IMO this guy does a lot more good than bad. He reacts angrily to people who are against gays. I can't blame him, considering he is gay and much of his life has been spent trying to prevent gays from seeing their lives as hopeless and committing suicide.
[h=1]Dan Savage[/h] From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Dan Savage | |
|---|---|
Dan Savage in 2005 | |
| Born | Daniel Keenan Savage October 7, 1964 (age 49) Chicago, Illinois, US |
| Other names | Keenan Hollahan |
| Education | BA, Theater, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign[SUP][1][/SUP] |
| Occupation | Author, media pundit, journalist, newspaper editor and sex advice columnist |
| Spouse(s) | Terry Miller (m. 2005) |
| Children | D.J. |
In his writing and public appearances, Savage has clashed with social conservatives on the right and the LGBT establishment on the left. He has been particularly vocal in response to Rick Santorum's views on homosexuality. He has made several controversial public statements in various media, often lambasting people with whom he disagrees.
[h=2]Contents[/h]
- 1 Early life
- 2 Career
- 3 Personal life
- 4 Opinions and points of view
- 5 Controversies
- 6 Works
- 7 Awards
- 8 References
- 9 External links
[h=2]Early life[/h]
Dan Savage and Terry Miller's wedding at Seattle City Hall with Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn on December 9, 2012, the first day of same-sex marriage in Washington.
Dan Savage was born in Chicago, Illinois,[SUP][5][/SUP] the son of Judith "Judy" (née Schneider), who worked at Loyola University, and William Savage, Sr.[SUP][6][/SUP] He has Irish and German ancestry.[SUP][7][/SUP][SUP][8][/SUP] The third of four children,[SUP][5][/SUP] Savage was raised as a Roman Catholic and attended Quigley Preparatory Seminary North, which he has described as "a Catholic high school in Chicago for boys thinking of becoming priests."[SUP][9][/SUP] Though Savage has stated that he is now "a wishy-washy agnostic" and an atheist,[SUP][10][/SUP] he has said that he still considers himself "culturally Catholic."[SUP][9][/SUP][SUP][11][/SUP]
Savage attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he studied theater and history.[SUP][5][/SUP]
[h=2]Career[/h] [h=3]Savage Love[/h] Main article: Savage Love
In 1991, Savage was living in Madison, Wisconsin, and working as a manager at a local video store that specialized in independent film titles.[SUP][5][/SUP] There, Savage befriended Tim Keck, co-founder of The Onion, who announced that he was moving to Seattle to help start an alternative weekly newspaper titled The Stranger.[SUP][5][/SUP] Savage "made the offhand comment that forever altered [his] life: 'Make sure your paper has an advice column—everybody claims to hate 'em, but everybody seems to read 'em'."[SUP][12][/SUP] Savage typed up a sample column, and to Savage's surprise Keck offered him the job.[SUP][13][/SUP][SUP][14][/SUP]
Savage stated in a February 2006 interview in The Onion's A.V. Club (which publishes his column) that he began the column with the express purpose of providing mocking advice to heterosexuals, since most straight advice columnists were "clueless" when responding to letters from gay people.[SUP][13][/SUP] Savage wanted to call the column "Hey Faggot!" in an effort to reclaim a hate word. 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."[SUP][15][/SUP] In his February 25, 1999 column, Savage announced that he was retiring the phrase, claiming that the reclamation was successful.[SUP][15][/SUP]
He has written in a number of columns about "straight rights" concerns, such as the HPV vaccine and the morning-after pill, stating in his November 9, 2005, column that "[t]he right-wingers and the fundies and the sex-phobes don't just have it in for the queers. They're coming for your asses too."
[h=3]Theater[/h] As a theater director, Savage (under the name Keenan Hollohan, combining his middle name and his grandmother's maiden name[SUP][16][/SUP]) was a founder of Seattle's Greek Active Theater.[SUP][11][/SUP] Much of the group's work were queer recontextualizations of classic works, such as a tragicomic Macbeth with both the title character and Lady Macbeth played by performers of the opposite sex. In March 2001, he directed his own Egguus at Consolidated Works, a parody of Peter Shaffer's 1973 play Equus which exchanged a fixation on horses for a fixation on chickens.
2003's Letters from the Earth, also at Consolidated Works, was Savage's last production.[SUP][17][/SUP] Letters was a trimmed version of Mark Twain's The Diary of Adam and Eve, which received scathing reviews, including one from his own paper, "My Boss's Show Stinks."[SUP][18][/SUP]
[h=3]Media appearances[/h]
Dan Savage speaking at Illinois Wesleyan University, 2007
In addition to maintaining his weekly column and authoring four books, Savage has been involved in several other projects.
From 1994 until 1997, he had a weekly three-hour call-in show called Savage Love Live on Seattle's KCMU (now KEXP). From 1998 to 2000, he ran the biweekly advice column Dear Dan on the news website abcnews.com.
He is now the editorial director of the weekly Seattle newspaper The Stranger, a promotion from his former position as The Stranger's editor-in-chief.[SUP][19][/SUP] Savage currently stars in Savage U on MTV, contributes frequently to This American Life and Out magazine, and acts as a "Real Time Real Reporter" on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher. He has also made multiple appearances on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann and CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 discussing LGBT political issues such as same-sex marriage and Don't Ask Don't Tell.
[h=3]Podcast[/h] The Savage Lovecast is a weekly audio podcast based on Savage's column Savage Love, available via iTunes and at the Stranger's website for free download. It features Savage doing a call-in version of his sex advice column. It is routinely rated as the top podcast in the iTunes "Health" category and in the top 20 of all podcasts overall.[SUP][20][/SUP]
[h=2]Personal life[/h] Savage and his husband, Terry Miller, have one adopted son, D.J.,[SUP][21][/SUP] and were married in Vancouver, Canada in 2005.[SUP][22][/SUP][SUP][23][/SUP] Following the 2012 legalization of gay marriage in Washington, he and Miller were part of the ceremonial first group of 11 couples to receive a Washington marriage license.[SUP][24][/SUP] Savage and Miller married at Seattle City Hall on December 9, 2012.[SUP][25][/SUP]
[h=2]Opinions and points of view[/h] [h=3]It Gets Better Project[/h] Main article: It Gets Better Project
Dan Savage speaking at Google about the It Gets Better Project
On September 21, 2010, Savage started the It Gets Better Project in light of the suicide of 15-year-old Billy Lucas, who was bullied for his perceived sexual orientation. The project encourages adults, both LGBT and otherwise, to submit videos assuring gay teenagers that life can improve after bullying in early life.[SUP][26][/SUP] As of November 2013, the project had over 50,000 user-created testimonials viewed over 50 million times.[SUP][27][/SUP]
[h=3]Political advocacy[/h]
Dan Savage at the 5th Avenue High School Musical Theatre Awards, 2006
Savage has written about his interest in political matters. His political leanings are primarily liberal, with pronounced contrarian and libertarian streaks.[SUP][28][/SUP] For example, he wrote that in 2000, suffering from the flu while on an assignment for salon.com to cover the Iowa caucuses,[SUP][29][/SUP] he was so angered by televised remarks in opposition to same-sex marriage by conservative Republican presidential hopeful Gary Bauer that he abandoned his original plan "to follow one of the loopy conservative Christian candidates around—Bauer or Alan Keyes—and write something insightful and humanizing about him, his campaign, and his supporters".[SUP][30][/SUP] Instead, he volunteered for the Bauer campaign with the intent to infect the candidate with his flu. He wrote that he licked doorknobs and other objects in the campaign office, and handed Bauer a saliva-coated pen, hoping to pass the virus on to Bauer and his supporters (though he later said that much of the article had been fictitious). He also registered and participated in the caucus, which was illegal, as Savage was not an Iowa resident. He was charged and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of fraudulent voting in a caucus, and was sentenced to a year's probation, 50 hours of community service, and a $750 fine.[SUP][31][/SUP][SUP][32][/SUP][SUP][33][/SUP][SUP][34][/SUP]
Savage frequently mentions political issues in his column, particularly issues that affect family planning, birth control, and sexuality. He often encourages readers to get involved and/or voice a positive or negative opinion about a politician or public official.
After Rick Santorum, then a United States senator from Pennsylvania, made comments to a reporter comparing homosexual sex to bestiality and incest in 2003, Savage assailed Santorum in his column. Later, he sponsored a contest that led to the term santorum being used to refer to "the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes a byproduct of anal sex".[SUP][35][/SUP] Savage set up a website to spread the definition.[SUP][36][/SUP] In 2010, Savage offered to remove his website if Rick Santorum would agree to donate US$5 million to a gay rights group.[SUP][37][/SUP][SUP][38][/SUP] The organization, Freedom to Marry, advocates on behalf of same-sex marriage in the United States.[SUP][38][/SUP][SUP][39][/SUP] Savage told Mother Jones in 2010, "If Rick Santorum wants to make a $5 million donation to [the gay marriage group] Freedom to Marry, I will take it down. Interest starts accruing now."[SUP][40][/SUP] Evan Wolfson, executive director of Freedom to Marry, responded in a statement to Metro Weekly, "Support for Freedom to Marry's national campaign would be welcome—and a good way for Rick Santorum to start cleaning up the discriminatory mess he and his companions have made."[SUP][41][/SUP]
Savage continued the tradition in 2009 by having his readers vote to define saddlebacking as "the phenomenon of Christian teens engaging in unprotected anal sex to preserve their virginities",[SUP][42][/SUP] as a protest against the vocal support given to California Proposition 8 by Rick Warren (pastor of Saddleback Church), and President Barack Obama's invitation to Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration. When Savage vowed to boycott Utah due to strong Mormon support for Proposition 8 ("Fuck you, Utah—we’re going to big, blue Colorado"), the Salt Lake City Weekly dropped Savage's column: "all Utahns aren’t to blame."[SUP][43][/SUP]
Savage strongly supported the war in Iraq in the pages of The Stranger in October 2002.[SUP][44][/SUP] By the time of the US invasion in March 2003, however, he had somewhat softened his argument.[SUP][45][/SUP]
Savage has also been a vocal opponent of state legislation proscribing the sale of sex toys. After an exposé by Kandiss Crone from WLBT (Jackson, Mississippi) precipitated the arrest and fining of an adult video store owner, Savage suggested that readers send any sex toys that they needed to dispose of to Crone.[SUP][46][/SUP][SUP][47][/SUP]
[h=3]Personal opinions[/h]
Dan Savage discussing sex education with his brother, Northwestern University Senior Lecturer in English, Bill Savage (2010)
Savage initially supported the Iraq war and advocated military action against other Middle Eastern states, including Iran and Saudi Arabia, saying, "Islamo-fascism is a regional problem, like European fascism—and the Middle East [has] to be remade just as Europe was remade." One week before the war began, Savage spoke against it, citing the inability of President George W. Bush to form a convincing case and sway the UN and NATO allies.[SUP][45][/SUP] By 2005 he deemed the situation "hopeless" and advocated an immediate troop withdrawal.[SUP][48][/SUP]
He describes his view toward family as "conservative", and his husband, Terry Miller, is a "stay-at-home dad" for the couple's adopted son. He has, however, expressed skepticism of "simplistic" views of monogamy.[SUP][49][/SUP]
In response to a letter asking "Is the AIDS crisis over?" Savage, in his October 22, 1997 column, answered simply, "Yes." Several weeks of columns were devoted in whole or in part to discussion of the issue.[SUP][50][/SUP][SUP][51][/SUP]
He opposes the tactics of the War on Drugs, and opposes the prohibition of certain controlled substances.[SUP][52][/SUP]
[h=3]Views on outing[/h] Savage stated in a column that he favors outing in some cases, specifically mentioning anti-gay activist Tyler Whitney. However, in the same column he noted that "I recently talked someone out of outing a public figure. A Savage Love reader was contemplating outing an innocuous celebrity back in April. I advised him against it because, as I wrote to him privately, outing is brutal and it should be reserved for brutes."[SUP][53][/SUP]
[h=3]Local issues[/h] Savage's editorship of The Stranger has established him as a voice in local Seattle politics. His most high-profile commentary has been as an outspoken critic of the Teen Dance Ordinance and other crackdowns on all-ages events.
Savage argues that closing down supervised all-ages dance venues drives teens to boredom and reckless activities: "Places like Ground Zero and the Kirkland Teen Center are invaluable from a law enforcement point of view. They keep kids out of, say, 7-Eleven parking lots or the homes of friends whose parents are away."[SUP][54][/SUP]
[h=2]Controversies[/h] In a 2006 interview with the Daily Pennsylvanian, Savage stated that then-Green Party Senate candidate Carl Romanelli, who Savage claimed was partially funded by state Republicans for a spoiler effect against Democrat Bob Casey, "should be dragged behind a pickup truck until there's nothing left but the rope". In the same interview, he stated, "Mr. Romanelli should go fuck himself."[SUP][55][/SUP] Immediately after the interview, Savage wrote, "I regret using that truck metaphor, and didn't mean it literally, and it was in poor taste, and I regret it."[SUP][56][/SUP]
On HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher July 15, 2011, during a panel discussion of the debt limit increase negotiations between the US Congress and President Barack Obama, Savage said in a stand-alone remark, "I wish the Republicans were all fucking dead."[SUP][57][/SUP] He apologized for his remarks on his blog later the same night saying in part, "I don't feel that way. My dad is a Republican. (Well, he says he's an independent, but he hasn't voted for a Democrat since JFK. My dad is a Republican.)"[SUP][58][/SUP]
Savage has been glitter bombed three times, twice in 2011 and once in 2012, by protesters who alleged that Savage is transphobic, among other accusations.[SUP][59][/SUP][SUP][60][/SUP][SUP][61][/SUP][SUP][62][/SUP]
Savage also came under scrutiny for an April 13, 2012, anti-bullying speech in which he encouraged high school students to "learn to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about gay people", prompting some students to leave the auditorium. Savage apologized on April 29 for calling the walkout "a pansy-assed move", saying, "I wasn't calling the handful of students who left pansies (2,800+ students, most of them Christian, stayed and listened), just the walkout itself." Savage stood by the central point of his speech.[SUP][63][/SUP][SUP][64][/SUP][SUP][65][/SUP]
In June 2014 during seminar at the University of Chicago on social media, Savage discussed his past use of the word "tranny". He objected to a student's request he use the phrase “T-slur” instead and gave examples of other slurs. Some students criticized him for trying to make the student feel threatened and uncomfortable. A University representative said “A guest used language that provoked a spirited debate. The speaker was discussing how hurtful words can be repurposed and used to empower; at no point did he direct any slurs at anyone.”[SUP][66][/SUP] Savage later thanked the University for standing up for him and demanded an apology from those who had accused him of hate speech against trans people.[SUP][67][/SUP][SUP][68][/SUP]
[h=2]Works[/h] Main article: Dan Savage bibliography
In addition to his advice column, Savage has written four books, edited one book, and authored various op-ed pieces in The New York Times.
