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PETA Vice President Dan Mathews' activism sends him all over the world, including to a recent Milan runway. He brings his autobiography, 'Committed,' to Atlanta this week. (Photo courtesy PETA)
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HOME > SOVO SCENE > FEATURE
By: ZACK HUDSON
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A memorable ambush by anti-gay bullies reduced an adolescent Dan Mathews to a gasping, flopping jumble on a school floor.
Sometime later, on a boat during a family fishing trip, Mathews opened his eyes to the realities of the fish he and others reeled in. The fish were sprawled in bloody recoil from the hooks, and they were writhing, flopping and gasping to breathe.
Mathews was pretty sure he knew how they felt.
So an activist for animal rights was made, and with him, much of the headline grabbing success of PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Mathews joined the organization in 1985 as a receptionist. Now the group’s vice president, he brings “Committed,” his 2007 autobiography, to the Buckhead Borders on July 24.
“Committed” uses a short-story format to chronicle Mathews’ charmed, if offbeat, life in loosely chronological order. The book came about after Mathews penned a story for Details magazine that reviewed and rated the many jails in which he has spent time.
“I stopped counting sometime around 20,” he laughs.
The stories behind the arrests, some of which are recalled in “Committed,” map out Mathews’ fascinating journey from gay small-town grade school reject in California, to stints in Italy as a hustler and runway model, to the celebrity chaser who signs on names like Pamela Anderson, Pink and Al Sharpton to rebuke Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Mathews’ first PETA protest took place outside a 1981 American Psychological Association conference in Los Angeles. He and his “punk friend Connie” rode down to help call out a conference honoree, a doctor who performed animal testing that was downright sadistic, as Mathews describes it.
“That first protest I went to in 1981, it started off as a pretty dull protest," Mathews recalls. "There was a bunch of old ladies holding signs and me and my punk rock friends. Somebody had an effigy of a doctor wearing a white lab coat, and somebody, one of the old ladies, set it on fire. They started walking around it and chanting burn slow.”
The image of the burning doc lit a spark in Mathews, who since helped push PETA out from the shadows as a pet cause for hippies and into a viable, solvent and well known nonprofit.
“I’m as much a sociologist as I am an activist, and I’m painfully aware that there’s a lot of competition for people’s attention,” he says, explaining the organization’s high-profile alliances with outspoken celebs like Martha Stewart, who campaigns against the use of animal fur in textiles.
Mathews credits PETA’s involvement with the virtual elimination of animal testing trials for cosmetic consumer products. But it was PETA’s anti-fur campaigns that thrust the organization into worldwide headlines in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
“You have to come up with some sort of action plan so that people really feel like they’re witnessing a happening, and that there’s some boiling point that it’s all going to come to that everybody can’t take their eyes off it,” he explains of his methods.
As a creator and spokesperson for PETA’s “Rather go naked than wear fur” campaign, Mathews and a pal trekked to Japan to protest a fur trade convention.
“We figured out the one thing we could do to ensure that our action got some people talking about the fur issue was to pretend that we were a stripper couple who had come to Tokyo to practice our striptease outside of this fur convention with a banner that said 'We’d rather go naked than wear fur,'” he recalls.
With little help from Japanese animal groups, Mathews and his pal alerted as many news media outlets as they could, and scored worldwide coverage of their protest.
“I think the one thing we would never do is that we would never do anything violent. We’re more vaudeville than violence,” he says.
His UNFLINCHING PURSUIT of better treatment for animals comes from Mathews’ outsider status as a gay man, he says. It’s also born of his love of mischief, he admits.
“I think the main message of my book is to follow your heart in life, and not your wallet, he says. “The second message is for those people who are active in a cause and get burned out because they’re not having fun. My priorities are having fun and helping animals, in that order.”
His advice is simple.
“I always try to get people to lighten up," he says. "Life should be a lark. And if you can do some good things along the way, great. But don’t become a fucking bore.”
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