An Army brat native of Augusta, GA and Massachusetts resident, Diego joined PFLAG in 2013 after the retirement of Congressman Barney Frank (MA-4), who Diego served as Senior Policy Advisor and the first openly trans senior staffer on Capitol Hill. As a Congressional staffer, Diego was involved in several landmark legislative victories toward equality. 

He is the first openly trans person appointed to the DNC’s Platform Committee and an author of the National AIDS Strategy while at AIDS Action in Boston and DC. He led the nation’s first government-funded trans health education program at Justice Resource Institute. Accredited in Public Relations by PRSA, he was an award-winning global executive in public relations, marketing, and DEI at world headquarters of Fortune 500 companies including Coca-Cola, Holiday Inn, ITT Sheraton and then Starwood Hotels, now part of Marriott International.  Diego chaired the Work Plan Committee for Massachusetts’ CDC-mandated HIV Community Prevention Group and served on the editing cohort of SAMSHA’s Healthy People first inclusion of LGBTQ+ people, first as a compendium document and later as part of the actual manual. 

A nationally recognized community leader, speaker, writer and strategist, Diego was named to the Top 100 Most Powerful Latino/a Corporate Executives by Hispanic Business Magazine, Most Powerful Latinos/as in Massachusetts by El Planeta Newspaper, awarded Q Street’s Legislative Staffer of the Year, named to Out 100 and the inaugural Trans 100. Diego received the Frank Kameny Award in 2022 from the National LGBTQ Bar Association, presented to a member of the LGBTQ+ community without a law degree who has paved the way for important legal victories. In 2024, he received a commendation from the New Jersey Assembly for his trailblazer lifetime accomplishments as a national trans community leader. Diego serves on the DNC’s Transgender Advisory Council and is on the Advisory Board of the Gender Care Center at Boston Medical Center.  

He graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism from the University of Georgia, majoring in Public Relations and Spanish, and is a Senior Fellow of UMass/Boston’s College of Management’s Emerging Leaders Program in the Center for Collaborative Leadership, residing in Washington, DC and Boston. Diego was selected to be in Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business’s LGBTQ Executive Leadership Program in 2023.  

He is a Founding Board Member of The National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE), SomosLatino/as LGBT Massachusetts, and Founding Board Co-Chair of the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition (MTPC). An ordained minister, Diego is included in many LGBTQ history textbooks and chronologies.