Growing up in the Midwest during the 1960s, Howard Bragman was fairly convinced he was an alien. "I was fat and Jewish and gay in Flint, Mich.," he says, "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." Today, Bragman has made a name for himself in Hollywood as the go-to publicist for helping celebrities come out of the closet — they call him the "gay guru." Bragman says he sees his work as a way to create the role models he never had growing up. "These people are heroes because coming out is the single most...