Dan Savage
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.Collection: Christmas
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.Collection: Valentines
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.Collection: Valentines
I got picked on a lot, even by teachers too. I liked to listen to musicals and bake, and my homeroom teacher found out and mocked me in front of the whole class for baking.Collection: Teacher
The only way to get gay issues off the front pages of Canadian newspapers is to grant gay and lesbian people our full civil equality and leave it alone.Collection: Equality
I didn't want kids to think that to be happy, they had to be famous or rich or live in the big city.Collection: Famous
My dad was a homicide cop in the gay neighborhood in the city when gay neighborhoods were desperate, depressing, sad places run by the mob. The only gay people he'd met when I came out to him were corpses.Collection: Sad
Men were never expected to be monogamous.
I have a thick skin, but I have a heart.
School is very conformist, and one of the very first conforming that goes on in preschool and kindergarten is gender.
But it doesn't matter what you're doing, it matters how you're doing it.
A lot of kids are bullied because of their sexual identity or expression. It's often the effeminate boys and the masculine girls, the ones who violate gender norms and expectations, who get bullied.
When you're young and queer and closeted, you can end up in this place where you regard your straight peers as the enemy.
The cultural expectation should be if there's infidelity, the marriage is more important than fidelity.
I think the best thing for you to do is just live your life. Live a life that's worth living, one where you do what you want to do, pursue your passions. That way, if you meet someone, they'll be joining a life that's already really good.
You want to help gay kids, you have to reach them in middle school and high school, when they're being bullied.
I don't think that sin and pursuing happiness are not necessarily the same thing.
How can you tell somebody whose is pursuing happiness that they're somehow not American when that was the very first promise that America made?
One man's blasphemy doesn't override other people's free-speech rights, their freedom to publish, freedom of thought.
The bullied straight kid goes home to a shoulder to cry on and support and can talk freely about his experience at school and why he's being bullied. I couldn't go home and open up to my parents.
A huge part of what animates homophobia among young people is paranoia and fear of their own capacity to be gay themselves.
I wouldn't say that holidays are manufactured by corporations, but they're certainly exploited and mined by them.
I don't write about my life in my column.
I don't like to think about what school was like for me.
When I was in high school I got involved in the fringe theater scene in Chicago, and I met some openly gay people. I could see that it got better, that they were happy and loved and supported. I saw with my own eyes that it got better.
I don't think it's the responsibility of gays and lesbians to reinvent the family.
It's going to take generations of gay people marrying before these things start to feel natural. We haven't had it long enough to remake it as our own, so it does feel like you're getting dressed up in straight drag to do it.
Straight couples don't have to be monogamous to be married or married to be monogamous. Monogamy no more defines marriage than the presence of children does. Monogamy isn't compulsory and its absence doesn't invalidate a marriage.
Preaching to the choir actually arms the choir with arguments and elevates the choir's discourse. There's a reason the right does it and does it well and triumphs.
The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads in the Civil War and justified it.
Books are magic: you never know where they're going to end up.
Ultimately life is disease, death and oblivion. It's still better than high school.
Really, when it comes to gay rights, there's two wars going on. The first war is political. But the culture war is over.
Straight people are everywhere!
The successes of the LGBT civil rights movement and the more prominent role openly gay people are playing in the public eye has actually turned up the temperature in middle schools and high schools for queer kids.
To be gay is nothing to be proud of. It's in how you are gay that you have something to be proud of, considering the obstacles placed in your path if you are gay.
I own a lot of my house, because I'm Irish and from people who never owned anything.
The mistake that straight people made was imposing the monogamous expectation on men. Men were never expected to be monogamous.
Women can go on marrying and pretending that their boyfriends and husbands are Mr. Darcy or some RomCom dream man. But where's that going to get 'em? Besides divorce court?
Children have a right to some stability and constancy from the adults in their lives.
You know, my problem is I can't say no to people, especially people who want to write me checks to do things.
Sometimes I talk to religious people about my column or what I do, and I ask them to, you know, read 20 or 30 of them and then come tell me that the message at the heart of every column isn't, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' In every possible sense.
When I was a kid, and I was odd, the default assumption was that I was odd, not that I was gay. Now when a kid is odd in a Greensburg, gay or straight, the default assumption is gay.
I am not an idiot, and I'm not a Pollyanna sort of kumbaya type.
I'm allergic to dogs, so I couldn't even adopt what gay men typically adopt when they have that maternal gene.
To be a straight person and discover you're infertile is almost like discovering you're not a straight person.
If what you want is a life where your homosexuality is not an issue, move, as many have done.
In an open adoption agreement, you agree to a minimum number of visits - a floor, not a ceiling. It's enforceable.
Most Americans don't care about gay marriage.
I believe it's in the best interests of a child to be in a stable environment.