is Murder” tour and convinced the artist to contribute a song to a PETA compilation album. Chrissie Hynde, k.d. lang and The B-52’s were recruited for a later animal rights music tour.

The success of these and other celebrity collaborations helped give way to a new kind of activism. Rather than promote an image of the activist as a dowdy, ultra-serious hippie, PETA embraced pop culture and helped make it sexy to stand up for your beliefs.

“People are turned off by political things,” Mathews says. “They don’t want to take the time to learn things that seem so dour and serious. It became clear that people were paying less attention to serious things and more attention to frivolous things.”

THE BOOK TAKES a similar approach to storytelling. Through all of the humorous incidents and exotic locales of his life story, Mathews manages to sneak in a good amount of information on animal cruelty, animal rights and what it takes to make a difference.

One of the book’s most memorable episodes involves a protest at Harvard in 2004. Mathews received an e-mail from a Harvard professor asking him to speak at an extremely popular philosophy class titled “Personal Choice and Global Transformation.” Trying to make a point to a class of young idealists (and with the professor’s urging to start a PETA-style protest), Mathews staged a near-nude protest in Harvard Square. The event drew gaggles of onlookers, garnered national media attention and resulted in all the participants being arrested for indecent exposure.

“Dan is the definition of empathy,” says Lisa Lange, PETA’s senior vice president of communications. “He is driven by how he feels in his heart about the cruel treatment of animals. Every bit of controversy that he courts, he makes sure it makes sense, and in the end what people talk about is the issue itself. He’s brilliant about that.”

The new memoir isn’t Mathews’ first published work. He wrote poems for a Los Angeles-based punk magazine when he was 16, and he freelanced for extra income during his early PETA days. Years later, after writing an article for Genre magazine describing an incident where he had lunchmeat thrown at him by schoolchildren, a publisher approached him about writing a book. (Incidentally, Mathews was dressed up as a carrot during the hilarious salami-throwing debacle, which opens the memoir.)

Mathews says he wrote the book, not so much for hardcore vegetarians, but for everyone.

“It’s not ...