Former street hustler and model Dan Mathews heads up the coolest animal rights group in the world. He spoke with Katrina Fox.

With its provocative ad campaigns featuring sex, humour and celebrities, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has made animal rights hip. The man responsible for this is Dan Mathews, its vice-president, who visited Sydney recently to announce the winners of the YoungGuns advertising competition (a global award for creatives under 30). This year the brief was supplied by PETA and the competition received a record number of entries - over 600 - from around the world, a testament to the group's appeal to young people.

"We live in world where people want to seem hip and fresh and into the latest fun and trendy thing and they don't want to hear more bad news, so by making animal rights a vaudeville show involving trendy artists now for 20 years, I've helped a lot of masses identify with it," he says.

Mathews, 41, empathised with animals at a young age when he noted that the bullies who beat him up at school for being gay and a punk rocker were often the same ones who crushed kittens in dumpsters for fun. "When people have no empathy and act abusively out of ignorance because someone is different, it's the same ignorance," he muses. "You can see the same look in their eye when they were punching me out as when they were throwing cats against a wall."

After graduating from high school, Mathews, by now a vegetarian, was unhappy in Ronald Reagan's America and moved to Italy for two years where he supported himself first through prostitution, then modelling.

"It was funny because I'd never had sex before, so it was interesting getting paid to learn," he laughs. "And it gave me a lot of confidence to do modelling. I couldn't imagine myself looking good because I'd been beaten up for so long for being a vulgar punk rocker. Before being vegetarian I was 40 pounds fatter, but within a year of graduating from high school, I moved to Italy, dropped 40 pounds, bleached my hair white, wore shredded military clothes and all of sudden was considered rough trade on the streets of Rome."

But it was disrupting fashion shows rather than modelling in them that proved to be Mathews' true vocation. He joined PETA in 1985 as a receptionist,and over the years recruited a host of celebrities, from Morrissey and Nina Hagen to Howard Jones, k.d. lang, Martina Navratilova, Chrissie Hynde, Paul McCartney, Pink and Pamela Anderson, who refers to him as her "gay husband". Between them they've engaged in a variety of zany stunts to highlight animal cruelty, from posing naked to cutting up leather jackets in a GAP store. Mathews' favourite action was impersonating a priest to gain entry to a fashion show in Milan and jumping onto the runway brandishing 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' placards to protest designers' use of fur.

Many of these designers, of course, are gay, something Mathews finds disconcerting. "Michael Kors is the worst, he's foul," he asserts. "He uses astrakhan, a kind of lamb's wool where they either induce miscarriage so they get the fur while the foetal fluid is still on it or they let the lambs be born and then beat them to death as soon as they come out, and the fur is at its most soft. He designs with this and I talked to him about it personally and asked how he could justify it and he said 'Because the fabric is really drapey' and I just thought 'fucking asshole'.

"That's the calibre of intellect you're dealing with - sometimes it's very embarrassing to be gay, when it relates to fashion; these people look like morons. Aside from the fur thing, these people have so little style of their own that they feel they have to buy something with a Dolce & Gabbana logo on, and I find it quite appalling."

Another person Mathews describes as "foul" is 'supermodel' Naomi Campbell, who after initially posing for PETA's renowned 'I'd Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur' campaign, did a backflip and returned to promoting fur. "She doesn't need to take the fur bookings, she does it because she's greedy," Mathews says. "I've met her many times, before, during and after our brouhaha and she wasn't very committed or articulate so I'm glad if we were going to lose a spokesperson that it was one who couldn't form a sentence."

Calvin Klein, however, stopped using fur after Mathews and other members of PETA ransacked his office and the pair has since become good friends, lending credence to the notion that fashion and ethics no longer need to be poles apart. It's quite possible to be a fashion-conscious, pop-culture junkie and celebrity-obsessed queen without supporting animal abuse, Mathews says.

"It's important to make it seem part of any normal person's life to be concerned about [animal cruelty]. I'm always happy to do whatever to help animals, but I'm also on the lookout for a good time and for diversion."

To support PETA visit www.peta.org

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