Dan Savage
Dan Savage
Daniel Keenan "Dan" Savage is an American author, media pundit, journalist, and activist for the LGBT community. He writes Savage Love, an internationally syndicated relationship and sex advice column. In 2010, Savage and his husband, Terry Miller, began the It Gets Better Project to help prevent suicide among LGBT youth. He has also worked as a theater director, sometimes credited as Keenan Hollahan...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionRadio Host
Date of Birth7 October 1964
CityChicago, IL
CountryUnited States of America
You could fly under the radar a little bit. You could be a weird kid without defaulting to gay, without everyone assuming you must be gay - that was literally the last place many people went.
I didn't want kids to think that to be happy, they had to be famous or rich or live in the big city.
You want to help gay kids, you have to reach them in middle school and high school, when they're being bullied.
If kids got raped at Denny's as often as they get raped at church it would be illegal to take your kids to Denny's.
Kids are like heroin, a little heroin addiction. When it’s bad, you’ve never been so miserable, but when it’s good you’ve never been so high.
When I was a kid, and I was odd, the default assumption was that I was odd, not that I was gay. Now when a kid is odd in a Greensburg, gay or straight, the default assumption is gay.
The bullied straight kid goes home to a shoulder to cry on and support and can talk freely about his experience at school and why he's being bullied. I couldn't go home and open up to my parents.
The successes of the LGBT civil rights movement and the more prominent role openly gay people are playing in the public eye has actually turned up the temperature in middle schools and high schools for queer kids.
A lot of kids are bullied because of their sexual identity or expression. It's often the effeminate boys and the masculine girls, the ones who violate gender norms and expectations, who get bullied.
I wanted to write about the idea of a multi-generational household because Americans don't live like that anymore, ... In writing about that place, I had to write about my great-grandparents' marriage, my grandparents' marriage, my parents' marriage.
It's amazing it doesn't happen all the time.
To keep the peace, I do show things to my family before they come out, ... It's like a 'heads up, here's what I'm writing. If you really have a problem with it or you're never going to talk to me again, give me a call.'
At that point, I had 50,000 to 80,000 words written about the house. Instead, it became a sequel to The Kid in a way,
It would be as if a print advertiser said 'Gee, The Wall Street Journal reaches all business people in the U.S., so why do I need to advertise in other business publications?' But the truth is it does work to advertise elsewhere.