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
I treat people who write me the way my friends and I all treat each other when we go to each other for advice, which is sometimes with supreme cruelty. I think that's what helps the advice sink in. If somebody comes at you with both barrels, the first shot opens your head, and the second shot allows the advice to get lodged inside.
When you're a writer, you want to try to avoid cliches. Unfortunately, when you're writing about marriage or family, all cliches seem to apply.
Oftentimes, when people write me 4,000-word letters, I write them back and tell them if their problem's that complicated, they probably need a lawyer or a cop, and not me.
Sedaris, in his essay in the It Gets Better book, writes that when he was growing up nobody called him gay because you might as well have called him a warlock. Nobody knew what gay was.
You know, my problem is I cant say no to people, especially people who want to write me checks to do things.
I don't write about my life in my column.
There's always something new with sex. We lived in a world without Viagra, now we live in a world with Viagra. We lived in a world without blowjobs and anilingus in the Oval Office, and then it happens and you get to write about it. We live in a world where now the government is screwing with contraception and holding back vaccines that could save 4,000 women's lives a year, and you get to write about that. It's not as much fun as anilingus in the Oval Office, but what are you going to do? If you pay attention, there's always something new, and it's always really invigorating.
I don't think it's the responsibility of gays and lesbians to reinvent the family.
A lot of people think that telling people you're gay is something someone might say just to get attention.
I'm an agnosto-theist. I cross myself on airplanes. I pray when I'm sick. When you're sick I'll keep you in my thoughts; when I'm sick, I'm entreating a higher power.
If sex isn't an important part of your marriage, you can't beef if your wife or husband does this unimportant thing with somebody else every once in a while, if you have no interest in it.
I really enjoy doing theater, but doing theater in Seattle is like dropping a brick in a bottomless well. It's gratifying, but it's almost like doing radio. It's ephemeral.
I feel like I'm a compassionate guy, but I also feel if somebody's grip on life or sanity is so tenuous that a joke in an advice column that usually is nothing but jokes pushes them over the edge, then if not me, it would have been a leaf blowing past them that did it, or something else. You almost have to feel that way, doing this.
Most Americans don't care about gay marriage. But it matters very much to the knuckle-draggers and Christianists and whack jobs in Bush's ever smaller base.