Dan Savage

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Daniel Keenan Savage (born October 7, 1964<ref>This American Life, episode 118 uncut, 32:22–32:32.</ref> near Chicago, Illinois) 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, using his middle name and his grandmother's maiden name. <ref>Kittenpants interview with Dan Savage Kittenpants 04.10.01 Issue 9.</ref>

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. His first break came while in Madison, Wisconsin, as a manager at a local video store. A friend from The Onion newspaper was starting up The Stranger; Savage suggested it should have an advice column, not knowing that he would be offered the position. Savage stated in a recent interview in The Onion AV Club that he began the column with the express purpose of providing mocking advice to heterosexuals. "Forever, I'd read letters that had been written to straight advice columnists from gay people. Sometimes the advice was okay, but oftentimes it was clueless about gay issues or gay people or gay sex or gay rights. And I just thought it would be funny for once if there was an advice column written by a gay person where straight people had to get slapped around or treated with contempt." Savage 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. After the first year or so, he moderated the tone of the column and tried to provide more helpful advice. Recently, he has written in a number of columns about "straight rights" concerns, such as the HPV vaccine and the morning-after pill, saying 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."

In addition to authoring four books, Savage is currently the 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. In 2000, he wrote that while suffering from the influenza virus while on an assignment for salon.com to cover the Iowa caucuses <ref>Salon.com's editorial, The firestorm over "Stalking Gary Bauer"</ref>, 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." Instead, he volunteered for the Bauer campaign, intending to try to infect the candidate with his flu. He wrote that he'd licked doorknobs and other objects in the campaign office, and handed Bauer a saliva-coated pen, hoping to pass the disease 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 with perjury and felony assault, pled 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.<ref>http://www.dmregister.com/news/stories/c4789004/12880264.html Des Moines Register article.</ref> <ref>[1]</ref> <ref> Dan Savage on NNDB.</ref> <ref>Dan Savage Germ Warfare, The Stranger, Jan 27 - Feb 2, 2000.</ref>

He does not, however, 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 himself describes his view towards family as "conservative", and his boyfriend is a "stay-at-home dad" for the couple's adopted son, but at the same time is skeptical towards the concept of monogamy. He has often clashed with 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. He is also friends with the controversial gay pundit and self-labeled South Park Republican Andrew Sullivan, whose influential blog (http://www.andrewsullivan.com) he took over for a week in August 2005 while Sullivan was on vacation.

Savage's editorship of The Stranger has established him as a voice in local Seattle politics, in which he has been 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."<ref>Josh Feit and Dan Savage, Raving Mad, The Stranger, Mar 30 - Apr 5, 2006. Accessed 6 April 2006.</ref>

After growing up in Chicago, Savage studied theatre 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" <ref>Dan Savage, Savage Love (column), The Village Voice, April 12th, 2005. In fact, Pope John Paul II did not drop by Quigley North; he did come to Quigley South at 77th and south Western Avenue, where students of the entire Chicago seminary system were invited to greet him; the Pope used the Quigley South chapel for a meeting of all the North American Catholic bishops. See Papal Visit to Quigley South, October 5, 1979 on Quigley's official site.</ref>. 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.

On December 3, 2002, after columnist Ann Landers' June 22 death, Savage purchased her desk <ref>Dan Savage, Savage Love: Advice Regarding Minors; Childbirth Fetish; I Bought Ann Landers's Desk!, The Village Voice, December 4 - 10, 2002.</ref>

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