Sexpertise

Two weeks ago, after I’d been on talk radio with Andrew Halcro on 650 KENI, a conservative-leaning outlet (Rush Limbaugh’s Alaska home), a gentleman called my office to talk to me, since we hadn’t taken calls on the radio.

He told me that he doesn’t pick up this paper because it carries “Savage Love,” the explicit sex advice column by Dan Savage. He didn’t want it laying around for his kids to peruse anal sex etiquette, or read the just-established definition of “saddlebacking.” (In case you missed it, “saddlebacking” is named after the Saddleback Church of anti-gay-marriage Pastor Rick Warren—he of the controversial Obama invocation. The new definition, as voted for by readers of Savage’s column, is “the phenomenon of Christian teens engaging in unprotected anal sex in order to preserve their virginities.”)

Savage, who’s openly gay and has an adopted ten-year-old son, DJ, with his partner Terry Miller, is the Editorial Director of The Stranger, an alternative weekly in Seattle much like this one. While Savage wasn’t surprised by what the radio listener said to me—“It is ironic that daily papers that you have to purchase, that are locked up in boxes on street corners, have nothing in them that’s not fit for a child to pick up and read, and free newspapers that are laying around have shit for adults,” he says—he doesn’t agree with the premise that free papers that carry his column are an inherent danger to kids.

“We have The Stranger around the house; [my son] doesn’t pick it up, ‘cause it’s not for him and he’s not interested and he thinks sex is icky, because he’s ten,” Savage says.

By the time he is interested in sexual subject matter, that’s when he’ll need the answers and information in the column, according to Savage. “A lot of people have this misconception that hearing about something somehow inculcates an interest in it, sexually. That if you’re told about some outlandish kink, you will burn with desire to go do it. If that were the case we would all be shit eaters, because at some time in our lives we hear about coprophilia. I just reject the premise that kids need to be protected from information about sex, even crazy sex.”

Besides, he says, his advice column is about responsibility, to yourself and others, about birth control, about what constitutes consent. “The meta-narrative to ‘Savage Love’ is one I think every parent should get behind, which is first do no harm with your genitals and your sex life and your sexual interests. The message of ‘Savage Love’ I actually think is very good for young people, and it’s the info they need, actually. A lot of what we call ‘sex education’ in the schools, even if it’s not abstinence and it’s ‘good comprehensive sex education,’ it’s just reproductive biology, zygotes and fallopian tubes and shit that nobody thinks about when they’re actually trying to get laid. And where people go off the rails and get into trouble is situational stuff. And they need to read about those hypothetical situations, and project themselves into them and imagine how they would behave, and that’s kind of the role that advice columns play.”

Savage says his son is “scandalized” by the fact one of his dads writes a dirty column, but the subject matter that’s made his column infamous doesn’t mean his family’s home is a den of iniquity—no coffee table books of gay naked art; no tasteful nudes on the wall; no porn in the DVD player. “Our house is like Ozzie and Harriet live here,” he says. “My kid—we’re hoping to give him all the hang-ups that we have about sex because they’ve made our sex lives as adults really interesting; we don’t want to deprive him of that experience.”

In 1991, Savage lived in Madison, Wisconsin and met some people who were moving to Seattle to start a newspaper—one of whom was Tim Keck, co-founder of the Onion. You’ve gotta have an advice column, Savage told them, everybody reads them. “Even if you think it’s the most ridiculous form of journalism—and I do, although it may be the only form left soon—you can’t skip past an advice column,” he says. Although he’d never written anything for publication before, he wrote up a sample column. Keck offered him the job.

The column’s ascent to the degree of ubiquity it now enjoys was rather slow—“I’m sort of incapable of promoting myself,” Savage says—and started with a couple of Northwestern papers picking up the column. Syndication spread down the West Coast and further into Canada, but there were holdouts. New York City’s Village Voice, which invented the concept of the alternative weekly, thought “Savage Love” was too filthy for its readers for years. “It was running in freaking Seattle and Vancouver and I think Halifax, Nova Scotia at the time, but it was too dirty for New York,” he says. “They wanted to know if I could tone it down.”

“Toning it down” was never in the cards for “Savage Love,” but the column has evolved over the course of its 17-year history. In the beginning, a big part of what readers wanted was referrals—they were into BDSM and couldn’t find the kink community in the town where they lived. Today the internet’s connected like-minded sexual enthusiasts to a degree that a weekly column could never approximate. Savage says that many of the old inquiries used to be “what is” questions or definitions of how things work. But in these wired times when he gets an email asking what a cock ring is, he’s flabbergasted. “Cock ring has a Wikipedia entry!” he laughs. “Now it’s much more situational, the questions are. ‘I’m in this situation, what’s your take on it?’ Which I find those questions more inherently interesting.”

Of course, soliciting questions on matters of sex and sexuality has drawn some uncomfortable letters, although to this point Savage has never felt compelled to contact authorities himself. “That’s one of the things that’s great about getting questions in the email now,” he says. “I’m able to write back to someone and say, ‘This is a problem that cries out for the police, not for some dumb faggot in the back of a newspaper.’”

Next week Savage will be here in Anchorage at UAA’s Wendy Williamson Auditorium to present “Savage Love Live,” a format that mimics the column. He’ll give a talk and then take questions from the audience. Although it could get a little awkward if an attendee has a question about the sanitary dangers of felching, the audience will have an option of writing anonymous questions on cards for Savage to answer, preserving the anonymity correspondents in the print column enjoy.

Last September, when the presidential campaign was going hot and heavy, Savage recorded a video message to Governor Sarah Palin and posted it to YouTube and on The Stranger’s website. With a McCain/Palin campaign sign on the wall behind him, next to poster that read “SUPPORT AMERICA | FUCK THE SHIT OUT OF SOMEONE,” Savage made a pitch to Palin to become her gay friend. (The video appears below, at the end of the story.)

“I talk to a lot of teenagers about sex, and sexuality, and responsibility, and birth control. You have kids who have been apparently deprived of any sort of sex education because you’re religiously opposed to it. And I could be their sort of cool, gay uncle, kind of close to their parents’ age, but the one they can come to and confide in, with their sex problems and come to when they need advice about birth control or abortions, or men. I think they could relate to me, particularly Levi, your future son-in-law, because I have sort of a potty mouth like he does,” he said, gesturing at the poster next to the McCain/Palin sign.

Savage’s boyfriend lived in Alaska for a summer, but this will his first trip to the state. “I would love to meet Sarah Palin,” he says now. Mentioning the McCain/Palin sign in the video, he says, “Some people took that to mean I was a Republican as opposed to a deeply ironic Democrat.”

When Savage is up here, it will be in the middle of “Freedom to Marry Week,” an initiative that encourages lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and their supporters to have conversations with their friends about equal marriage rights for LGBT people. Savage and his partner were married in Canada in 2005, and the culture wars are never far from his mind or his pen, especially in the wake of California’s recently passed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, Proposition 8.

But progress toward legal gay marriage is still being made, he says, despite the fact that 30 states now have constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage. “Even when we lose a battle like in California, we’re still moving the ball down the field,” Savage says. “Just eight years ago in California there was a vote on an anti-gay marriage law that passed by, I think, 18 points, and the constitutional amendment banning gay marriage passed by four. So there’s a 14-point shift in eight years in our favor. The reason the religious right has run these initiative campaigns all over the country is they know they’re losing ground. They know homophobia, like racism, is a pastime of the ignorant and elderly. And the elderly are leaving us. They want to take a snapshot of this moment in time and lock in these prejudices, and make them hard to undo. But they’re losing ground. We’re moving the ball down the field and we’re winning. It’s just… Canada got the French; Australia got the convicts; we got the fuckin’ Puritans.”

Dan Savage has had a front row seat—and often a spot on the stage—in the struggle for gay rights, and he sounds comfortable with the progress that’s been made in the U.S. In the early ‘90s a group of LGBT activists known as Queer Nation were trying to reclaim pejoratives like “queer,” “dyke” and “faggot.” So for the first eight years, “Savage Love” letters began with the salutation “Hey Faggot!” (That was also his first choice for the column’s name, but his editors nixed it.)

These days, Savage just doesn’t find it a big deal. “My straight friends will make a joke about faggots, and I’ll make a joke about cunnilingus being disgusting, and I just think people are chiller than they used to be,” he says. “You look at the humor on South Park, which is quote-unquote homophobic, Big Gay Al and all, and I think we’re culturally comfortable enough now and integrated enough now that we can be the butt of the joke without having to freak out, because we’re not only a joke anymore.”

bjk@anchoragepress.com

Dan Savage is scheduled to appear at UAA’s Wendy Williamson Auditorium at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, February 12. Admission is free for students, $10 for the general public, and tickets are available at uaatix.com.