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
We're living through an age of irrationality and religious "fervor" I would call it religious idiocy. It's exhausting to year after year be on the receiving end of this demagoguery.
There's a big mistake the left has made with talking to religious people, which is attempting to talk them out of their interpretations of the Bible, attempting to have theological debate with them. When I'm on right-wing whackjob radio, when people call up to inform me that I'm going to hell, I concede the point. "I'm going to hell. Yes. Can you leave me alone now?"
A lot of young people regard a threat against one person's sexual freedom as a threat against all of them, and that's absolutely how they should regard it. But it's heartening to look at the polls on young people on gay people, gay marriage, and sexual-freedom issues. They're terrific, and that's why the religious right is so desperately trying to lock in their current bare majority for prejudice: because their constituents are dying. They're losing votes every time the ambulance pulls up to the old folks' home. Let's hope it pulls up a little more frequently.
Sometimes I talk to religious people about my column or what I do, and I ask them to, you know, read 20 or 30 of them and then come tell me that the message at the heart of every column isn't, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' In every possible sense.
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.
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 hasn't changed the way we live or relate to each other, ... But there is this intangible, hard-to-pin-down sense of permanence that is hard to describe.
I don't think people should do things that make them miserable. And if being an in-shape, sober, monogamous heterosexual makes you miserable, don't do it. And if being an in-shape, sober, monogamous heterosexual makes you happy, do it.
I felt a sense of loss and dislocation.
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.'
I don't think it's the responsibility of gays and lesbians to reinvent the family.
It's like wearing ill-fitting garments, ... They don't quite fit.
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.