Dan Savage fell into the advice-column business by accident; he was clerking in a video-rental store in Madison, Wisconsin when Onion co-founder Tim Keck mentioned that he was starting a new alternative paper. Savage suggested an advice column; Keck asked Savage to do it, and they went from there. Savage Love launched in 1991 in the first issue of Keck's Seattle-based alternative paper The Stranger, and now runs nationwide. In his column, Savage discusses love, relationships, and sex in frank, unflinching detail, fielding questions on everything from dating etiquette to rimjob etiquette. Since the column launched, Savage has become an essayist, columnist, and journalist, appearing in The New York Times, on National Public Radio's This American Life, and in The Stranger, where he's taken over as editor. He's also published a collection of Savage Love columns and three funny but personal non-fiction books: The Kid (the story of how he and his boyfriend Terry adopted a son), Skipping Towards Gomorrah (a pro-vice look at sin in America), and 2005's The Commitment (about his struggles with the idea of marrying Terry). With February 14 looming on the horizon, The A.V. Club sought Savage's advice on Valentine's Day, his column, and the possibility that he's driven people to suicide.
The A.V. Club: What's your take on Valentine's Day? Corporate exercise, or meaningful reminder of romance?
DS: It is a corporate exercise; it's also a holy day of romantic obligation. It's also a day of torment. Mother's Day is a torment if your mother is dead. Valentine's Day is a torment if you don't got one. And at some point in our lives, we will be tormented by Valentine's Day even if we're relatively lucky in love. It's just like Christmas. Christmas can have a real melancholy aspect, 'cause it packages itself as this idea of perfect family cohesion and love, and you're always going to come up short when you measure your personal life against the idealized personal lives that are constantly thrust in our faces, primarily by TV commercials. I find, though, that if you avoid TV, you don't succumb to the despair. I wouldn't say that holidays are manufactured by corporations, but they're certainly exploited and mined by them. If you're not a big consumer of television, I don't think it's too much of a torment even if you don't have a love interest.
AVC: Do you and Terry celebrate Valentine's Day?
DS: No. [Laughs.] But we're not sentimental weirdoes. We barely acknowledge our anniversary. It took us 11 years to get married. Our anniversary will come and go, and we'll both realize it about a month later and say, "Oh, shit. Yeah, happy anniversary." But we're both guys, and that helps with avoiding Valentine's Day as a holy day of obligation. Valentine's Day is much more of a holy day of obligation for a guy in a relationship with a woman, because a woman has certain emotional expectations. Even if she doesn't value Valentine's Day, or views it as a corporate exercise, she still often wants her boyfriend or husband to go through the motions, just in case she values it. I get letters every year from women who think Valentine's Day is an empty exercise, but are ironically pretty exercised when their boyfriends neglect or forget it. There's this movement to form a day called Steak And A Blowjob Day, which would be the male version of Valentine's Day, where women would come through with a steak and a blowjob in return for the chocolate and flowers that guys come through with, and I support that holiday.
AVC: It would be interesting to see Hallmark try to take advantage of that.
DS: That's one of the great things about it. It's probably one of the reasons it hasn't really taken off in the few years people have been trying to promote it. How do you make a card for Steak And A Blowjob Day?
AVC: You've written books about your relationship, your adoption, and your marriage, which presumably opens your personal life up to scrutiny. Do people come up to you at readings and ask about your boyfriend and your son—
DS: Whether I really went to jail, whether I really was a crack addict, whether I really went to Hazelden, and all those things that didn't happen. That's why I left them out of my book. I never assaulted a police officer. I should have put a lot of bullshit in my book.
AVC: Do you get tired of the exposure?
DS: I live in kind of a George Bush-esque bubble, I guess. I come here to work where everybody hates me—at The Stranger, I'm not deferred to a lot, and people here know me, so they're not particularly interested in my personal life. And I go home to my boyfriend, who's not particularly impressed with me, and that's about it. It is weird when I go out on a book tour or something. I meet people who are fans who remember anecdotes about my childhood that I have already forgotten. I included them in The Kid 'cause I was interviewing my mother or talking to my siblings about our childhood, and they brought something up, and I was like, 'Oh, I'll stick that in,' and then I forgot about it. I'll meet people who've apparently memorized them in a way I haven't. That can be wonderful and it can be disconcerting, depending on who the person is. When you write about your personal life… People who are cool hang back—people who really dig the book, who have good social skills and good boundaries, don't get up in your face about your life. They're like, "Oh, I really loved The Kid, it was great to read that adoption story and learn more," and "There he is. Oh, wow, I'd approach him and tell him how much I love his book, but I don't want to bother him. He's having dinner with his family, obviously." And so the people who do approach you are the ones who don't have good boundary perception, who may be a little bit nutso or off-putting. You end up getting this skewed perception of people who like your work, 'cause the people who are cool who like your work don't come up and talk to you, usually. And the people who aren't cool will, like, charge at you in an airport, which happened to me, and will grab your dick in the line at the coffee shop, which has happened to me. I write about sex, therefore you can grab my dick in a Starbucks in Manhattan.
AVC: Was that meant as a come-on?
DS: No, just friendly joshing, "Oh, there's the sex guy, I'm gonna reach through his legs and grab his dick, then he'll turn around and laugh out loud about him being the sex guy." And I turn around and I'm like, "Who the fuck are you? I'm gonna call the police."
AVC: You've said that gay people can't make un-self-conscious decisions in public places—adoption is a political act, marriage is a political act, everything that you do is a political act to some degree. Do you get sick of that dynamic?
DS: You get tired, you get sort of exhausted, it wears you down. I don't think responsible, reasonable adults engage in a lot of PDA, because it's childish, it's for teenagers, but [adults] engage in a certain amount of it. But when you're gay, you reach a point when you're like, "It's not worth the kisses, it's not worth the look over the shoulder," although we live in Seattle and it's really safe and I kiss my boyfriend frequently. But I've kissed him goodbye and stepped out of the car and gotten called a faggot by the crack dealers on the corner near my office. I congratulated them on their perception. Most people have to see a videotape of me actually blowing my boyfriend just to work it out that I'm gay. Just a kiss usually isn't enough evidence.
You know what would be a lot more tiring? Being gay 50 years ago. We gripe and gripe and gripe, gay people do, 'cause we do have legitimate beefs. But I'm one of those gay people who's constantly reminded of how fortunate I am to live now and not to be Ennis and Jack [from Brokeback Mountain] or whatever—not that I'd mind being Ennis for half an hour. But it's been so much worse recently. It still is terrible. In Iran, they're hanging gay teenagers. I'm grateful for how far the United States, even with its crazy Christians, has come on a lot of issues. And the fact that I get called a faggot occasionally by a crack addict, while annoying, certainly isn't a lobotomy and prison.
AVC: You've written a lot recently about the ongoing attack on gay rights. Do you think this is a temporary setback, or are we at risk of going back to where we were 50 years ago?
DS: I don't think you could slip back, on gay rights, to where we were 50 years ago. I think on women's reproductive rights, we're seeing a lot of erosion, but I don't think you can stuff this thing back in the bottle. There's just too many gay people who are too far out and too integrated into the mainstream culture to pretend you can unscramble these eggs. And we wouldn't cooperate, our friends and family wouldn't cooperate, our employers wouldn't cooperate. Occasionally, the publisher of The Stranger gets a letter saying that he should fire me because I'm gay. [Laughs.] I'm like, "Like he's gonna do that." But who knows? It was illegal to murder a Jew in Germany in 1910, and three decades later, suddenly it wasn't. So things can change for the worse, and change in profound ways. So you don't want to be a Pollyanna about it, you have to be vigilant, but when I look out at the crazy anti-gay whackos with their anti-gay marriage amendments, screaming and yelling about gay people adopting children, I feel threatened by them personally, but I'm confident that if we get up in their faces, we'll win. And I'm confident that more and more straight people, especially younger straight people, the kind of straight people I hear from all the time for Savage Love, view sexual freedom as a continuum. And it touches their lives too—there isn't a big difference between taking away a woman's right to emergency contraception, and taking away a gay person's right to be a gay person. 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.
AVC: You say they're losing votes, and that people couldn't stand it and it wouldn't happen, but a lot of people think that about a lot of things that have happened in the last five years.
DS: That's true. It's a terribly perilous moment. Like I said, we can't be Pollyanna, we have to be vigilant, and we have to have a divided government again, so there's some limit on the powers of the President and some limit on sycophancy in Congress. [Laughs.] But I'm hopeful. I think our country has always had a pretty robust immune system. I think our country's also been tremendously ill at times, and this is one of those times. But there seems to be this capacity in our culture and our society for things to get really shitty, and then for things to right themselves through the efforts of, and the eventual coming around of, the idiotic American people. American people are dumbfucks, but eventually they get it. I love those polls that say, "A majority of Americans" agree on the gay-marriage debate, as if that's the conversation-stopper, as if that wins, proves that it's not the right thing to do. A majority of Americans has been so wrong, so often, on so many issues, that a majority of Americans supporting something should be cause for as second look at its rightness. A majority of Americans supported slavery, a majority of Americans supported the internment of the Japanese, a majority of Americans supported denying women the vote, a majority of Americans supported the Communist witch hunts, a majority of Americans often have their heads up their asses. And then we're embarrassed 10 years later when we realize we have shit all over our faces. And I think we have shit all over our faces on gay rights, and we will come around. People will feel embarrassed one day when Mexico has gay marriage, Canada has gay marriage, the whole world has gay marriage. America will be last. Pakistan will have gay marriage before we do.
AVC: You use your column to advocate freedom, but that often seems to scare people. Historically, it seems like there's a real terror that other people might somehow get the freedom to do the things we ourselves don't want to do. Why do you think that is?
DS: Because Canada got the French and Australia got the convicts and we got the fuckin' batshit crazy Christians. And that matters. We're all lied to in high school—"The Pilgrims came here seeking religious freedom." No they didn't. They were the Puritans kicked out of England. They went to Holland, Holland was like "Fuck you people," and they kicked them out too, so they came here. They came here seeking the ability to persecute everybody else—and each other—for their religious beliefs. And we are living with the descendants of those nutjobs, and we have to fight them.
We also have to concede some things to them. 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. [Laughs.] "I'm going to hell. Yes. Can you leave me alone now? Isn't that enough? Isn't punishment for all eternity enough? Do you have to screw with me here on Earth, too? Can't you just sit back content that I will roast on a spit in hell right next to Ronald Reagan, adulterer?" And often if you concede their theology and let them have their crackpot religious beliefs, you can make a little progress. The left has made a mistake trying to argue with religious people about their religious beliefs. They have a legitimate beef when it comes to thought police from the left getting up in their business and telling them how they should interpret Leviticus. Well, who gives a fuck how you interpret your fuckin' Grimm fairy tale?
AVC: You've also used your column as sort of a bully pulpit to give your readers information about issues that they should act on, and to tell them specifically where to go and what to do to preserve their freedom. Have you seen signs that that makes a difference?
DS: I think in the "Santorum" case, you can see the reach of Savage Love. It was just mentioned in The Economist. They said "gay activists"—plural, although it's just me—"are trying to make his name synonymous with something that cannot be described in a family newspaper." They're all family newspapers, that's their problem, the millstone around daily papers' necks. It's hard to say what the impact is. I don't think all the tons of people who read Savage Love are waiting for marching orders from me. I get feedback from websites I mention when their traffic explodes after the column appears. I know that when I ordered people to call up the pharmacy in Arizona that denied a rape victim emergency contraception, it was kind of a trial for the pharmacy. A lot of people do call. But you can't really measure impact. I can't say that my begging people to vote for John Kerry actually got him elected, because it didn't.
AVC: Savage Love basically originated when Onion co-founder Tim Keck was starting up The Stranger, he needed an advice column, and he asked you to do it, right?
DS: Yeah. I met him through a friend—I was working for a video store in Madison. I said, "Oh, have an advice column, everybody hates 'em, but everybody reads 'em." And he thought that was good advice, and asked me to write it. It sounds so disingenuous all these many years later, but I wasn't trying to get the job. I'd never really written anything before in my life, except for student papers. If you read the first couple years of Savage Love, it's pretty clear I'd never written anything before in my life.
AVC: Did you discuss an agenda or a tone beforehand, or did you just go in swinging?
DS: It was just me and Tim, and it was 1991 or '90, and we talked about what an advice column would look and sound like at that moment. And I being the loudmouth faggot that I was, and still am—for years, I'd been reading advice columns, I'd read Ann Landers and Dear Abby growing up—I'm sitting at Ann Landers' desk, actually, while we have this interview—and I'd always been a fan of the genre. Forever, I'd read letters that had been written to straight advice columnists from gay people. Sometimes the advice was okay, but oftentimes it was clueless about gay issues or gay people or gay sex or gay rights. And I just thought it would be funny for once if there was an advice column written by a gay person where straight people had to get slapped around or treated with contempt. That was the agenda at first—I was just gonna be obnoxious and contemptuous about straight sex and straight relationships. That humor vein lasted about a year, and then I realized that I was gonna actually have to give advice and learn a little about heterosexual life.
AVC: You're still sometimes harsh or dismissive or aggressive with some of the people you deal with. Is there a philosophy to that attitude?
DS: Oh, absolutely. I always think of the column as a conversation I'm having with friends in a bar about sex. And people say, 'Oh, you're so mean.' That's only 'cause everyone's so completely pussified by our therapy culture, where anyone who's seeking counsel has to be fuckin' nursed at your hairy tit for half an hour before you say a discouraging word—"Ooh, poopy-poopy, it's so sad." But if you think about it, if you go to your friends for advice and you lay out the dumb thing you did, the first thing they do is make fun of you for half an hour, or two hours. They make jokes at your expense, they tell you you're an asshole, they ask you how you can be so stupid and idiotic, and then they give you some advice. 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.
AVC: You've said in other interviews that you don't really care if fake letters end up in the column, because it's entertainment, not group therapy.
DS: Every question is a hypothetical question for everyone but the person who asks it. People will write in and say, "Ah, I've seen this phrase in like three of the question-letters, so obviously you're writing the questions." I'm editing the questions. People who aren't writers send me questions that are four times longer than the column itself, and I have to boil them down to 200 or 300 words. So oftentimes, it will sometimes seem like letters in Savage Love have a similar tone. It's my tone, 'cause I'm often rewriting them to make them make sense. I get these letters that are one sentence with no punctuation that are 4,000 words long. I guess I could just print them in their entirety, and copy editors all over the country would die of heart attacks. People don't see the letters I get as they come in. I get a lot of bullshit that I never print. But some questions are just on the degree of plausible, where it's like, "I wonder whether this is true, but it's a really good question, and a really interesting hypothetical situation." Which is all it is for the vast majority of people who read the column anyway. And so I don't get too hyper if something slips in that was a good fake. Why should I? I don't take the column that seriously.
AVC: If you see Savage Love primarily as entertainment for readers, does that give you more responsibility toward the people you're entertaining than to the people you're advising?
DS: Oh, absolutely. The dirty little secret of the advice column is, you're really not trying to help anybody. The column gets serious from time to time. I'll answer questions from a girl who cut herself as a teenager, and then had a hard time forming relationships as a young woman, because she didn't want to show any of the scars all over her legs and arms. And I wrote a column that was pretty gentle about it, saying "We all have our scars. That's what falling is love is all about: revealing your scars to somebody who then loves you anyway." And there I am being the nice guy, and I got lots of letters from people who were like, "Oh, shit, he's gonna be mean to her, and then she's gonna kill herself." And then two weeks later, I got a very similar question from someone in a very similar situation, and of course I didn't run it, because I'd just answered that kind of question. I could run nothing week after week after week but questions from people who've been raped or abused, but I don't, because you have to keep the column varied. All advice columnists do this. You answer a question from someone who's a victim of domestic violence, and then you really can't touch that subject again for a while. It doesn't matter how many sad tales of domestic violence you get. You're gonna lose readers if it's the domestic-violence show every week. You have to be sort of cold. Thank God for email, cause it's made it really easy just to blast email back to people saying, "Oh my God, you need to call the police, not me."
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