Journal of the

"Ontology on the go!"

An interview with Dan Savage

"Savage Love" Columnist and Editor of "The Stranger", Dan Savage, very kindly gave editors Mayerson and Sutton the interview below in late June 2003. In addition to writing in and editing a weekly paper, Savage has these books available at Amazon: Skipping Towards Gomorrah: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Pursuit of Happiness in America; The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant: An Adoption Story; and Savage Love: Straight Answers from America's Most Popular Sex Columnist. For some reason I thought there was a book he'd written with his mother, but I'm not finding it. Any leads would be appreciated.

Background

Laurel Sutton: What columnists do you read?

Dan Savage: I read mostly political columnists. I like Andrew Sullivan, Katha Pollit, and Paul Krugman. Florence King's column in national review was terrific, but she has, sadly, stopped writing it. In my own field, I really think that "Dear Prudence" is the only (other) really good advice column out there.

Ginger Mayerson: What were you doing before you became a sex advice columnist?

DS: Working in a video store in Madison, Wisconsin, drinking too much, eating way too many Plaza Burgers.

LS: Can you tell the real letters from the fake ones? How? What percentage of your mail is fake?

DS: The fakes are pretty easy to spot, for the most part. People send me lots of letters about bizarre sex practices -- mudslides, donkey-punching -- that no one has ever actually engaged in. Those get trashed right away. But even if some creative person does get a fake into the column, so what? It doesn't really make any difference to the people reading the column. Only one person knows if the letter was real, and that's the person who sent it to me. Everyone else reading the column... real, fake. They just want to enjoy someone else's problem, someone else's misery, and have a laugh.

LS: What comix do you currently read?

DS: Uh... none, sad to say. The ones in The Stranger. I love, love, love Lloyd Dangle's Troubletown. That's the comic i worship, actually. And I love Boondocks and (believe it or not) For Better or Worse. Don't really read alt comics or comic books or graphic novels. Went though my Maus phase like everyone else, now... I like my words sans graphics, for the most part.

LS: Are there plans for any more Savage Love comix? (There were only two, the last one was published in 1994.) How did that project happen? Was it fun?

DS: No plans for more savlove comics. Those comics happened when Jame Sturm, The Stranger's first art director, asked me if I wanted to do a comic. It was fun...

LS: What TV do you watch with your kid, if any? How will (or how do) you deal with your kid's access to the Internet?

DS: We watch videos of his choosing twice a week in the evenings, and on Saturday and Sunday he gets to watch cartoons. He's only five, so there's no "access to the internet" issues to deal with -- yet.

LS: Would you appear on "Crossing Over", if they asked you?

DS: No way. The show about talking to dead people? The only dead people I really want to talk to after they're dead are people who, uh, aren't dead yet but I wish they were, if you know what I'm saying.

Culture

LS: Why does everyone have a blog?

DS: I don't have one. Not everyone has succumbed to the temptation to fly filterless through the media universe. Some are terrific -- Andrew Sullivan's, Eric Alterman's -- but most are about as interesting as an overheard cell-phone conversation.

GM: Do you have any insight into why straight women "Oz" fans (the ones I know say they're straight) are so into prison rape and male on male sexual and other brutality?

DS: Vicarious thrills? Seeing big, bad men -- who, consciously or subconsciously, women fear on some level as all potential rapists themselves, enjoy seeing men, good looking men, live with the same constant fear of sexual violence that they have, albeit (hopefully) to much lesser degrees.

GM: Are you in favor of gay marriage, and if so or not, why are you in or not in favor of it?

DS: I'm all for it. People should be able to marry the person they've fallen in love with, period. If we can't, well, that's discriminatory, period. A gay relationship is not lesser than a straight relationship, and gay relationships should have all the same possibilities that straights ones do -- which means, of course, that you're free to get married, if you so choose, or not get married, if you think marriage is a bullshit institution.

Sex - safe and otherwise

GM: You have said in the column that the conditions that fostered the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s are replicating again. If the HIV and STD numbers are going up (140% increase in syphilis NYC gay men, I think I read in your column), then, I assume, people are not practicing safe sex. After all the horror of the 80s and 90s why aren't they? How can this be headed off?

DS: Well, we can start telling gay men that they don't exist in an alternate moral universe, where anything that a gay man wants to do in the sack, however self- or other-destructive, is his right.

GM: In reading your column, you give much needed level headed advice to, well, everyone who writes to you. What is it in our society that causes people to ask you, instead of someone else, face to face? I mean, what did people do before they could write to "Savage Love" and how/why was it a different world before "Savage Love"? If you were growing up gay now, would it be any different?

DS: Well, not all people with problems write to Savage Love. Some people still ask their friends, parents, siblings, and, god help them, their clergy for advice. Some folks go to shrinks. People still do everything they did before advice columns came along -- it's not like me and Abbey and Prudence have cornered the advice market.

But people ask us a question for lots of reasons. To see it in print, to get a thrill, to get the POV of a disinterested third party, because they're too embarrassed or ashamed to ask someone face-to-face...

Politics

GM: What's with this right-ward shift in American politics? I mean, what's a Neanderthal (no offense to Neanderthals) like Rick Santorum doing in the Senate? Somebody actually elected that weirdo; what can they have been thinking?

DS: Well, if we had Democrats who would run against Republicans with the same vigor and venom that Republicans run against Democrats we wouldn't be in this fix. And the reason there's a lot of assholes like Santorum in the Senate is because there are a lot of assholes in the United States, particularly PA.

Remember: Canada got the French and the monarchy, we got the Puritans and the religious nutjobs. Hardly seems fair -- and it distorts our politics to this day.

GM: You decided to be against the US/UK invasion of Iraq because GW Bush had failed to make the case for invading. No one with any real power listened to the few people who could foresee what a nightmare it would become, mainly for Iraqis, and that "our guys" still have yet to find any biological or nuclear weapons. Do you have any ideas on how this post-war situation, is going to play out here in the U.S.?

DS: Well, I think it's criminal that the same lefties who were out carrying around huge, blown-up photos of innocent Iraqis before the war aren't out in the street carrying those pictures today. The reason they're not, of course, is because if you really cared about innocent Iraqis, as you claimed, you would be out there now demonstrating for more troops on the ground in Iraq -- that's what "innocent" Iraqis need most now. Stability, security. Like everything else, Bush is trying to do this on the cheap, and it's going to explode in our faces. It already is, frankly, costing US and Iraqi lives. And the silence of the left now only proves that the left, with all it's photos of innocent Iraqis, didn't care any more for those innocent Iraqis than they accused George bush of caring. The left is, it appears, content to watch innocent Iraqis die, if it will hurt George Bush politically.

GW: Does the fact that the peace movement that brought together and mobilized millions of people worldwide and did exactly zip in terms of stopping the invasion of Iraq give you hope or despair or just annoy you?

DS: You mean those "focus groups" the president dismissed? Well, I had a problem with those focus groups too. If there's one thing the Left is these days -- from the Dems in the Senate on down to the lefties in the streets -- it's ineffective. Wildly so. So I wasn't surprised that it had no impact.

GM: Do you have any idea what GW Bush's appeal is?

DS: A stupid president for a stupid people.

GM: What do you feel is the biggest danger facing the people of the U.S. right now and what can be done about it?

DS: Four more years of George W. Bush is the biggest danger we face. All we can do about it work to defeat him, and never again allow ourselves the fatal indulgence of, say, another Ralph Nader. If anyone would like to argue now that there's no difference between the Dems and the Repubs -- no difference between, say, Al Gore and George W. Bush, well, I've got some drilling rights in ANWR I'd like to sell 'em. No, wait, actually I'd like to punch 'em in the head. That's what I'd really like to do.

The next election

LS: Before the next election, what personal freedom will the Bush administration try to take away next? Is John Ashcroft really Caligula?

DS: Ashcroft is a boob. Let's not get hysterical. He's bad, but he's not going to be AG forever. If we get involved, we can undo the damage Ashcroft, Bush, et al., have done to our democracy. For a list of freedoms the bushies would like to take away, see Patriot Act II.

GM: What issues do you think will be crucial in the 2004 Presidential election? What issues do you think *should* be crucial in the 2004 Presidential election?

DS: I have no idea, frankly. It all depends on what's going down in Iraq next summer, and whether or not there's another terrorist attack on American soil before the next election, and if there is, whether the American people rally around Bush in the wake of the next attack or blame him for not preventing the next attack.

GM: Who would you like to see get the Democratic nomination and why is that?

DS: I'm for Howard Dean -- because he's got balls, and he's not afraid of the right-wing attack machine. He knows that you can't play nice with the right, so you might as well go for it and play mean.

The last question

GM: Thank you, Mr. Savage. One last question: Do you still want to cum all over Ashton Kutcher face (that's what I'd do) or is there someone new?

DS: I never said I wanted to come all over Ashton Kutcher's face. I said I wanted to watch Brad Pitt come all over Ashton Kutcher's face -- with Ashton tied to a chair, gagged with Jennifer Aniston's panties, and Jennifer herself videotaping the whole thing. That would be nice, wouldn't it?

***

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Editor in Chief - Ginger Mayerson
Editor Cache - Laurel Sutton
Art and Architecture Editor - Robin Austin
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The Journal of the Linclon Heights Literary Society is part of a larger site, www.hackenbush.org, which is in conjunction with www.gingermayerson.com. Please feel free to visit those sites and look around while we assemble LHLS for your reading pleasure this summer. Thank you and see you later.

Updated: July 5, 2003