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In pre-1960s America, if you had questions about sex (Is masturbation cheating? What’s a butterfly flick? Butter or margarine?), you were at the mercy of your friends, who probably knew less than you did. Then came the sexual revolution with its free-flowing sex advice, some of it accurate. We like to think the Playboy Advisor column, as it reassured, instructed and entertained several generations of men, gave birth to a genre that thrives today.
One of the most read and most controversial sex columnists working now is Dan Savage, whose Savage Love column is syndicated in more than 50 newspapers around the world. Savage also dispenses his hilarious and sage advice in best-selling books, podcasts and blogs, as well as a smartphone app. And he’s gay, but the majority of his readers are straight. “His columns answer a Chaucerian panorama of correspondents,” according to Washington Monthly. “Gay Mormons, incestuous siblings, weight-gain fetishists, men yearning to be cuckolded and otherwise ordinary Americans grappling with an extraordinary range of problems and proclivities.”
Along with his unconventional sex advice, Savage is known for his advocacy of LGBT rights, including gay marriage. He has frequently appeared as a liberal pundit on CNN, Real Time With Bill Maher and The Colbert Report. And he has been repeatedly attacked, even condemned, by conservative politicians, media pundits and clergy. Savage hasn’t been reluctant to fight back against those he deems homophobic and dangerous. After Rick Santorum compared homosexuality to bestiality, Savage announced a contest to redefine the word santorum. The winning definition—which he explains in this interview—continues to plague the former senator, who is reportedly exploring another presidential run in 2016.
Savage, 50, was born in Chicago, where his father was a police officer and his mother a homemaker. He now lives in Seattle with his husband, Terry Miller. They married in Canada in 2005 and renewed their vows in 2012, following the legalization of gay marriage in Washington. The couple has an adopted son, DJ, who has come out of the closet to Savage and Miller—as straight.
I don’t believe all sexual expression is good. Sex is powerful. It can destroy you.
In September 2010, prompted by the suicide of a teenager who had been bullied because classmates thought he was gay, Savage and Miller created the It Gets Better project. They made a video in which they speak to gay kids who are isolated and feeling hopeless. They posted it online and encouraged others to follow suit. “The idea was simple,” Savage explains in American Savage: Insights, Sights and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love and Politics, his latest best-seller. “There were LGBT kids out there who couldn’t picture futures with enough joy in them to compensate for the pain they were in now. We wanted to offer them encouragement.” The It Gets Better project currently has more than 60,000 videos. Celebrities and politicians, including President Barack Obama, have contributed.
At a time when support for gay marriage is increasing, gay sports stars are coming out of the closet and more openly gay members are serving in Congress, we asked Contributing Editor David Sheff, whose last interview for us was with the Chinese artist-dissident Ai Weiwei, to meet with Savage. Sheff says that when he arrived to begin the interview, Savage admitted he was nervous about speaking to PLAYBOY, thought by some to be a bastion of heterosexuality. “But he quickly relaxed,” Sheff says. “Soon he was animated, speaking passionately, emotionally, vividly and hilariously about a wide range of subjects. Clearly he warmed up to talking to PLAYBOY, as evidenced by a text he sent soon after the interview’s conclusion. “I forgot to say one thing,” he wrote. “I have lusted in my heart.”
PLAYBOY: According to the Playboy Advisor, the number one question sex columnists are asked is “Am I normal?” What’s behind the obsession with normalcy?
SAVAGE: Even though everyone has non-normative desires—variance is the norm, in fact—people are terrified by what they think and want. When you ask people what they see in their minds when they imagine two people having normal sex, they say the missionary position, vaginal intercourse and husband and wife, with the intention of making a baby. How rare is that? That’s freaky shit right there. That is not normal.
PLAYBOY: If the non-normal is normal, why do people need to be reassured?
SAVAGE: Sex negativity is imposed on us by religion, parents and a culture that can’t deal with sex. We pretend sex doesn’t interest us, while the culture is sexually obsessed. I also think sex negativity is hardwired into the human experience. You’re born with it, because when you’re a kid, prepuberty, sex is this fucked-up thing grown-ups do. When you hear about it, you think, Creepy, gross. Like, oh my God, you adults do whaaaat? Then you hit puberty and the riptide pulls you out; you get sucked under by this thing you swore you’d never do. It’s terrifying. That’s why people are plagued by their desires and why they need to be constantly reassured. They never wanted to get into that ocean, and they’re suddenly drowning. Your dick or your pussy seizes control of your brain and tells you who’s really in charge.
PLAYBOY: What’s the root of religious conservatism about sex?
SAVAGE: Judaism, Christianity, Islam and almost every other faith have constantly tried to insert themselves between your genitals and your salvation, because then they can regulate and control you. Then you need them to intercede with God, so they target your junk and stigmatize your sexual desire. If you have somebody by the balls or the ovaries, you’ve got them.
PLAYBOY: And then you come along, telling us that when it comes to sex, anything goes.
SAVAGE: I don’t say anything goes. I don’t believe all sexual expression is good. Sex is powerful, and you must approach it thoughtfully, because it can destroy you.
PLAYBOY: Destroy us how?
SAVAGE: Sexually transmitted infections, unplanned pregnancy, partner violence. It’s why we need comprehensive, responsible, kink-inclusive, queer-inclusive sex education for all kids.
PLAYBOY: Did your parents talk to you about sex?
SAVAGE: When my brothers and sisters were teenagers and having their first relationships, my parents were all over them. “Who are you going out with?” “Where are you going?” “I want to meet this person.” My sister was sexually active, as I was, in high school—sorry, Laura, I hope your son doesn’t read this—and she could go to my mom and say, “My boyfriend is saying ‘If you loved me, you wouldn’t make me use a condom,'” and Mom could blow up and yell at her boyfriend if he was stupid enough to show his face at our house. When I had a boyfriend at 16, I couldn’t rely on my mom to vet this shit. I wasn’t out to her at that point, so I couldn’t confide in her at all, which is a problem for a lot of queers. They fly blind into adult relationships.
PLAYBOY: With what result?
SAVAGE: You’re 15 and watching your siblings have relationships, and you want to have a boyfriend too. But because their age-appropriate boyfriend targets aren’t out yet, a lot of young gay kids date older people, which is a recipe for potential disaster. My first boyfriend when I was a teenager was 28, and he was a wonderful guy and good for me. But the odds that it might be an exploitative relationship are that much higher.
PLAYBOY: If not your parents, was there an equivalent of Dan Savage you could go to for sex advice?
SAVAGE: I read Xaviera Hollander, the Happy Hooker, her Call Me Madam column. She took questions about kinky sex, crazy sex, bi sex, BDSM, and was so unfazed. She gave advice that was constructive, not judgmental.
PLAYBOY: What do you think of others in the media who offer sex advice? How about Dr. Laura?
SAVAGE: Dr. Laura is a vile piece of shit.
PLAYBOY: Dr. Phil?
SAVAGE: He’s part of the advice-industrial Oprah complex. I’m not a big fan of telling women that when their husband looks at porn it’s a form of cheating. That’s what you say if you want to drive the divorce rate up even higher than it is.
Straight people need to have more sex partners, and gays need to have fewer.
PLAYBOY: What do you tell a woman whose husband looks at porn?
SAVAGE: He’ll pretend not to look, you pretend to believe him, and then give him some credit for covering his tracks if he does so successfully. If you stumble over evidence once in a great while, then you repay his courtesy of covering his tracks most of the time by ignoring it.
PLAYBOY: What impact does the availability of limitless porn online have on kids as they grow up?
SAVAGE: A lot of girls have the expectation that they’ll have to do all these things they see in porn, whether they want to or not. And it weighs on the boys too that they’ll have to perform all these acts. It’s as big a stressor for boys as it is for girls. They see these 20-inch dicks and rock-hard abs and all that. I tell my son, “You have to be careful when you look at porn. A lot of porn is for men who can’t get laid, who can’t get girlfriends. A lot of porn is created for angry men.” Kids see porn and think that’s what sex is. So we have to say to boys and girls what the right-wing fundamentalist fucktards won’t say, which is that other kinds of sex are normal and at your ages it might be better to masturbate together. That oral sex is less risky. That a lot of what adults do isn’t vaginal intercourse. That everyone doesn’t have a 20-inch dick. It can lift the burden from them. But parents don’t talk about sex at all with their kids. It’s hard talking about sex with a teenager. My son doesn’t want to hear it from me or anyone else, but you have to meddle. You have to say, “You can roll around and jerk off. That’s a lot of what adults do.”