Sean Strub
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sean Strub is an activist, writer and publisher involved in progressive social change activism for more than 30 years.
Strub founded POZ magazine, for people impacted by HIV/AIDS, in 1994. Strub’s companies also launched POZ en Español, Mamm (for women impacted by breast cancer), Real Health (a health title for the African-American community) and Milford Magazine (a regional title distributed in the Delaware River Highlands area of northeast Pennsylvania).
Strub co-authored, with Steve Lydenberg and Alice Tepper Marlin, the seminal guide to corporate social responsibility, Rating America’s Corporate Conscience, (Addison-Wesley, 1987) and, with Dan Baker and Bill Henning, Cracking The Corporate Closet, (Harper Business, 1995).
Strub’s involvement in the social responsibility and ethical investment movements dates to the early 1980s, when his consulting firm worked with the Council on Economic Priorities, Alumni Against Apartheid and the Harvard Endowment for Divestiture. In the decade prior to the launch of POZ, Strub worked with a wide range of environmental, civil rights and feminist groups, including most of the major LGBT and AIDS organizations.
Strub has also produced theatre and major events. In 1992, at the Perry Street Theatre in New York, he produced The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me, written by and starring David Drake. The Obie Award-winning hit became one of the longest running one-person Off-Broadway shows in history. Strub subsequently produced it at the Tiffany Theatre in Los Angeles and at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco.
He produced two major art auctions for ACT UP/New York, in 1988 and 1989, and a benefit for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, which featured a performance by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane dance company, at New York’s Industria Superstudio in 1993. In Los Angeles, Strub produced the first Out Auction in 1991, which has since become an annual event benefiting the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center.
Strub has been arrested or detained multiple times for civil disobedience in New York and Washington, DC, where he was first arrested outside the White House in 1987 protesting the Reagan administration’s response to the AIDS epidemic. He was one of seven AIDS activists who protested then-US Senator Jesse Helms by placing a giant condom over Helms’ two-story brick colonial home in suburban Washington in 1991.
Strub has an extensive history of Democratic Party activism, dating to the early 1970s in his native Iowa. He served as Executive Director of the Kentucky Democratic State Committee in 1981 and then in the same position, in Pennsylvania, in 1982, focusing in both states on turning the state party organization into a service and training resource for local candidates.
In 1990, Strub himself was a Democratic candidate for the US Congress from New York’s 22nd congressional district, running as an openly gay/HIV+ man and receiving 46% of the primary vote in a race against a former member of Congress.
Since 1997, Strub has been involved in a community redevelopment project in Milford, Pennsylvania, involving investment in public infrastructure, launching cultural festivals, private sector historic preservation efforts and restoration and reopening of the Hotel Fauchère, an historic boutique hotel and culinary destination which Strub owns with a business partner.
He has received numerous awards and honors from AIDS organizations, community and professional groups, including the 1995 AIDS Action Foundation’s National Leadership Award, the 1996 Cielo Latino Companero award from the Latino Commission on AIDS, the Los Angeles-based Being Alive’s Spirit of Hope award in 1997 and the Life Award from the National Association of People With AIDS in 1999. Direct Magazine named Strub “Direct Marketer of the Year” in 1993.
A native Iowan, Strub attended a Jesuit boarding school in Wisconsin, then Georgetown and Columbia Universities before leaving college without a degree. He lives in Milford, Pennsylvania and New York City.
