Dan Savage (born 1964 near Chicago) is an openly gay American sex-advice columnist, author, media pundit, journalist and newspaper editor whose strong opinions pointedly clash with both traditional conservative moral values and those put forth by what Savage has been known to call the "gay establishment". He is also a playwright and theater director, both under his real name and under the name Keenan Hollahan.
His internationally syndicated relationship and sex advice column is Savage Love. Its tone is humorous, profane, and on occasion hostile to conservative opponents, as in the Santorum controversy. Savage originally conceived of the column as mainly advice for heterosexuals from a queer nationalist, and wanted to call the column "Hey Faggot!" His editors at the time refused his choice of column name, but for the first several years of the column, he attached "Hey Faggot!" at the beginning of each printed letter as a salutation. The idea that he was primarily a "neutral party" advising heterosexuals quickly fell away; today, gays are disproportionately represented among his correspondents.
He has written three books: Savage Love, a collection of letters from his column; The Kid, relating how he and his boyfriend adopted a baby boy; and Skipping Towards Gomorrah, which describes his exploration of the seven deadly sins. (The latter book's title is an upbeat parody of Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline by Robert Bork.)
Savage is also editor of the Seattle weekly newspaper The Stranger and a contributor to This American Life, an hour-long radio show on Chicago's WBEZ syndicated by PRI. From at least September 1994 until 1997, he had a weekly 2-hour call-in show called Savage Love Live on Seattle's KCMU (now KEXP). From 1998 to 2000, he ran the bi-weekly advice column Dear Dan on the news website abcnews.com.
His political bent is leftist/libertarian/liberal, but he does not shy away from defending unexpected positions: he disapproves of the gay pride theme, has called for harsher civil penalties against people who knowingly place others at risk of HIV, and supports sending more American troops to Iraq in order to improve the situation of civilians there (see U.S.-led occupation of Iraq). He has often clashed with those other perceived leaders of Seattle's gay community. For example, he has often expressed contempt for the editorial calibre of the Seattle Gay News and under his editorship, The Stranger frequently publishes criticisms of the messages put out by local AIDS organizations and of how they handle their money.
After growing up in Chicago, Savage studied theater and history. As a writer and director for theater, in the mid-1990s Savage (working under the name "Keenan Hollahan") was founder of Seattle's Greek Active Theater which mainly staged queer re-contextualizations of classic works, such as a tragi-comic Macbeth with both the titular character and Lady Macbeth played by performers of the opposite gender. More recently, in March 2001 he directed his own "Egguus," a parody of Peter Shaffer's 1973 play Equus, undercutting its stodginess by substituting a fixation on chickens for a fixation on horses.
Savage surprised many of his readers by writing in his syndicated sex advice column: "I'm Catholic—in a cultural sense, not an eat-the-wafer, say-the-rosary, burn-down-the-women's-health-center sense. I attended Quigley Preparatory Seminary North, a Catholic high school in Chicago for boys thinking of becoming priests. I got to meet the pope in 1979 when he dropped by our school during his visit to Chicago" [1]. Shortly after the death of Pope John Paul II, he wrote in the same column that:
- John Paul II had more "no's" for straight people than he did for gays. But when he tried to meddle in the private lives of straights, the same people who deferred to his delicate sensibilities where my rights were concerned suddenly blew [him] off. Gay blowjobs are expendable, it seems; straight ones are sacred.
- So I can't get behind this orgy of cheap and easy piety... I'm sorry the old bastard's dead, I'm sorry he suffered. But I'm not so sorry that I won't stoop to working John Paul II into a column about zombie fetishism.
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