Alan Wakeman

For the British saxophone player, see Alan Wakeman Alan Wakeman (1936-2015) was a British author, playwright, vegan and gay rights activist. Biography He was born in London and grew up in Coulsdon, Surrey. He attended Purley Grammar School and later did National Service in Singapore and Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). He worked as an architect before spending three years in France, after which he returned to Britain to work as a teacher of English as a foreign languages. Between 1967 and wrote an English language course called English Fast, which sold steadily for several decades. From the 1970s onward, he became a staunch member of the Gay Liberation Front. He wrote the first GLF song, A Gay Song (which was played at his funeral service) and was a founding member of the theatre troupe Gay Sweatshop in 1974. For nearly fifty years, he lived in Soho, London and became a dedicated campaigner against development of historical sites. Wakeman was a vegan from the 1970s and co-authored an early vegan cookbook with Gordon Baskerville in 1986.