Birthday: Dan Savage said, "Ultimately life is disease, death and oblivion. It's still better than high school."

Daniel Keenan Savage (1964-   

Writer, journalist, activist

He grew up in Chicago, and went to Archbishop Quigley Preparatory Seminary North, a seminary prep school. That part didn’t take, and, after graduating from the University of Illinois in Urbana, Savage moved to Madison, Wisconsin.

In Madison, Savage met Tim Keck, co-founder of The Onion. He ended up moving to Seattle after Keck, and became author of a sex advice column “Savage Love,” in 1991. (He wanted to call the column, “Hey, Faggot!” to reclaim the slur from its usual users, but settled for heading all the letters he printed with it as a greeting. Eventually he declared victory and retired the term).

“Savage Love” drives crazy the sort of people you would expect to be driven crazy by a column that addresses sex as it is practiced, wondered about and celebrated (When I was a college newspaper editor in the 1970s, I passed on a syndicated offer by a 70-ish college advisor who apparently saw no irony in marketing a weekly column to college kids called “Across Mrs. G’s Desk”) .

In this week’s “Savage Love,” he advises a straight woman who, with her husband, gets a kick out of reading Craigslist hookup ads, and saw one posted by a friend. What to do?

My first impulse was to tell you to mind your own business—or MYOB, as the late, great Ann Landers used to say (google her, kids)—because you don't actually know if your friend is taking foolish risks. He could be using condoms, taking Truvada, and carefully vetting his play partners. But if I spotted a friend's dick on Craigslist in an ad that left me the least bit concerned for his safety, I would say something. I don't mind coming off as "mommy" (meddling mommy impulses are a requirement for this gig), and if looking out for your friends is "creepy," then I'm a creep...

Over the years, “Savage Love” has been the source of a number of well-known neologisms: GGG (good, giving, game, to describe an ideal sex partner), Monogamish, Pegging, “The Campsite Rule” (when starting a relationship with a younger partner, leave them in better emotional and physical shape than when you started), Saddlebacking (the phenomenon of Christian teens engaging in unprotected anal sex in order to preserve their virginities), and, his most famous one, Santorum.

In the 1990s, Savage was a ubiquitous Seattle presence. He started a theater company that recast plays in gender-bending styles; for three years he hosted a weekly radio show that became renowned for hoax interviews with conservative Washington state politicians. He made regular emcee appearances in drag at gay rights events.

Politically, Savage is less sure-footed. He regularly annoys activists on both end of the political spectrum; consistency has never been much of a friend. He was an Iraq war cheerleader, and in the 2000 Iowa caucuses he infiltrated the campaign of evangelical Gary Bauer and, he clater claimed, licked all the doorknobs in the office, hoping to spread the flu he’d caught and incapacitate Bauer’s campaign. He also registered and voted in the caucuses, to report on them from the inside; that cost him a plea to illegal voting, community service and a fine. He tends to mouth off about things and walk back his more outrageous remarks; during the 1990s he regularly mocked “assimilationist” gay couples who bought houses, kept tidy yards and adopted children. He later married his boyfriend; they adopted a child, and live in a tony Seattle neighborhood where he wrote a book about getting The Kid. He invited National Organization for Marriage co-founder Brian Brown to dinner with his family, with predictably unproductive results; as his fame grew, he and conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan took to cross-publishing homey stories about their families’ joint vacations on Martha’s Vineyard.

In late 2010, after teenaged gay man, Billy Lucas, killed himself because of anti-gay bullying, Savage wrote:

I wish I could have talked to this kid for five minutes. I wish I could have told Billy that it gets better, it gets better. But gay adults aren’t allowed to talk to these kids. Schools and churches don’t bring us in to talk to teenagers who are being bullied.  Many of these kids have homophobic parents who believe that they can prevent their gay children from growing up to be gay—or from ever coming out—by depriving them of information, resources, and positive role models. 

Why are we waiting for permission to talk to these kids? We have the ability to talk directly to them right now. We don’t have to wait for permission to let them know that it gets better. We can reach these kids.

The way to reach those kids was through videos uploaded on the Internet. Since 2010, the It Gets Better project has hosted some 50,000 videos from around the world with a simple message: just hold on and it will get better. The project was given a special 2012 Emmy award for “strategically, creatively and powerfully utilizing the media to educate and inspire.” Most recently Savage’s project has drawn the ire of conservatives for partnering with the manufacturer of Doritos chips for a fundraising run of rainbow-packaged snacks.

After a long tenure as editor, Savage now serves as editorial director of The Stranger. His “Savage Love” column appears in alternative weeklies across North America. He writes his advice column at the desk once owned by Ann Landers. Savage also records a weekly  Savage Lovecast  podcast. He has written six books, edited another, contributed op-eds for The New York Times, and has made numerous appearances on talk shows and news programs.