By Chris Azzopardi

Originally printed 11/15/2012 (Issue 2046 – Between The Lines News)

How does it feel going from cheeky columnist to a leader in the LGBT movement after the It Gets Better Project?

(Laughs) I don’t know! I never describe myself as a spokesman or having any sort of role in the movement – because it pisses off people who probably should be pissed off, or probably just want to be pissed off. I’m just a writer. Usually when people start talking about a gay writer in relation to their role in the movement, what comes next is they want you to shut up.

It’s true. There are a lot of conservatives who wish you’d shut your mouth.

There are a lot of lefties out there who are trying to get me to shut up! There are lefty queers who think that I’m the devil.

The people who hate you, especially in the gay community, say that although you created the It Gets Better Project to curb bullying, you are a bully yourself – that you bully the obese, Republicans and Christians. How do you respond to people who call you hypocritical?

Well, usually they’re lying or they’re full of it, or they’re confused about what bullying is. Bullying is a power relationship; it’s about the powerful picking on the weak and the vulnerable and the persecuted. That I have an opinion about the obesity epidemic that you disagree with doesn’t make me a bully. That I write a column where people are allowed to use the language that they actually use when they talk about their sex lives, and that I use the word “fag” in my column, doesn’t make me a bully.

Rick Santorum says I’ve bullied him – because he is somehow the moral equivalent of a vulnerable and isolated closeted gay 13-year-old growing up in Texas who has no support and nowhere to turn? That’s Rick Santorum? This is dumbing bullying down to mean absolutely everything.

People who claim that they’ve been bullied by me or my column are full of shit. (Laughs) Now they’ll claim that that is bullying because I’m supposed to go, “Oh, golly gosh, you just threw the word ‘bullying’ on the table and it’s kryptonite and I must melt in the face of it.” Somebody disagreeing with you – that ain’t fucking bullying.

How about telling Republicans to kill themselves? What’s that?

(Laughs) I actually haven’t ever told a Republican that they should kill themselves, and the one time on “Bill Maher” I said under my breath, “I wish they were all dead,” I immediately apologized before anybody barked at me about it. It was the wrong thing to say, and I apologized before anybody yelled at me. I didn’t wait for there to be a scandal to apologize. You know, when you run your mouth for a living, sometimes you run yourself into a ditch. It’s important at those moments to man-up and say, “Hey, that was wrong.”

People try to claim that I’m a bully – and it’s bullshit. It’s actually a form of bullying, you know, when queers show up and somebody throws a jar at your face and dumps glitter on you and says that you’re an anti-trans bigot. To accuse somebody in the hothouse environment of queer activism of being an anti-queer bigot is bullying, especially when you’ve got nothing to back it up.

Where does this hatred come from? How did you become this “bully” within the gay community?

What that comes from is that some fucking queer people are crazy. That’s where that comes from! (Laughs) I’m for trans-inclusion. I keep pointing out that DADT repeal is not finished because trans people are banned from serving in the military, and I raised $5,000 for a trans woman’s funeral on my blog in 2004. Buck Angel and Kate Bornstein have been guest sexperts. Find me a sex-advice columnist who was seeking out the opinions of high-profile trans people 15 years ago and lending them their platform. If that amounts to anti-trans bigotry, if I’m the enemy in the trans community, then the trans community could use more enemies like me.

The It Gets Better Project wasn’t the Suck My Dick, I’m Dan Savage Project. (My partner) Terry (Miller) and I got it rolling and then stepped out of the way. And a lot of trans people made videos. Some of the first videos that came in were from trans people and upped the visibility of trans people. I’m the executive producer of the two It Gets Better specials that we did for MTV, which reached millions and millions of people. One of the six stories we told was Aydian’s – who’s trans! What’s funny now is that anything I do that vaguely is in-line with stuff that I’ve always done that’s pro-trans is now, “He’s just covering up for his transphobia by being pro-trans.”

What do trans people point to? Why do some of them think you hate them?

That I’ve used the word “tranny” and the word “she-male” in my column. I stopped using them after people raised objections, but people still cite columns I wrote 10 years ago. I think we all know more about trans issues than we did 20 years ago. I have trans friends who actually think we should use the term “she-male” when we’re referring to a type of trans woman who does escorting or a particular porn genre, because what other term is there? What are you supposed to say when you mean she-male porn?

You also use “fag,” so that must make you anti-gay.

And I use “breeder,” so I’m anti-straight. We could pick this apart. I’m a rape apologist. I’m racist. It’s kind of hilarious. (Laughs)

The It Gets Better Project has become a worldwide movement. Did you anticipate it taking off like it has?

No, absolutely not. When I announced it, I thought it would be this cool project for my readers. We hoped that we would get about 100 videos, because I felt like if we got 100 videos, we’d get some of everybody. Terry and I were both aware when we released that first video that not all queer people look like us, have penises like the both of us happen to, want the same things out of life – and it would only be meaningful if there was a lot of everybody, a lot of different kinds of queer people.

We got 100 videos in probably 12 hours or 24 hours, and it kind of blew us away. That just this week It Gets Better launched in Portugal and Italy, and there are It Gets Better Projects in Latin America, Australia, the United Kingdom and Sweden – it’s kind of amazing. There’s probably 80,000 videos, and millions of people have taken part in the projects.

It became part of a sensation, and then celebrities and politicians started jumping in; we did not solicit videos from celebrities and politicians. The ones that are really valuable to everyday ordinary queer kids are the everyday ordinary queer people who you haven’t heard of. We don’t want to say that to be happy and loved you have to be Ellen, because not everybody gets to be Ellen.

Some of your critics thought that It Gets Better was too passive, that we should tell kids to fight back. Scott Thompson of “The Kids in the Hall” told me his advice to kids would be to “grow a pair.”

(Laughs) You know what, that’s what some people said in the videos. One of our favorite videos was from Gabrielle Rivera, this Latina lesbian poet in the Bronx who made this video that some people thought we would hate. In her video she’s like, “I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t get better. These white people and their money, and they can sit in their nice apartments.” But she was like, “Fuck that and these people. I’m here to tell you it does not get better; I’m here to tell you, you get stronger.” That’s grow a pair – or you will have a pair grown for you. (Laughs)

Most of the misconceptions people have of what’s in the videos can be cured if they spend five minutes watching them. If you watch them, what you see are people talking about how they made it better themselves, what they did, how they demanded better of their families and their communities. It didn’t just happen to them – the sun didn’t just come up and it was better one day. So there’s nothing passive about the project.

Who told you it gets better when you were a kid?

People have asked me, “Would you have liked there to be an It Gets Better Project for you?” and I’ve always said that there was. When I was 13 years old in 1977, growing up in Chicago, I remember very distinctly being out at the movies with my mother, siblings and dad – and there were two gay guys in line holding hands in front of us. My parents were kind of unhappy and freaked out, and I just remember looking at the couple and going, “I always knew I was different. Now I know how.” I just looked at them and thought, “They look happy; I’ll be OK.” And they were telling a story, which is what the project is about.

Fifty years ago, you used to think you were the only queer person in the world. You didn’t think there was another boy like you. Queer kids don’t grow up with that kind of isolation anymore. But there are bullied queer kids out there who know there are happy queer adults in the world, but they don’t know how you get to be one. But so many of us suffered, and then we got past it.

With this project, we were able to share those stories. And there have been other suicides since that have been earth-shattering, particularly Jamey Rodemeyer’s suicide. We’ve heard from thousands of kids – and some parents, even. And nobody writes about the kids who didn’t kill themselves. It’s not a news story when a gay kid doesn’t kill him- or herself.

Who do you go to for advice?

I used to go to my mom, but my mom passed away, so I go to my brother Billy. He gives great advice. He’s a smart dude.

Does Terry give you good advice?

(Laughs) Well … Terry and I are spouses; we talk about everything. Terry is a very smart person, but usually when I need advice it’s about Terry, so I can’t really go to Terry.

What can we expect from your talk in Ann Arbor?

It depends on what people want to talk about. I’ve been writing a question-and-answer column and an advice column for so long that Q&A is my format – that’s what I do. We will talk about whatever people ask me questions about. That’s the deal. Savage Love Live is questions from the house and me running my mouth.

When you speak in more rural places that wouldn’t seem to be open to talking about sex and gay people, what’s that like? Is that a different vibe?

You know, it’s not. Sometimes I worry about it in advance, but there are liberals in those places, and there are queer people in those places, and they turn up. They’re just so happy to look around the room and see other people who agree with them for a change. (Laughs) It’s kind of like when I show up in a college town in Oklahoma or Kansas; you’d think the Bible thumpers would come, but they don’t. I’m always surprised that they don’t. You’d think they would. They read me, but I don’t come across as someone they can make cry.

What are some trends in gay sex? Have dental dams caught on yet?

No – dental dams for analingus and cunnilingus didn’t catch on during the worst of the AIDS epidemic; they’re certainly not catching on now. Trends in sex: Well, kink has gone completely mainstream. I’d like to think that my column sort of opened the discussion of kink and helped make it more mainstream. Look at “Fifty Shades of Grey” now. Back when, people who had the audacity to hang Robert Mapplethorpe pictures in museums were put on trial; newspapers and courts talked about S&M as if it were the most depraved and disgusting thing that a human being could possibly do next to gay sex – and if you did it in addition to gay sex or at the same time, oh my god – you were Satan. Now it’s pretty mainstream. But that’s human sexuality.

Gay sex always had at its heart that sex is about pleasure and intimacy and not about reproduction – and it’s not about reproduction for straight people either, but they like to pretend that it is. Straight people have a lot more sex than they have babies.

For someone who gives advice on sex, you must have a pretty fulfilling, or at least entertaining, sex life. How much of the advice you give is based on your own sex life?

Gay people tend to know more about sex and be better at it than straight people, because sex is what makes us not straight people so we think about it more. So everything I write about – not everything; I haven’t salined my balls. Not yet, anyway. The night is young. Who knows what could happen. But I take a healthy interest in variance and difference. I’m always kind of curious about what people are up to. We have, I think, a pretty awesome sex life, and it’s adventurous and we’ve been together a long time and everything is still pretty … great. (Laughs)

There were about four other adjectives in there.

There were! Some people are shocked when they come over to our house and they expect that there will be a sling over the dining room table, and there isn’t. It’s very Ozzie and Harriet around here. We kind of have a grandma house. It’s very boring. Not that we don’t have a sling; we do – it’s just not hanging over the dining room table.

Chris Azzopardi is the editor of Q Syndicate, the international LGBT wire service. Reach him via his website at http://www.chris-azzopardi.com.

ALYSIA ABBOTT OCT 31 2012, 4:51 PM ET

Queer families are more visible in pop culture than ever. But is there anything real about the way they’re portrayed?

ABC; AP Images; NBC

The 2012 fall TV season may be remembered as the season the gay fathers stormed primetime. According to The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation there are a record 111 openly LGBT characters on TV and a number of these are fathers. In ABC’s Emmy-winning Modern Family, now in its fourth season, ensemble cast members Mitch and Cam are the same-sex parents of an adopted daughter. And this fall, NBC introduced The New Normal about a gay couple, Bryan (Andrew Rannells) and David (Justin Bartha), who decide to start a family with the help of a surrogate mother.

I was raised by a single gay father in the 1970s and ’80s. When I was a kid, the only LGBT characters I found on weekly primetime comedy were performed by straight characters desperate for real estate. Jack (John Ritter) played limp-wristed so he could live with two girls on Three’s Company, and on Bosom Buddies, Kip (Tom Hanks) and Henry (Peter Scolari) donned dresses so they could get an apartment in a cheap, women-only building. Back then, I thought I was the only one in the world with a gay parent, and felt so isolated that I pushed myself into the closet, eager to hide my out-and-proud dad.

After the battles the LGBT movement has fought these last 40 years, are these representations the ones to celebrate?

I was curious to see The New Normal. Created by Ryan Murphy, the maestro behind Glee andAmerican Horror Story, it’s the first network show to put gay dads front and center; NBC even cheekily billed the show as “the post-modern family.” The pilot starts off promising. In a video message to his baby, Bryan looks lovingly into the camera and says, “This…is to show you how desperately you were wanted.” We later flashback to the moment when Bryan knew he wanted to be a father, while shopping at Barneys. “Oh. My. God. That is the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. I must have it!” he exclaims. We think he is looking at an item of clothing and then see he’s locked eyes with an adorable baby being pushed in a stroller. In recalling the moment to his partner, David, he explains, “When I saw that miniature person—whose skin was flawless, by the way—I really got it. I want us to have baby clothes and a baby to wear them.” “You can’t return a baby to Barney’s,” David tartly replies. David’s the gay “straight man” in the couple, a grounded counterpoint to Bryan’s flamboyant material girl. I had to wonder: After the battles the LGBT movement has fought these last 40 years, are these representations the ones to celebrate?

Many early gay fathers in pop culture were closeted, often with children from a heterosexual marriage—like Doug Salter in 1972’s A Certain Summer, for example. The Wedding Banquet, though, was among the first onscreen portrayals of openly gay men with a child. It tells the story of a gay Chinese man (Winston Chao) with a boyfriend who marries a woman to please his straight-laced parents, then raises their child with his life partner (Mitchell Lichtenstein) along as a third parent.

I understand that characters like Bryan are often blown out of proportion to fit the conventions of sitcom. In Modern Family, Mitch and Cam represent only one of many loveable stereotypes that fuel the show’s comedic success. Predictably fussy Mitch and overdramatic Cam are no more clichéd—nor less endearing—than Gloria, the much-younger, busty, thickly-accented Latina dimwit married to Mitch’s dad. But you do have to wonder: Did the mothers and fathers of the same-sex movement—the down-on-their heels transvestites who pushed back police at the Stonewall Inn in 1969, the men and women who sparked the 1979 White Night riots in San Francisco—get beat up for… this?

Yes, I realize we are talking about fictional characters on primetime network comedy, but when same-sex marriage is on the ballot in four states next week, representation of gay families in the media is important.

My dad was married to my mother when he came out, with a child on the way. That didn’t stop him from founding a chapter of the Gay Liberation Front and marching in a dress down the streets of Atlanta, Georgia, hardly a “sissy” act in 1970. After my mother died three years later, he moved us to San Francisco, where as a critic and editor, he nurtured a community of writers who explored issues of sexuality and identity in their work. Before he died of AIDS in 1992, friends said my father used to urge young writers and artists to take themselves seriously. Not just to have fun but to create something of cultural importance, to contribute to civilization. To be gay wasn’t just to be attracted to someone of the same gender; it was to align yourself with a history of outcasts and renegades, people like Oscar Wilde and Allen Ginsberg, who took countercultural stands, often at great risk to their lives or careers, all in an effort to be true to themselves.

What feels “true” in the world of The New Normal? The tender kisses seem as natural as the kisses between straight TV characters, which is a great advance. But it’s hard to believe in the love between the two characters when one hopes for a child that’s skinny enough to fit the Marc Jacobs baby line and the other is a sensible “gay-necologist” who’s never heard of Grey Gardens and likes to play games of pick-up basketball with his buddies from the hospital.

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I’m also troubled by the couple’s conspicuous affluence. Yes, there’s the stereotype of the dual income gay professionals. David’s a doctor. Bryan works in TV. Naturally they live in a beautiful LA home and look like Banana Republic models! But I get the feeling that the world of The New Normal is made palatable because of this wealth. David and Bryan don’t blink at the $35,000 it costs to hire their surrogate Goldie (Georgia King). And after falling for her and her adorable daughter (Bebe Wood, a dead ringer for the girl in Little Miss Sunshine) they buy the mother a suit (to fulfill her dream of becoming a lawyer) and invite the pair to live with them in a wing of their home. Of course they’ll be good fathers—they’re already providers! This hardly reflects the reality of most gay parents. A recent study of US census data cited in the New York Times found that “Black or Latino gay couples are twice as likely as whites to be raising children” and are “are also more likely than their white counterparts to be struggling economically.”

For all their wealth and good-looks, though, David and Bryan are still looked down on by Goldie’s bigoted grandmother (played to the hilt by Ellen Barkin), their plans for a family called “disgusting” by the fanny-pack wearing dad they encounter at the outlet mall. These confrontations are orchestrated to evoke sympathy and righteous anger but too often feel staged. And that poor unborn baby moves from coveted clothing mannequin to political prop.

It’s a good thing to have more openly gay men and women on TV. But if these characters are consistently portrayed like Mitch and Cam, “just like us,” or like David and Bryan, “what we want to be,” is pop culture truly moving toward acceptance of queer culture? Or are these shows merely evidence of the assimilation of gay men and women into straight culture, and the disappearance of the radical queer culture that was so exciting a generation ago?

The most vibrant gay man you’ll see on a screen this fall won’t be found on TV but in David France’s filmed history of the ACT UP movement, How to Survive a Plague. Bob Rafsky quit his job as a PR executive at Howard Rubenstein (he’d represented Donald Trump before going on disability for AIDS) in order to become an activist. In a New York Times op-ed he wrote, “There’s not much to do except to keep fighting the epidemic, and those whose actions or inactions prolong it, until I get too sick to fight.”

Chairing the ACT Up Media Committee, Rafsky was involved with many of the group’s most memorable stunts, including a Kiss-In at St. Vincent’s Hospital to protest violence against the LGBT and AIDS communities. These are thrilling actions to behold, because they remind us of a time when gay men and women lived outside the fold of acceptable society, and how bitterly and powerfully they came together to fight the establishment in an effort to save each other from the death sentence of AIDS.

Rafsky was also a dad. Among the most affecting scenes in an already affecting movie are those between him and his young daughter, Sara. We see them celebrating birthdays and dancing together in his sunny New York apartment. Rafsky’s face beaming, he tells us in voiceover: “It’s the only really successful love affair of my life.” This love is made more poignant as we see him deteriorate over the course of the film.

Rafsky’s best known for a moment in the spring of 1992, when he heckledcandidate Bill Clinton at a campaign rally in New York City,”What are you going to do about AIDS?” Clinton responded, “I feel your pain.” The televised exchange led to AIDS becoming an issue in the ’92 election. During the Clinton administration, protease inhibitors were developed, transforming AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable disease. These advances couldn’t save Rafsky, who died of AIDS in 1993, but his story illustrates the legacy of political activism, a legacy to be proud of. At the time of his death at age 47, he was writing an autobiography about his work as an AIDS activist tentatively titled A Letter to Sara.

The gay fathers on TV today can make us laugh, but can they inspire? If they can’t inspire can they at least not embody embarrassing stereotypes? Thinking about the latest crop of gay dads on television I can’t help but recall a popular chant from the Act Up demonstrations whenever someone was arrested or harassed: “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!” The irony is that, too often, the world wasn’t watching then. But now, thanks to these primetime characters, people are definitely watching. They just aren’t seeing much of the truth.