Howard Benjamin Bragman was born on Feb. 24, 1956, in Flint, Mich. His father, Leonard, had an insurance company and later a real estate business, and his mother, Myrna (Wolin) Bragman, was a homemaker who later worked with her husband in real estate.
“I was fat and Jewish and gay in Flint, Michigan,” Mr. Bragman told NPR. “And that makes you a bit of a Martian, because there’s not a lot of peers, there’s not a lot of role models, to really look to.”
He earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and psychology from the University of Michigan in 1978 and soon landed a job at a small public relations concern in Chicago whose clients included Anheuser-Busch, the maker of Budweiser and other beers.
Mr. Bragman was soon turning up in newspaper articles. When Stevie Wonder and Kai Millard Morris had a child, Mandla, in 1979, it was Mr. Bragman who announced that the newborn weighed 7 pounds, 8 ounces. When Tom Earhart, a snowmobile racer sponsored by Budweiser, set a new speed record of 148.6 miles per hour in 1982, Mr. Bragman told the world.
He was a founder, in 1989, of Bragman Nyman Cafarelli, which quickly became a major public relations player. One of his first acts there was to offer pro bono help to Joseph Steffan, who had been kicked out of the United States Naval Academy in 1987 after acknowledging that he was gay and who in late 1988 sued for reinstatement. (The suit was ultimately unsuccessful).
“Sometimes causes need publicists, too,” Mr. Bragman told The Los Angeles Times in 1990. “I felt it was important that he have all the help he can in fighting his battle.”
