Dan Savage’s syndicated weekly sex advice column, Savage Love, is popular all over the world, and Dan is the editor of The Stranger, Seattle’s weekly newspaper. He’s also the author of several books, including "The Kid", about gay parenting, and "Skipping Towards Gomorrah", which looks at the Seven Deadly Sins in present-day America. His forthcoming book looks at gay marriage.
Dan spoke with Mark Adnum via email in April 2005.
MARK ADNUM: In one of your recent “Savage Love” columns, you reminded your readers that objectification can be “intensely sexy”. I loved that because for a long while now, the whole Queer Theory, crypto-Feminist bandwagon has complained that the worst thing anyone could do was objectify someone as a hunk/babe or be physically desirable themselves. Do you think there’s an atmosphere-change in the works, with gay people re-embracing hot sexual ideas and giving stale political bellyaching the flick?
DAN SAVAGE: I think gay people gave that crap the flick long, long ago. The smothering, stultifying anti-sex police were chased from the scene a decade or more ago. Still, it never hurts to reinforce the power of positive objectification.
With your catchy slogans and acronyms, such as OYMSYP, you’re cut out to have your own TV talk-show. Would you like to have your own show? What would you call it?
"Cancelled." You're not allowed to say on TV things I tend to say in my column. Sometimes cheating is okay; sometimes a sleazy hook-up turns into a beautiful relationship; fetishes are for indulging; fantasies are for realizing. Toss in "all men look at porn," and, "if he only cheats on you once or twice in an LTR, he did a good job at being monogamous," and my show is off the air after one episode.
Who’d be your first guest?
Rick Santorum, of course.
Your drug-support payments idea sounded perfectly reasonable to me. Sexually active heteros have understood for millennia that sex can come with consequences, and many a horny young straight guy has grown old under twenty years of child-support payments after a hot quarter-hour in the back seat of a car. Adults pay for their mistakes – so how can gays be adults with this pervasive, post-AIDS saccharine dopiness?
Well, I think the saccharine stage is over. Gay men with HIV are no longer beloved baby harp seals they once were, and that realization is slowly sinking into even the thickest of gay skulls. I think AIDS meds should be available to all who need them, but there are too many gay men out there behaving with immoral and shocking disregard for the health of their sex partners and their communities -- and they point to the effectiveness and availability of AIDS meds to justify their choices. Something has to be done to change the calculus.
Further, it’s like Larry Kramer calling Ronald Reagan “Adolf Reagan” who personally “murdered” all the gay men that died of AIDS in the 1980s and early 1990s. This kind of fantasia seems like an externalised form of AIDS dementia to me. In the race to establish post-HIV gay identities (gays in the military, gay marriage) we don’t seem to have explored or significantly processed the mid-HIV identity. What’s your view?
Larry was right to call Ronald Reagan names. Reagan ignored AIDS -- tens of thousands of Americans died before he uttered the word. If the feds had acted faster, if they had reacted to AIDS the same way they reacted to, say, Legionnaires Disease, hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved. But because it was "only" gay men getting the disease, the feds didn't act. We were expendable, sub-humans. So Larry wasn't demented. Larry was right -- and if you read all of his writings from the time, he was as hard on Joe Blow gay-man-in-the-baths as he was on the feds.
And let's not forget that in the early days no one knew how AIDS was spread or what caused it. Some early theories included popper use and introducing too much semen into the rectum. Nice.
Now, of course, we know how the disease is spread, and we know how to prevent its spread, and gay men are more culpable in the on-going spread of HIV. I'm not sure what you mean by "mid-HIV identity," but we haven't processed our ways out of a mid-80s AIDS mindset. Back then all people with AIDS were "innocent," and it was impossible to even suggest that someone with HIV/AIDS should be called out on his behavior. Having HIV/AIDS was so crushing, and death was so imminent, that it seemed cruel to say something like, "Gee, maybe you shouldn't have been getting fucked by so many strangers in that bathhouse," or, "Now that you're positive, it's important that you not infect anyone else." We have to say those things now. People with HIV are moral actors and have to be treated as such -- particularly now that people with HIV are living longer, healthier lives. Our attitude now should be, "Oh, you're going to live. Great. Welcome back to the land of the living. Remember, though, that we can no longer turn a blind eye to your behaviors out of misplaced sympathy for your predicament. You've got it pretty good."
What’s your new book about?
Oh, gay marriage, of course. Every gay male writers has to write at least one.
Do you read other gay internet writers, such as Andrew Sullivan? Would you consider a blog of your own?
Too lazy for blogging. I love to read though -- I read Americablog, Sullivan, Kos, the Corner on National Review, Talking Points Memo, Gawker, Wonkette every day.
Does the abbreviated slang-language of chat lines and text-messaging (c u l8r, ;) etc) annoy you?
Very much. When you spend all your time on your computer, you become a pretty quick typist. The time you save when you write "l8r" over "later" is so infinitesimal that the annoyance you've caused, to say nothing of the damage you've done to the english language, can't be justified. still, i save time by pretty much ignoring caps, so who am i to throw stones?
Related Reading:
The Stranger
