Political savagery

No matter how far he strays from imparting words of wisdom to the nation’s horniest, freakiest and kinkiest, Dan Savage will always be known as a sex-advice columnist.

“Savage Love,” his weekly syndicated column, carried locally in The Reader, has morphed over the last 15 years to become a sounding board both for lonely fetishists and Savage’s own political agenda. The amalgam makes for an absorbing read. As the columnist-editor of The Stranger (Seattle’s weekly alt-source), Savage devotes space to railing against the Bush cabinet (“the American Taliban,” as he calls it) and the way its policies warp not just the gay lifestyle, but breeders’ rights, too.

When he speaks at a benefit for Chicago’s GLBT-focused Gerber/Hart Library, the writer will talk about the lateral pass of gay culture—Savage says that parents rarely hand down homosexuality to their kids—and will stress the importance of places like Gerber/Hart in shaping future generations of gay and lesbian youth.

I heard you infiltrated the Gary Bauer 2000 presidential campaign.
[Laughs] Yeah, it’s true. I went to the Iowa caucus for Salon and The Stranger. I got a horrible flu when I was there, and I decided that I’d volunteer for the Bauer campaign to try and get him sick. At the time, Bauer had said—and this was before 9/11, when terrorism was cheap hyperbole—that gay marriage was terrorism. So I decided, I’d be a terrorist. I could have completely erased all his hard drives, but instead I just licked a few staplers.

If something pisses you off, you don’t just write a letter.
There’s some writing out there that’s just people blah-de-blah-ing. And I like to blah-de-blah, too, but I also think it’s more fun to go out and do shit. Writing is really boring—you sit in front of a computer all day, sort of alternating between looking at an empty Word document you have to fill and Internet pornography. They both get monotonous. So, if you can build little excursions into your writing life, and get other people to pay, whoop-de-do.

Lots of “Savage Love” readers write in and complain that you don’t answer people’s questions.
I’ve always approached the column as sort of “I am the reluctant sex-advice columnist.” Which means, I’ve reserved the right to change the subject; or talk about other shit; or ignore people’s questions because I think they’re stupid; or have a hangover…. What comes across in those letters is that other people have a more keen sense of my responsibility as an advice columnist than I do. I don’t take them seriously at all.

How many letters do you get each week?
About 5,000. And I read every single one of them. Half of them are people saying, “You’re right. You’re brilliant. I love you,” and half say, “You’re wrong. You suck. I hate you.” I just delete those. Some letters are 18,000 words long. If it takes you that many words to lay out your problem, you need a cop, a lawyer and a fireman. You don’t need me. I delete those, too.

Has anyone ever contacted you and said something like, “You gave my husband advice, but here’s what he didn’t tell you”?
That’s one of the limitations of the genre: You only have one side of the story and you can’t do any more without exposing the person who wrote in and depriving them of anonymity. So you have to run with their scenario, unless there’s an obvious hole in it or you suspect something else is going on. But you know, the letters that drive me crazy are when people say, “Well, she’s depriving him of sex, and he’s miserable and they fight about it all the time,” and some other person will say, “What if she’s clinically depressed?” Well, what if? What if she’s been captured by space aliens and her vagina’s been sewn up? For every question I answer, I get 100 e-mails saying, “Why didn’t you bring up STDs?” There are some people who believe that a sex column has to be only, exclusively and always hammering the STD political.

Almost like a permanent sidebar.
Actually, that’s what people would like. Oh, by the way, herpes, herpes, herpes, HPV, HPV, HPV, HIV, HIV, HIV, chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, thank you for coming.

Dan Savage speaks at Gerber/Hart’s benefit Saturday 30.