“It Gets Better,” the anti-bullying, online video campaign he and husband Terry Miller started, might be making him, in his words, “milquetoast,” or, as he put it at another point, “a kind of touchy-feely, ooey-gooey, Up-with-People guy.”
He needn’t fear.
Just in recent weeks, the alternative newspaper sex columnist and newly minted TV star (“Savage U” on MTV) has been slammed by conservative Christians for describing elements of the Bible as bovine byproduct, but in more pungent terms.
He’s been “glitter bombed” by transgender advocates, who object to some of the terminology his “Savage Love” sex advice column has used for transgendered people. (His response? “Throwing glitter at gay guys is like throwing sprinkles at cupcakes. OK? You’re only making that cupcake more fabulous than it already was.” Then, more substantively: “If I’m the enemy of trans people, then the war is over, and they’ve lost.”)
He quickly apologized for using the term “pansy-assed” to publicly describe an organized walkout by conservative Christians during the same speech that brought on the Bible controversy, an April keynote address to a national high school journalism convention in Seattle, where he lives.
The website Gay Patriot, billed as “the Internet home for the American gay conservative,” went for the snappy headline: “If it gets better, why is Dan Savage so bitter?”
And then at Elmhurst College last month — about 22 miles from where he was raised in Rogers Park, the son of a cop and Catholic Church deacon and the product of North Side Catholic schools — Savage reiterated much of the speech that had led to so much ink spillage but apologized, again, for the “pansy” phrasing.
During the vibrant Q-and-A at speech’s end, a questioner from the right (of the auditorium) tried to label Savage himself a bully for his part in the scatological redefinition of former Sen. Rick Santorum’s name through Google, and a questioner from the left (of the auditorium) took issue with Savage’s interpretation of the Bible.
Savage fired back fiercely on both fronts, to the delight of a crowd that was, if raucous applause is any indication, almost wholly on his side.
“Rick Santorum would destroy my family and my life,” he said. “We told a dirty joke. And I’m the (expletive)?”
The message was clear: If Dan Savage is milquetoast, then he is a particularly piquant version. If he is in any way “Up with People,” then the phrase has to start, at least some of the time, with the word “fed.”
Or maybe it should start with “act,” a nod to his being, as he put it, “an ACT UPper from way back” — a reference to the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, the activist group that came to prominence in the 1980s and ’90s, when Savage, now 47, was coming of age.
Wednesday, Savage responded to the news that President Barack Obama would support same-sex marriage. Writing on his blog, he said, “As delighted as I am by this news — and I’m freakin’ delighted — I’m nevertheless disappointed that the president’s support for marriage equality doesn’t extend to … states that have already banned same-sex marriage.”
Part of what’s happening with him now is that, with the U.S. presidency in the balance, not only did Santorum come back as a prominent Republican contender for the nomination, but so, too, did culture wars themselves.
And in that battle against social progressivism, a very convenient target is the gay, self-described “loudmouth” who publicly advocates all manner of sexual practices and who, when given the choice between delivering a snappy, sharp-edged line and a safer, slightly duller one, will almost always choose the honed and whetted one.
Some choice words from the Elmhurst appearance:
•On his popularity as a college speaker: “University health departments bring me in because they know I can undo abstinence education programs in just two hours.”
•On gay marriage being labeled a “threat” to the family: “Once we all get married, we’re going to forget which (orifice produces) babies.”
•On whether his redefinition of “santorum,” in Google searches, as a sloppy sexual byproduct is unfair to the former senator’s children: “I care about Santorum’s kids, in part because there are so many of them that the odds of one of them being gay are high.”
•On watching the incredible pace of email pouring in during the early days of “It Gets Better”: “It was cascading down the screen. It looked like one of those black granite water walls in a douche-bag bar.”
•On anti-gay activists: “Every dead gay kid is a moral, rhetorical victory for them. They stand on a pile of dead gay kids.”