A writer and provocateur, Dan Savage has an easy-going, glib manner when the subject is sex advice that’s well suited to TV — and especially engaging college students, as he tours and lectures dispensing much-needed wisdom to the hormonally challenged population.
MTV tries to bottle that in a new series, “Savage U,” premiering on April 3 at 11 p.m. And while Savage’s quick wit, no-nonsense observations and racy ripostes play well, the show proves a little bit too cute for its own good by seeking to create a sort of rom-com-style banter (minus the sex) between its star and his producer, Lauren Hutchinson, who’s basically reduced to following him around saying “Oh no you didn’t!”
Fortunately, the half-hour episodes (MTV’s ordered 12) go down pretty quickly, and to give you an idea of Savage’s approach to sex ed, there’s no way he’d let someone say something as suggestive as “go down pretty quickly” without making a joke about that.
Savage recently hosted the MTV spec “It Gets Better,” a much weightier effort based on his admirable viral video campaign, designed to provide a comforting shoulder to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youths.
“Savage U” skews toward the lighter side, and there’s room for that too. It’s just an elective, to put it in terms college kids can understand, as opposed to a core requirement.
It’s not true. But when I was young and closeted—so very long ago—I was seriously thinking about becoming a priest. At the time that seemed to be the only way I could live with other dudes (in something called a “rectory”) and dress in drag on the weekends (in something called a “cassock”) without breaking both my parents’ hearts.
Which is how I wound up at Quigley Preparatory Seminary North, a Catholic high school for boys who were thinking about becoming priests. The Chicago Archdiocese closed Quigley, which was located just south of the Viagra Triangle, in 2007. It was declining enrollment that did Quigley in. Because nowadays Catholic boys who want to live with men and play dress up have more and better options—like coming out and/or joining the marines.
So I was never a fully blown seminarian. I wasn’t even a briefly fondled one. (Catholic grade schools, Catholic high schools, altar boy, receptionist in rectory, and never once molested—forgive me, father, but what am I? Chopped liver?) But I was, when I showed up at Quigley on my first day of high school, very seriously thinking about the priesthood. That serious contemplation lasted, oh, about six weeks.
Quigley was hell on Rush Street. Most—not all—of the teachers were assholes and, as in any environment where closet cases are overrepresented (the Catholic church, the GOP, Ultimate Fighting pay-per-view audiences), homophobia was not just tolerated, it was encouraged. Bullying was rampant at Quigley, and I was a target.
I could recount some bullying stories here—beat downs, casual violence, threats of violence—but I don’t want to give the bullies the satisfaction of seeing their actions, which terrorized their victims at the time, fade into anecdotes. Let’s just cut to the chase: it was bad, and one day I decided that getting beat up by boys I wanted to blow me was no fun. Getting beat up by boys who also wanted to blow me sounded like way more fun—I was Catholic—and there just weren’t any boys like that at Quigley.
I organized my expulsion two months into my sophomore year by setting off firecrackers in my locker. I wound up in another Catholic high school—St. Gregory the Great—with two of my siblings before finding the high school where I belonged: Metro High, an alternative Chicago public high school which, like Quigley, is now closed.
Sometimes I wonder what kind of priest I would’ve made if I’d stayed at Quigley and gone on to a real seminary and then somehow had managed to get my gay ass ordained. A good one, I’d like to think, a priest like Father Tom or Father Ed, two priests who made a real difference in my life. But thankfully for me—and the church—circumstance and social change carried me to a pulpit that was much more my style.
The Google Chrome team has created a supportive video for LGBT teens as part of the “It Gets Better” campaign.
The video, which aired during prime time on Fox’s Glee Tuesday night, is a 91-second clip that compiles some of the most inspirational and helpful clips from the It Gets Better YouTube channel. The project was started by gay rights activist Dan Savage. In September, Savage decided to create a YouTube channel to solicit videos from anybody that wanted to send a positive message to bullied or struggling LGBT teens.
The result was a massive outpouring of support from celebrities and everyday people. Neil Patrick Harris, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Apple employees are just some of the many people to create videos for the project.Even President Barack Obama has uploaded a video to let LGBT teens know that “there are people out there who love you and care about you just the way you are.”
The Google Chrome video is an amazing compilation of the project. People will recognize Adam Lambert, Lady Gaga, Kathy Griffin and even Woody fromToy Story, but the commercial also contains messages from a wide variety of people of different ages and backgrounds. This isn’t Google’s first time contributing to the project, either; some of Google’s LGBT employees created a video (embedded below) as well.
Check out the video for yourself, and let us know what you think in the comments.
“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.
Atheists, in turn, called the native Chicagoan out for the apology he wrote, because, in distinguishing between the Bible and Christianity, it backed off on what they think is a necessary challenge to the legitimacy of religion.
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.”
Sex columnist Dan Savage talks about It Gets Better, his YouTube campaign in support of bullied gay teens
By Dan Savage Monday, Mar. 28, 2011
John Keatley/Redux for TIME
How did you come up with the idea for It Gets Better?
Last summer I was reading about teen suicides, speaking at colleges and thinking that what I should be doing is going to high schools. But I would never get permission, as a gay adult, to speak to gay kids. Then it occurred to me that in the YouTube era, I was waiting for permission I no longer needed.
Are there more suicides and incidents of bullying now, or are we simply more aware?
Both. I think that kids are coming out younger. So [some] suicides that used to be chalked up to “Who knows why they were sad?” we are now able to attribute to conflict about sexual orientation. And with the culture wars in the past 20 years, I don’t think we realized how bad it was getting in [certain] places.
This campaign gives kids hope but doesn’t change their lives right now. How can we do that?
There’s nothing about this campaign that precludes doing more. But we also have to recognize that there are places where we will never be able to fix the gay-bullying problem. So this may be the best we can do.
How many It Gets Better videos have been uploaded?
There are over 10,000.
Tell me about a video that surprised you.
There was a video that people saw and said, You’re not going to post this. Not only did I post it, but we put it in the top spot. It’s by Gabrielle Rivera, who says, I’m a gay woman of color, and it doesn’t get better. She contradicted the whole message. She said, What happens is you get stronger.
Who hasn’t made a video yet who you hope will?
Rick Santorum. Tim Pawlenty. Sarah Palin. Glenn Beck. The Prime Minister of Britain, who leads the Conservative Party there, made a video, and we haven’t seen one from anyone on the right in the U.S. to even say, You’re 14 and gay. Don’t kill yourself.
It seems unlikely that Santorum will participate. Because of you, if one Googles Santorum, a very inappropriate definition is the first hit.
Rick Santorum has said insanely offensive things about gay and lesbian couples. He was a two-term sitting U.S. Senator with a lot of power, and my readers and I are a bunch of jackasses without a lot of power. We made a joke at his expense, and now he [plays] the victim, which is all Republicans seem capable of doing these days.
You recently attended an antibullying conference at the White House. Did you meet the President?
No. But I was 20 feet away from him and the glamour supernova that is Michelle Obama. It’s staggering how charismatic and beautiful she is. It takes a lot for a woman to ping onto my radar like that.
So much of your writing is not emotional. And this project is.
I have a thick skin, but I have a heart. Every once in a while, as rough and tumble and cynical as the column can be, I’ll really reach out to someone. This is only out of character for people who perceive me as the potty mouth who writes a dirty sex column.
It launched last September as a video on YouTube that quickly went viral—sex columnist and author Dan Savage and his partner Terry Miller’s testimonial to LGBT kids that it gets better. The video quickly became a movement, amassing thousands of proud, brave, trusted voices in its campaign. The project came about after a series of tragic suicides, bullied kids who felt so hopeless that they took their own lives, and was met with overwhelming enthusiasm and support—more than 10,000 user-created videos generating over 30 million pageviews have been made to date.
Since, Savage and Miller have collected several of these stories and essays into a book, It Gets Better, that they hope will be on the shelves of every high school in the country. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, David Sedaris, Michael Cunningham, Ellen DeGeneres and more are just a few of the people who have stepped up to tell LGBT kids that life does improve. Here, Savage talks to us about the book and the It Gets Better Project’s next steps.
Can you tell us more about the idea to expand the It Gets Better Project into a book?
Before he was a widely read sexpert, syndicated “Savage Love” columnist Dan Savage was a gay youth struggling with his sexual identity in Chicago. Growing up in Rogers Park, the third child of conservative Catholic parents, Savage stayed closeted while attending St. Ignatius and St. Jerome grammar schools and Quigley Preparatory Seminary North. He came out at age 17.
Now, nearly three decades later, the 46-year-old Savage is married to his longtime partner, Terry Miller, and together they’re raising an adopted son, D.J., in Seattle. Clearly, then, things have improved — in Savage’s case, tremendously. Which is precisely the notion he and his chief collaborator Miller want to convey with their ongoing online endeavor, the “It Gets Better Project” (itgetsbetter.org): Things can improve. And while not everyone digs their approach (http://tinyurl.com/24xya8o), Savage is no stranger to criticism.
Culled and adapted from thousands of videos submitted via YouTube, including a splashy musical creation by Second City alum Rebecca Drysdale (http://tinyurl.com/24zvvub), the new book version — It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living (Dutton, $21.95) — features handpicked and heartfelt essays from contributors famous and obscure, gay and straight. (Savage is contributing his earnings to charities that benefit lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youths.) Random folks from Chicago, New York and Berkeley share space with such out-and-proud notables as financial queen Suze Orman and best-selling humorist David Sedaris. Secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Obama chip in, as well. That all four have Chicago roots seems merely coincidental.
Savage — who recently shot a pilot for MTV that tails him to various college campuses as he dispenses frank sex advice to students — spoke with the Sun-Times about growing up gay, the nature of his latest outreach and, of course, sex. But nothing too kinky.
Q. Why didn’t something like “It Gets Better” exist before?
A. Social media didn’t exist until recently, and I really think this was about YouTube and Twitter and Facebook — a little bit like the revolutions in the Middle East right now are about YouTube and Twitter and Facebook — in that it allowed us to reach out to these kids and talk to them without being physically in the room with them. A lot of gay kids at that age [teens] are closeted and they couldn’t go to a gay community center to get counseling or join a support group. Or they live in parts of the country where there is no such thing as a gay community center or a support group for gay youth. And what this new social media allowed us to do was deliver these messages right to these kids, right into their homes, whether their parents wanted their kids to get these messages from gay adults or not. And in many cases, they don’t.
Q. Have you heard from many people who were on the verge of killing themselves before being introduced to this project?
A. There are people who made videos who talk about their suicide attempts, and we’ve heard from just scores and scores of young people for whom the videos have done what they were designed to do: give them hope to go on. And we heard from lots of people in pretty extreme situations. Gay and lesbian teenagers are four to eight times likelier to attempt suicide — particularly if their families reject them. It’s not uncommon or something that just started. There just wasn’t really any sense that we could address it until now.
Q. You’ve said that growing up, you were never bullied much for being gay.
A. I wasn’t, but there was still a time in my life where I thought about suicide. My parents are very Catholic and very religious, as was I at the time, and I thought to be the good son that killing myself would be the right thing to do for my parents, for my family, because it would be easier for them to have a dead child than a gay child.
Q. At what point did they realize you had been pondering this, and what was their response?
A. I told them about it after I came out, and they were just really happy that I hadn’t killed myself, particularly out of deference to their stated beliefs about homosexuality. They realized after the fact the damage that they had done thoughtlessly to one of their kids. But that was a long time ago, at a time when many, many more people believed that homosexuality was something that a straight kid could drift into and that responsible parents would nudge you away from by making sure you understood that they wouldn’t approve. If my parents were bringing up kids today, they would certainly not do that. They’re not monsters. But at the time, that’s what they believed good parenting was.
Q. Did your suicidal mindset last for several years?
A. Yeah, a couple of years. But it never went past thoughts. I never made any serious attempt on my own life. I was in some ways lucky. I talked to gay friends who had much more difficult coming-out processes than I did. When I was a teenager, I didn’t think there was anything wrong with me. I thought there was something wrong with the world. I thought I was fine, but people just couldn’t deal. And that made my life difficult, but it wasn’t because I was perverted or damaged or sick or sinful. It was that the world was a mess.
Q. Did it take your dad longer than your mom to accept your homosexuality?
A. I didn’t come out to my dad till later. My parents got divorced, and Catholicism fell apart, and he moved away, and so I was able to dodge coming out to my father till I was 20. He was a Chicago cop. He was a homicide detective in Area 6, which included the gay neighborhood at the time, which wasn’t a nice neighborhood at the time. And he thought [singer and anti-gay activist] Anita Bryant was right, and that gay people were a threat to the family and a threat to his children. And he would say these things in front of me when I was a small child, and I carried that around with me, and I was very afraid to come out to him. But when I did come out to him, he apologized and was great and said that he knew. He just didn’t know how to talk to me about it.
Q. How has Chicago changed in terms of sexual attitudes since you came up here?
A. It does feel like Chicago’s a much more sexually liberated place now and a much more sexually integrated place now. Gay people live all over, and there’s not just one gay neighborhood anymore, not even necessarily a need for a gay neighborhood anymore, because you can be safe in many, many, many parts of Chicago and be openly gay. And that wasn’t true when I was a kid.
Q. Your son is 13 now. Has bullying been an issue for him?
A. It hasn’t. We live in a very liberal place and he goes to a very liberal school [laughs]. And we’ve been careful about that. We sought out places where he wouldn’t be bullied. Only once in his life did he encounter somebody being bigoted. At a summer camp for snowboarders that he goes to every year, somebody found out he had gay parents and was giving him grief and he said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” and snowboarded away. I believe he also said, “F— you!” [laughs] He wasn’t shattered by it.
Q. If someday he says, “Dad, I’m gay,” have you thought about what your reaction might be?
A. We want him to be whatever he’s going to be. He is straight and he has told us he’s straight. We knew from a very early age that he was straight. In some ways it’s a relief, because if he were gay — and some kids of gay parents are gay, just like some kids of straight parents are gay — people would say, “Look, having gay parents makes you gay,” and they would hold him up as an example of that, even though I can point to my straight parents and Terry can point to his straight parents. [They] didn’t make us straight, so that’s not the way it works.
Q. Is it more satisfying to give sex advice or to spread this gospel of hope?
A. [Laughs] Well, I really enjoy my day job. Who wouldn’t enjoy my day job? Who doesn’t like to talk about sex? Who doesn’t like to get a bunch of e-mails about sex in the morning? It’s like, “This is awesome!” I’m just glad that I’ve been able to leverage my goofy column that I very much enjoy writing. Every once in a while I will leverage it to do something that creates some social good. I think it’s hilarious that I’ve parlayed the dirtiest sex column in the world into occasional op-eds in the New York Times. I don’t know how that happened.
Lately, sex columnist Dan Savage has been known for an earnest effort — his “It Gets Better” campaign — but never forget, he is a man of signature snark. While interviewing him about his new book, “It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living,” I asked where the idea for the project had come from. He replied: “Um, it’s right there in the intro to the book.” Never mind that I had just prefaced the question by explaining that I would ask him some questions that are answered by his introduction in the book — he was just messing with me. Rest assured, he is still the same delightfully droll and impudent man who brought us the term “santorum.”
The Savage Love author’s startling earnestness isn’t the only unusual thing about the campaign. We cynically expect frivolous entertainment, guerrilla marketing and shameless self-promotion from YouTube videos — not sincere outreach. But last fall, in the wake of two teen suicides connected to anti-gay bullying, he and his husband, Terry Miller, turned that expectation on its head. The concept was simple: They asked LGBT folks to upload videos of themselves talking about the hardships they experienced growing up and coming out — but, more important, how much better things got for them later in life.
They hoped for maybe 100 videos. There are now more than 10,000 — including one from President Barack Obama. And now, there’s a book, too. Some of the most powerful videos — from big names, like Ellen DeGeneres and Hillary Rodham Clinton, to just everyday folks with great stories to tell — have been transcribed and preserved in print form (much to the relief of the Luddites of the world). There are also brand-new and expanded essays, a section devoted to resources for LGBT teens, and an introduction from Savage that looks back at the project’s meteoric rise to viral fame. It’s chicken soup for the gay teenage soul — or, you know, any soul not clouded by hate.
I talked to Savage by phone about the messages he’s gotten from gay teens, how social media granted him direct access to kids that he never would have gotten otherwise, his own “coming out” experience and, of course, about how things got better for him.
Why is such a simple idea like “it gets better” so powerful?
Because it’s true. It really goes to the heart of what I’ve always called the hero’s journey for gays and lesbians. It’s the process in middle school and high school when you realize you’re different and you’re then forced to make a profound and lasting choice about how you’re going to live. Are you going to live with integrity and come out? Are you gonna put all of your relationships on the line so that you can be out? It can be very ugly and rocky, but then it gets better. Your family comes around. You lose friends, but you make new friends, better friends. You find love and you find that the world isn’t middle school.
This all sounds so obvious looking back as an adult, but when you’re a gay kid it’s not obvious, and it’s kind of hidden from you. Most gay kids don’t have gay parents. And they’re isolated from gay adults by design, because a lot of people believe that you can prevent a gay kid from becoming a gay adult by cutting them off from information and role models. Lots of gay 14-year-olds can see Ellen or Adam Lambert, but they don’t see how you get to be Ellen or Adam Lambert. They don’t see how you get to be safe and loved and secure. And what these videos show are average everyday LGBT people sharing their own stories of how they got from where you’re at right now as a gay 8th grader to where we’re at now as gay grown-ups.
Why did you decide to deliver that message via YouTube?
I was going from college to college doing speaking gigs and, reading about these suicides, I just felt like what I needed to be doing was going from high school to high school — but I would never get permission to speak at a high school or middle school. Then it occurred to me that I was waiting for permission that I no longer needed to talk to gay kids. I could record a video, look in the camera and speak to a Bill Lucas before he killed himself instead of regretting not being able to speak to him after the fact. I could tell him that it gets better and to hang in there. That was sort of the “aha” moment and I called my husband to say, I have this idea, I want you to do this with me.
Obviously we weren’t the only gay folks out there who had this impulse to speak to gay kids but were waiting for permission that was never coming. When my husband and I gave ourselves permission to do it, we explicitly gave permission to other LGBT adults to do the same, and people just rushed in.
One thing that surprised me was that the conversation wasn’t limited to the YouTube videos, that many of the adults who posted the videos then received personal e-mails from LGBT teens seeking guidance. Is there a way to better facilitate that sort of direct communication and mentorship?
I don’t know if there’s a better way. Most kids who desperately need that kind of connection are being raised by parents who are denying them that connection. There’s something very subversive about the whole campaign in that we were really reaching out to kids whose parents are also bullies. In the case of queer kids, they’re not only bullied by their peers. A straight kid who’s bullied because he’s a geek or in a band goes home to parents who support him or her, and all too often gay kids go home to more bullying from their parents. Then they drive to church for more bullying from the pulpit.
The whole point of the campaign is that we’re not waiting for permission anymore to talk to your kid, whether you want us to or not. For 40 years, the deal for gays and lesbians has been: OK, we get to torture you until you’re 18, then you can do whatever you want — you can move away, you can come out — the only thing you can’t do is talk to the kids who are under 18 whom we’re still torturing. And if you try to reach out to them we’re gonna accuse you of being pedophiles and attempting to recruit children into the gay lifestyle.
How do we help to actually remove the torment so many LGBT kids face in their middle- and high school years, so that they no longer are waiting for the day in the future when it gets better?
We push for safe schools legislation, like Al Franken’s bill. We push for accountability when school administrators or teachers don’t do anything or participate in bullying as was the case in Seth Walsh’s school in Tehachapi, Calif. We also have to recognize, however, that we can’t eradicate anti-gay bullying even if every public school in the country has an excellent anti-bullying program and a gay-straight alliance. There are going to be private evangelical Christian schools where that is never going to happen, or won’t happen for decades. So we have to push for change and make it better where we can, but in some cases the best we can do is lob these videos over the wall.
What’s a memorable response you’ve gotten from a gay teen?
I got an e-mail from a girl who at 15-years-old came out to her parents as a lesbian. They completely freaked out and shoved her into a reparative therapist’s office and just really abused her emotionally, threatened not to let her see her siblings. She went back into the closet and told her parents that she was confused, that she wasn’t really attracted to girls, and her parents bought it. I got an e-mail from her — it makes me really choke up to talk about it — saying that she was so grateful for the It Gets Better project and that she was watching videos on a friend’s iPhone under the covers at night. Talk about subversive. These parents don’t want this girl to be a lesbian, would not let this girl seek out a gay-straight alliance or see a therapist who wasn’t a bigoted quack, and not only can’t they isolate her the way they would like to, but we’re literally lying under the covers with her at night with these videos.
That’s really the perfect image to represent how you’ve been able to harness technology and get straight to the kids who need it most.
She said that the videos were keeping her sane. It’s important to point out that so many of the videos are made by adults who were in this girl’s situation: Their families were very hostile and condemning when they came out, but the families eventually came around. They’re giving her hope that her family won’t always be in this place that they’re in right now.
You experienced some of that personally. Can you talk a bit about when you came out to your family?
I came out to my older brother Billy first and he was fine with it. I was always a little weird and into musicals and not so into girls. I wanted to come out to my mother sooner than I did, but my parents got a divorce and I didn’t want to pile on. Hello, crying lady, this will take your mind off the divorce! So I waited. The first thing out of my mom’s mouth was she didn’t want to meet anybody that I was dating and she didn’t want any boyfriends in the house. She wanted to wall off my homosexuality from her relationship with me. That was painful, but she came around really fast.
She arrived at a place where she viewed my relationship with my husband no differently than her other children’s relationships with their partners. She was just as aggressive about meddling and butting in and judging and offering her opinions. The day my mother died, I went to see her in the hospital. We were saying our goodbyes and she told me to tell Terry, my husband who had been in my life for 14 years at that point, that she loved him like a daughter. It was hilarious and totally my mother. It’s her sort of ironic reference to how hetero-normative our relationship was. One of the ways that it got better for us was that she had a sense of humor and could make jokes about us and how we lived and our homosexuality.
The expected go-ahead by the Committee on Student Life will entitle Munch to meet for lunch or dinner on campus, promote gatherings on school grounds and apply for grants from the school’s Drug and Alcohol Peer Advisors organization, the paper said.
Once an informal gathering for like-minded individuals to discuss their proclivities in the bedroom without fear of being judged, Munch now has “institutional support” to provide reassurance for its members, its anonymous founder “Michael” said in the story.
One member told the Observer that she had been hit with a riding crop, a belt and canes in a private Munch get-together. “Floggers are my favorite,” she said.
There is historical precedent. The Iowa State University student government funded a bondage club in 2003, calling it a triumph for diversity, one publication reported.
Now S&M clubs are increasingly popular at elite institutions as “50 Shades Of Grey” climbed the bestseller list, the Observer said. Columbia, Tufts, MIT and Yale have them, though the story did not say whether they were officially recognized. Assault cases from within some groups have sprung up as well, the paper said.
But one Munch member told the Crimson that the club could provide a haven for those who engage in BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism) after they have been scarred by sexual abuse or other trauma.
Harvard spokesperson Jeff Neal told The Huffington Post that the college does not endorse the views or activities of any independent student organization.
FACE TO FACE Dan Savage, right, hosted in his home a debate with Brian Brown, left, on gay marriage. At center, the author, Mark Oppenheimer, moderated.
THE ancient Greek symposium, which combined drinking with elevated discussion, was often held in a private house; at Parisian salons, conversation frequently took place in the bedroom. Once upon a time, intellectuals knew they could do their best thinking at home, not in a public venue, and that debate would be helped along by food and drink.
But is such gemütlichkeit possible in this country in 2012, when our young century has already been strafed by culture wars and juvenile attack ads? Last week, four of us put it to the test.
The Dinner Table Debate, as we are calling it, was set in motion last April, when Dan Savage, the sex columnist and originator of “It Gets Better,” an anti-bullying campaign, gave a speech to a high school journalism convention here, attacking the Bible as the root of much anti-gay bullying.
We can learn to ignore the nonsense in the Bible about gay people the same way we have learned to ignore what the Bible says “about shellfish, about slavery,” he told them, referring to Paul’s injunction that slaves should obey their masters.
As some students walked out, Mr. Savage taunted them: “It’s funny, as someone who is on the receiving end of beatings that are justified by the Bible, how pansy-assed people react when you push back.”
Two weeks later, Brian S. Brown, a conservative Catholic who is president of the National Organization for Marriage, an anti-gay-marriage advocacy organization, issued a challenge to Mr. Savage on the group’s blog: “You want to savage the Bible? Christian morality? Traditional marriage? Pope Benedict? I’m here, you name the time and the place and let’s see what a big man you are in a debate with someone who can talk back.”
On May 22, Mr. Savage responded in his weekly podcast, offering to hold the debate at his dining room table, in his home in Seattle. “Bring the wife, my husband will be there,” he said. “You have to acknowledge my humanity by accepting my hospitality, and I have to acknowledge yours by extending my hospitality to you.”
There would be dinner, with the debate to follow. That’s where I came in: a journalist with pro-gay sympathies, but a history of writing extensivelyabout both sides in the marriage fight, I was chosen to moderate.
After some e-mailing back and forth, the three of us agreed on a date, Aug. 15, and Mr. Savage appointed a chef, his neighbor John Colwell, a heterosexual stay-at-home father of four and a gifted cook. I corralled a video crew, and began studying books on same-sex marriage (Jay Michaelson’s “God vs. Gay?” and Maggie Gallagher and John Corvino’s “Debating Same-Sex Marriage,” among others). Then I booked a flight to Seattle from my home in New Haven.
LAST Wednesday, when I arrived at the Savage homestead, a small, plain-looking brick house in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, the video crew was setting up. Mr. Brown had not arrived yet, but Mr. Savage already looked worried. “Can we talk out back?” he said.
At a picnic table in the backyard, he asked if I thought the debate should deal with what had happened in Washington. “What are you talking about?” I said. In transit, without access to TV or the Internet, I had not yet heard about the shooting of a security guard at the Washington headquarters of the Family Research Council, the conservative Christian group. People were speculating that a gay man was the culprit. (A suspect has been arrested and is awaiting a hearing.)
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we should talk about it over dinner, then not deal with it during the debate itself.”
Terry Miller, Dan’s spouse, came out to offer me a drink. I eagerly accepted.
From then on, I did not stop drinking. It started with Terry’s Mai Tai, as Mr. Miller named his fabulous rum drink, and continued with the red wine that Mr. Brown politely brought when he arrived without his wife, who was pregnant with their eighth child, and then the white wine that Mr. Colwell provided to accompany dinner. (For those who are curious, we ate Northwest sockeye salmon with Washington sweet corn, heirloom tomatoes and new-potato gnocchi; dessert was roasted peaches with an oat-and-almond crumble.)
But even if I was no longer sober by the end of the meal, I still managed to exert enough discipline to hold the debate to an hour. It was dispiriting, but in an instructive way. Here were two Catholics — Mr. Savage born to the faith, Chicago Irish, the lapsed son of parochial schools; Mr. Brown of Quaker ancestry, but a Catholic since college, with a convert’s zeal — who could agree on nothing and could effect no change of heart in each other. They disagreed over whether Mr. Savage had the right to insult the Bible in front of high school students; about whether the New Testament endorsed slavery; and about whether the recent study by Mark Regnerus and its controversial conclusions about gay parents had any merit. (The hourlong debate can be seen on YouTube.)
Every time they disagreed, I drank some more.
I probably should not have expected anything else. Mr. Savage thinks religion is at best pointless, at worst malevolent. Mr. Brown believes that the truth of Catholicism should be apparent to anyone capable of reason. These are not compatible ways of seeing. And the homey setting did little to raise the level of the discourse. (Although Mr. Savage’s kitschy collection of rosaries hanging on the wall behind us at dinner did introduce an amusingly sacrilegious note to the proceedings.) If the two men could agree on anything, maybe it would be that they shouldn’t have to agree.
Several days later, I asked Mr. Savage, Mr. Miller and Mr. Brown how they thought the debate had gone. (DJ, Mr. Savage and Mr. Miller’s 14-year-old son, ate with us but left before the debate, so I didn’t bother him with questions.)
Mr. Miller pronounced the entire night a waste of time. “Brian’s heartless readings of the Bible, then his turns to ‘natural law’ when the Bible fails, don’t hide his bigotry and cruelty,” Mr. Miller wrote in an e-mail. “In the end, that’s what he is. Cruel.”
I spoke with Mr. Brown by phone, and he seemed to agree that the setting had made little difference. “There’s this myth that folks like me, we don’t know any gay people, and if we just met them, we would change our views,” he said. “But the notion that if you have us into your house, that all that faith and reason that we have on our side, we will chuck it out and change our views — that’s not the real world.”
As for Mr. Savage, he felt that being on his home turf had actually worked against him. “Playing host put me in this position of treating Brian Brown like a guest,” he said. “It was better in theory than in practice — it put me at a disadvantage during the debate, as the undertow of playing host resulted in my being more solicitous and considerate than I should’ve been. If I had it to do over again, I think I’d go with a hall.”
It was my hope, of course, that Mr. Brown might witness a sane, functional, happy family in a bourgeois home, and consider it as another piece of evidence, something more for reason to operate on. Indeed, Mr. Brown’s former ally, David Blankenhorn, the founder of the Institute for American Values, recently changed his views on same-sex marriage — in part, he said, because he listened to the stories of gay parents.
So perhaps all is not lost. Salonnières, next time let’s meet at my house. Or better yet, in my bedroom, like the Parisians. We’ll send my three daughters to the basement, calm the two dogs with juicy bones and relax with my wife’s vegetarian cuisine, some stiff gin and tonics, and three stationary cameras.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 22, 2012
An earlier version of this article imprecisely quoted Dan Savage’s speech at a high school journalism convention. He did not use the word nonsense.
