Biography
LGBTQ activist and advocate Alan Klein is a strategic communications leader with a 30-year record of sociopolitical achievements.
Alan, a native New Yorker, was an early member of the AIDS activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and he co-founded the LGBTQ+ rights organization Queer Nation.
He created one of the nation’s first public relations firms to specialize in social justice issues. Among his clients were some of the nation’s most notable corporations, nonprofits and activists, including: AT&T, Rolling Stone, HBO, Housing Works, Lambda Legal, GMHC, SAGE, NQAPIA, God’s Love We Deliver, AIDS activist Sean Strub, gay historian Martin Duberman, and industrialist Lord (John) Browne, the first openly gay CEO of any Fortune 500 company.
Alan is an agenda setter, moving marginalized issues center stage through placements on newspaper front pages, in primetime and online.
Alan served as the first national communications director and primary spokesperson for GLAAD. He also played a pivotal role in Ellen DeGeneres’ coming out, orchestrating international coverage and shaping the subsequent media frenzy.
He was co-creator and executive producer of “The Anti-Violence Campaign,” chaired by celebrities Susan Sarandon, John Waters, Harvey Fierstein and Lou Reed. It was the first-ever television public service announcement campaign to galvanize the nation’s attention on the epidemic of anti-LGBTQ violence.
In 2013, following passage by the Kremlin of an anti-gay law that banned promotion of nontraditional sex, and during the lead up to the Sochi Winter Olympics, Alan helped raise awareness of the plight of LGBTQ+ Russians suffering under Vladimir Putin’s regime. He transformed a little-known injustice into a global concern by securing national and international media coverage.
More recently, following the massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida in 2016, Alan Klein worked with LGBTQ+ grassroots and gun safety organizations to organize vigils and protests, and provide media outreach as a campaign spokesperson.
