LaRae Lobdell
Savage: 'Entertaining activism is the best kind of activism.'
It was supposed to be for "shits and giggles," mocking the mores of the time. A sex advice column written by a gay man who treated straight sex with the same revulsion straight people had for gay sex.
Dan Savage started writing Savage Love in 1991 in the back room of Four Star Fiction and Video, where he was the night manager. He had recently moved to Madison with his former boyfriend, who was in graduate school at UW.
What began as a lark is now 24 years old and syndicated around the world. It ran in The Onion in Madison until that paper's demise in 2012, and, starting this issue, will appear weekly in Isthmus.
Savage broke the genteel mold of mainstream advice columnists with his in-your-face, always straightforward, sometimes bitchy approach to readers' questions. Virtually nothing is beyond the pale for Savage, and he gives himself the same latitude when it comes to weighing in on social issues and politics.
Writing and activism are inextricably linked for Savage. During his time in Madison he helped draw attention to the impending AIDS crisis as a lead organizer of the state chapter of ACT UP. He also protested the presence of ROTC on the UW-Madison campus.
Over the years his activism grew more creative. In 2003 he invited readers to coin a new meaning for "Santorum" in response to homophobic remarks made by then U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum. Savage created a website for the winning entry -- "the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex" -- that has dogged Santorum for years, including during his run for president.
In 2010 Savage launched the It Gets Better project, designed to give hope to gay youth and prevent teen suicide. He is the author of four books and has another on the way. Savage also does a weekly podcast, based on his advice column.
Savage and his husband, Terry Miller, live in Seattle with their son. Isthmus recently spoke with Savage from his office at The Stranger, the alt weekly where he is editorial director.
Isthmus: There are various versions of how your column came to be. What's the story?
Savage: I met Tim [Keck, co-founder of The Onion] through another employee of Four Star. They were telling me about the paper they were going to create in Seattle, and I said you should have an advice column. I wasn't angling for the gig. I had never written anything outside of school work. And I had no desire to be a writer when I grew up.
But I've always been a huge fan of the genre. What I said to Tim is when you see that Q&A format, you can't not read it. Some people won't admit to reading advice columns, but everybody does. And Tim said that's excellent advice; you should write the advice column. I was sort of giving him advice, right?
Then we were joking around about what an advice column in a straight newspaper written by a gay guy for straight people would do and be. Nobody knew then that The Stranger would take off and the column would be a success, so it was all just for shits and giggles. I just wrote it for fun from the back of Four Star Fiction and Video on the computers there and faxed it from Star to Seattle, and for the first six months of the column I was writing it in Madison.
Tell me more about the "shits and giggles."
Initially, it was just a joke. As a gay dude, I was going to write advice for straight people and treat straight sex and straight people with the same contempt and revulsion that straight advice columnists had always treated gay people and gay sex with. I would go, ewww, gross, yuck, why would you do such a disgusting, immoral thing, but if you're going to have straight sex here is how to do it. The irony was I thought it would be insulting and baiting and it would piss straight people off, and that is what I lived for when I was 26. But straight people loved it. They'd never been treated this way. This was a new and novel and kind of amusing experience for them to have their sex described with such disgust. It was this kind of bizarro universe where straight sex was gross and gay sex was normal and wonderful.
But it evolved from there.
Six months in, I was getting real questions, real letters, the mail was pouring in. I was getting these letters that were really heartbreaking -- letters that really forced me to accidentally become an advice columnist. Because people read me and they liked me and they began to trust me and they began to open up to me. And I was like, holy shit, what have I begun?
How did that transition go?
It was bumpy. I made lots of mistakes. I thought I knew everything there was to know about heterosexual sex. But I was still ignorant. I put the clitoris in the wrong place.
Yikes, how did that happen?
I didn't look it up. It was pre-Google. It used to be hard to get the facts. You used to have to go to the library and look in a book. I didn't put it up on the nape of the neck or the ankle, I just thought it was way up and inside, basically where the cervix is -- the joy buzzer at the top of the vaginal canal.
Did an editor save you?
No, it went into print. This was before Christine Wenc, who had worked at The Onion, actually began to edit my column. But that was after I made a lot of mistakes.
But mistakes have always been part of the column. In a way, advice columns like mine and Ann Landers kind of anticipated blogging and comment threads, because you would run responses, you'd give whole columns over to people telling you you were wrong and full of it. That kind of debate really characterizes journalism and writing now.
Do you think your column has changed the way people talk about sex and relationships? Or at least made it easier to talk plainly about subjects that were once taboo?
There's [really no way] for me to answer that question without sounding like I'm sucking my own dick. I do know when I started writing the column what was new and crazy was that I would give advice to people who were really kinky or who were cheating or who were not monogamous, and let people use the words that they actually use when they talk with their friends about sex as opposed to some sort of fit-for-print sexual Sanskrit. A few years after the column began running, the Village Voice called and wanted to run my column, but only if I'd stop writing about anal sex. I said no. A few years later they picked it up.
That was their only request?
Yeah, [anal sex] was gross. It was too icky. Anal sex was something I'd get a lot of questions about from straight people because I'm gay and they were curious. Gay people would yell at me because I was talking too much about anal sex. The gay rights tactic for years had been -- when people asked us what we did in bed -- to say we read, and we watch TV and we sleep and sometimes we make love. What do you do in bed? And be really defensive about the mechanics of gay sex. And my feeling was, answer the question. I found once they had an answer they could let go of it. They would stop obsessing about gay men and poop or how lesbians do it. And they're like, "Oh, I eat my girlfriend's pussy sometimes too."
In the early days you would also get all sorts of people asking if they were normal.
All sorts of people. "I'm a guy and I want to have sex in a canoe dressed up like the Queen of England and wear a butt plug in my mouth. Am I normal?"
No! You're not normal, but so what? That was always my response. Why would you think that's normal? When you go canoeing do you see anyone else dressed like the Queen of England with a butt plug in their mouth? But that's not the question. The question is, is it harmful? Is it consensual? Is it joyful? If it doesn't harm you, if it doesn't harm your partner, that should be the norm to which we all strive. Consensual and non-harmful.
I still get that question occasionally, but I do think the column was part of the dialogue that actually refocused what norms are and what they should be. And finally convinced everyone that most people are freaks. Everyone has something that disqualifies them from normal.
You really never had any aspirations as a writer?
None, which kills people who are sitting on manuscripts or trying to get published and I crank these books out. I know people who are wrapped up in their identities as writers, and their first book gets published and they stand there with it in their hands weeping. They're just so elated and moved and validated. My first box of books arrived, and I don't think I opened it for a month. Which is good. I think I write a little less self-consciously than people who conceive of themselves as writers. I've known many people who conceive of themselves as writers and are so wrapped up in that conception that they couldn't write. They are paralyzed by that.
So writing comes easily to you?
No, it's hard. It's lonely, stupid, boring, grinding work as I'm sure you know. I could not have been a writer before computers. The way my brain works, I don't write complete sentences. I write gobbledygook, and then I start rearranging and tweaking it and moving it around and breaking sentences apart and pushing new things in the middle. I wrote a sentence to start writing The Kid, and now the first half of that sentence is at the beginning of chapter one and the last half is at the end of the final chapter. I kept writing until there were 100,000 words jammed in between that one sentence. I couldn't have written with a typewriter.
How did you progress from advice columnist to editor at The Stranger?
I was editor-in-chief for about a decade or so. I'm now the editorial director, which is a little bit like being the Queen of England. I'm consulted and ignored.
How do you see your roles as activist and writer? Are they separate or intertwined?
I've always been an activist. This might sound crazy when I say this, but my activism became much more effective when it moved to Savage Love. It's a super-secret kind of activism. The column is about straight people 90% of the time, and I have a huge straight audience -- people who wouldn't normally read a gay writer -- because I'm the only gay writer who writes about them. And then I say here's this thing and it's fucked up and we should all do something about it. When I write about HIV or gay marriage or teen suicide -- all these people who wouldn't read that article if it was anywhere else will read it in my column out of a force of habit. I can at that moment call my flying monkeys out and they will all go do for me. I can't call them out every week because they'd go away. It's the kind of activism where you keep your powder dry 50 weeks out of the year -- but two weeks a year I can say, here's this thing, let's do something about it.
You tend to spend a fair amount of time at the top of your podcast on political issues. Is your strategy around activism similar for that medium?
Entertaining activism is the best kind of activism. It's the kind of activism the right is really good at. And the left sucks at. We always think of the right as the Puritans who hate pleasure. They are Puritans -- they hate sexual pleasure. But sometimes I think there's a deep, Puritan mystic streak in the left where we hate fun. How can you be having fun when people are starving in Darfur? How can you be having fun when Bill Cosby is still at large?
People are much more likely to be participants if they are having fun along the way. You do need to jolly people along; it's one of our jobs as activists.
So Republicans are good at that?
Their conventions are fun. The thing you don't hear on the right when you show up at their demonstrations -- even from people who are radical pro-life activists -- is, why didn't you show up at the meeting? On the right it's "Hello troops, here's a sign."
My experience in a lot of lefty politics is that when those [less devoted] people show up they get treated like shit because they haven't given their life over to the cause. And you don't see that on the right. And I have friends who are right-wingers, honest to God I do. And they have a more active approach to turning out people. You get them out, you get them into the street, you get them screaming and yelling online. You don't guilt-trip them.
So there's too much guilt on the left? And judgment?
And holier than thou posturing. Solid gold platinum-plated lefty. Maybe there is a lot on the right, but I just haven't been exposed to it because I'm not on the right myself. My experience of a lot of lefty politics is that it is intolerable because of lefties. You're going to put this in the paper and get me murdered. It comes from a place of love. I'm a lefty myself.
Are you surprised the culture around gay marriage has changed so quickly?
I am. In 2004, when all those anti-gay marriage amendments passed and George Bush got reelected, I thought this will never happen in my lifetime. But we kept fighting. The secret weapon is, we're randomly distributed throughout the population and in all families. If you don't have a gay, lesbian, bi, trans in your immediate family, there's probably one in your extended family. Definitely your extended family. That is our secret weapon, and that humanizes us. If African Americans were randomly distributed throughout the population and in every family, George Zimmerman would be in jail and so would that cop in Ferguson.
How does that work when it comes to women?
I guess the analogy fails when you get to women's rights. We don't have equal pay and we're still fighting about choice and reproductive autonomy for women. It's appalling. But I really think when it came to LG rights, it was people coming out to their parents, to their siblings, and folks had to pick between their fears and prejudices and ignorance and their son or their daughter.
Of all the projects you are involved with -- your column, podcast, It Gets Better campaign -- are you surprised by how they took off?
I was surprised by the It Gets Better campaign and how it exploded. Honest to god, there are a quarter million videos now viewed hundreds of millions of times including in Austria, Vietnam. We had hoped to get 100 videos so that I would have this little reference library of people's testimony that I could share with my readers. And when we launched it we weren't rubbing our hands together and saying in four weeks the president of the United States is going to be uploading a video. We didn't see that coming.
The most important thing the project accomplished was that the culture had to say something back that gay children exist, that lesbian children exist, that bisexual children exist, that transgender children exist. And pretending that they don't is killing them.
How old is your son?
He is 16. He's a straight, 16-year-old, skateboarding, snowboarding high school student with the gayest dads in the world. One of the arguments against gay parenting is that your kids will grow up gay, as if there's anything wrong with that. But obviously if that is how it worked my son would be gay, and he's not. I write Savage Love and I'm very, very gay. And Terry is a gay DJ who does swimsuit modeling even in his 40s and is a leather gay. If we couldn't make a kid gay when he grows up... it can't be done.
Did you always think you'd be a parent?
One of the things I've always said with the It Gets Better campaign is that it has gotten better and pretty rapidly. When I came out to my mom and dad as a teenager, it meant telling them that I would never marry, I would never have kids, I would never become a Marine (not that I wanted to be a Marine). And here, just in the course of my adult life, from 18 until now, I'm married, I have children, gays and lesbians are free to become Marines. That all happened as billions of dollars were spent by the right wing trying to keep gays from achieving their full civil equality -- and in the face of those head winds we achieved all this.
Any plans to visit Madison in the near future?
I've been there twice this year. I love that city. And I'm not just sucking Madison's dick. Though I'd be happy to. I would like to move back to Madison and live there. Or Burlington, Vermont. College towns are awesome. People in college towns don't realize how good they've got it until they leave.
Do you have any other projects in the pipeline?
A couple of things, but it's too soon to talk about them. I'm supposed to be working on a new book, but I have yet to start. This one isn't about sex or politics, but that's all I can say.
Not sex or politics?
Neither.
Now I'm really curious.
I know, right?
