Dan Savage
And that really captures the difference for the bullied straight kid versus the bullied gay kid, is that 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. [...] And I couldn't go home and open up to my parents.Collection: Home
Pride became this dogma which meant you couldn't criticize anything gay - if you were the least bit critical of gay culture or people or any gay person doing any gay thing, that was an insufficient display of pride. You were suffering from internalized homophobia. As opposed to external homophobia.Collection: Pride
Outing is brutal and it should be reserved for brutesCollection: Should
I think abortion should be mandatory for about 30 years.Collection: Thinking
There's always something new with sex. We lived in a world without Viagra, now we live in a world with Viagra. We lived in a world without blowjobs and anilingus in the Oval Office, and then it happens and you get to write about it. We live in a world where now the government is screwing with contraception and holding back vaccines that could save 4,000 women's lives a year, and you get to write about that. It's not as much fun as anilingus in the Oval Office, but what are you going to do? If you pay attention, there's always something new, and it's always really invigorating.Collection: Sex
I think it's better to have limits. My limits are different from other people's limits. I'm all for freedom, I'm all for people doing what they want. I'm also all for people shouldering the consequences of their behaviors, and not being assholes, and not lying unless they need to, and being honest except when you shouldn't, and being faithful except when it's okay to cheat. I guess I'm just a mass of contradictions.Collection: Lying
Only someone obsessed with sexual fidelity to an unhealthy degree places a higher value on preserving the ideal of monogamous marriage over preserving an actual marriage.Collection: Degrees
For me, my discomfort with gay weddings was articulated by a close friend, who observed that gay people getting married is like retarded people getting together to give each other PhDs. It doesn't make them smarter, and it doesn't make us married.Collection: Gay
I'm an agnosto-theist. I cross myself on airplanes. I pray when I'm sick. When you're sick I'll keep you in my thoughts; when I'm sick, I'm entreating a higher power.Collection: Airplane
Bisexuals need to recognize that their being closeted is a huge contributing factor to the hostility they face.Collection: Needs
Every American may have equal access to ice cream, but there's no guarantee that the outcome of eating ice cream will be equal.Collection: Ice Cream
A lot of young people regard a threat against one person's sexual freedom as a threat against all of them, and that's absolutely how they should regard it. But it's heartening to look at the polls on young people on gay people, gay marriage, and sexual-freedom issues. They're terrific, and that's why the religious right is so desperately trying to lock in their current bare majority for prejudice: because their constituents are dying. They're losing votes every time the ambulance pulls up to the old folks' home. Let's hope it pulls up a little more frequently.Collection: Religious
I don’t understand how real Christians let that little f--ker get away with that.Collection: Christian
Yes, yes: Taking out Saddam Hussein means war, and war is bad for children and other living things. I went to grade school in the 1970s, and I recall the poster. But there are times when war is not only a tragic and unavoidable necessity, but also good for children and other living things.Collection: Children
I don't think that gay and lesbian relationships are identical to heterosexual relationships. I do think that heterosexual weddings, or at least most of them, are sort of camp pantomimes about male and female sex roles, even if the couple is marrying as individuals and equals.Collection: Sex
When you're a writer, you want to try to avoid cliches. Unfortunately, when you're writing about marriage or family, all cliches seem to apply.Collection: Writing
A lot of people think that telling people you're gay is something someone might say just to get attention.Collection: Gay
You know, my problem is I cant say no to people, especially people who want to write me checks to do things.Collection: Writing
Natural isn't something I get called a lot in Texas.Collection: Texas
There's going to be some places where you're treated with respect and dignity and some places where you'd have to be a fool to live, .. So, there will be places where people can get their hair done well and places where they can't.Collection: Hair
I started doing drag in Seattle because I started doing my column before I moved here, and then moved here and wanted to be able to go out and do things as Dan Savage without being recognized the next day, because the column was just in Seattle and it was kind of a sensation and I was beating people up. I was really worried and I didn't want to beat somebody up in a column and have that person know what I look like when I didn't know what they looked like.Collection: Next Day
We've had a culture war roaring away, and the kinds of people who want to abuse and discriminate against gay people who are adults can't really lay their hands on us unless they want to be gay-bashers and go to jail. They abuse us from afar and in the abstract, they abuse us with checkbooks and ballots, but their kids go to school on Monday morning. And there's a gay kid. And they feel they have license to beat that gay kid up in a way that I don't think they did when I was in school. I think it's gotten worse.Collection: Monday
You could fly under the radar a little bit. You could be a weird kid without defaulting to gay, without everyone assuming you must be gay - that was literally the last place many people went.Collection: Kids
Sedaris, in his essay in the It Gets Better book, writes that when he was growing up nobody called him gay because you might as well have called him a warlock. Nobody knew what gay was.Collection: Growing Up
It really did take Billy Lucas's suicide to wake me up to, kind of, the damage of the success of the LGBT civil-rights movement - higher-profile LGBT people - has done to LGBT youth who are trapped out there in those shitholes. But I don't think we need Pride. I am still opposed, on philosophical grounds, to the flap of the rainbow windsock and the damage that does to us intellectually.Collection: Suicide
Oftentimes, when people write me 4,000-word letters, I write them back and tell them if their problem's that complicated, they probably need a lawyer or a cop, and not me.Collection: Writing
I'm not good looking. I'm very strange - a very bony face on an enormous skull, and I don't like to be naked because I don't like how I look naked. And - no, no. I own a lot of my house, because I'm Irish and from people who never owned anything. So I could have a lot more trappings of wealth if every time I had 20 extra dollars I didn't pay off more of the mortgage.Collection: Skulls
Don't move to Seattle and write a stupid sex advice column. That's a waste of time and you need to grow up and get serious.Collection: Growing Up
Oh, my god. I'd be a terrible doctor. I don't like to touch other people. There's a lot of gruesome stuff in my line of work to feel or to admit. I'm sure everyone's expecting me to say "proctologist," but actually no, I don't want to be a proctologist. Probably want to be a dentist, because you don't have to touch much of the other person's body, just their face or mouth.Collection: People
I feel like I'm a compassionate guy, but I also feel if somebody's grip on life or sanity is so tenuous that a joke in an advice column that usually is nothing but jokes pushes them over the edge, then if not me, it would have been a leaf blowing past them that did it, or something else. You almost have to feel that way, doing this.Collection: Past
I really enjoy doing theater, but doing theater in Seattle is like dropping a brick in a bottomless well. It's gratifying, but it's almost like doing radio. It's ephemeral.Collection: Ephemeral
Most Americans don't care about gay marriage. But it matters very much to the knuckle-draggers and Christianists and whack jobs in Bush's ever smaller base.Collection: Jobs
You can't have Rosie on The View and Elton John packing Mom and Pop in at Caesars Palace and gay people all over television, and then have these politicians run out there with a straight face and say that gay and lesbian relationships are a threat to the family. We are winning in the culture - which is why we'll ultimately win the political war.Collection: Mom
First off, LARDASS, you neglected to include a sign-off, forcing me to create one for you. I tried to create one that captured the spirit and tone of your letter, and I think I did pretty well. [] I am thoroughly annoyed at having my tame statements of fact-being heavy is a health risk; rolls of exposed flesh are unsightly-characterized as “hate speech.”Collection: Hate
How can you tell somebody who is pursuing happiness that they're somehow not American when that was the very first promise that America made?Collection: Happiness
Is it adultery if I’m committing it at one end of a guy and he’s committing it at the other end of that same guy?Collection: Gay
The truly revolutionary promise of our nation's founding document is the freedom to pursue happiness-with-a-capital-H.Collection: Promise
I do know this, though: I’m done pretending that the handful of racist gay white men out there—and they’re out there, and I think they’re scum—are a bigger problem for African Americans, gay and straight, than the huge numbers of homophobic African Americans are for gay Americans, whatever their color…I’ll eat my shorts if gay and lesbian voters went for McCain at anything approaching the rate that black voters went for Prop 8.Collection: Gay