Dan Savage Quotes

When you're young and queer and closeted, you can end up in this place where you regard your straight peers as the enemy.

I don't like to think about what school was like for me.

I'm allergic to dogs, so I couldn't even adopt what gay men typically adopt when they have that maternal gene.

I really enjoy doing theater, but doing theater in Seattle is like dropping a brick in a bottomless well. It's gratifying, but it's almost like doing radio. It's ephemeral.

Relationships are monuments build on lies

My dad was a homicide cop in the gay neighborhood in the city when gay neighborhoods were desperate, depressing, sad places run by the mob. The only gay people he'd met when I came out to him were corpses.

Now that all writers everywhere are contractually obligated to blog and tweet all day long, who has time to work on a book?

The Bible is only as good and decent as the person reading it.

We're living through an age of irrationality and religious "fervor" I would call it religious idiocy. It's exhausting to year after year be on the receiving end of this demagoguery.

I think astrology is annoying bullshit-which is so Libra of me

I am not an idiot, and I'm not a Pollyanna sort of kumbaya type.

I think abortion should be mandatory for about 30 years,

Owning a gun in America is one way for conservative white males to demonstrate their anger at crime, liberalism, feminism, and modernity.

You can't have Rosie on The View and Elton John packing Mom and Pop in at Caesars Palace and gay people all over television, and then have these politicians run out there with a straight face and say that gay and lesbian relationships are a threat to the family. We are winning in the culture - which is why we'll ultimately win the political war.

Either way ... you've got to tell him
in no uncertain terms
to knock it the fuck off already. Don't be measured, don't wrap it up in "I" statements, no mewling about your feelings. Give him both barrels: "If you don't knock it the fuck off ... I'm going to kick your ass out, got it?" A strategic blowup or two should occur
scream, yell, smash a few things you're not all that attached to
when he slips up. Repeat until his attitude changes or his address does.

The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads in the Civil War and justified it.

Oftentimes, when people write me 4,000-word letters, I write them back and tell them if their problem's that complicated, they probably need a lawyer or a cop, and not me.

the truth is often a mixed message

I don't think that gay and lesbian relationships are identical to heterosexual relationships. I do think that heterosexual weddings, or at least most of them, are sort of camp pantomimes about male and female sex roles, even if the couple is marrying as individuals and equals ...

Jesus commanded his followers to clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, and care for the sick. Making health care available to all seems like a no-brainer, Jesus-wise, among the most Christian projects a president, or a nation, could possible undertake.

I'm a lesbian and I'd rather you bully me than a thirteen-year-old kid.

So I don't feel particularly wealthy-but, you know, I pay my taxes and I know that I am.

The proper response to religious opposition to choice or love or death can be reduced to a series of bumper stickers: Don't approve of abortion? Don't have one. Don't approve of gay marriage? Don't have one. Don't approve of physician-assisted suicide? For Christ's sake, don't have one. But don't tell me I can't have one - each and every one - because it offends your God.

The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness means that each of us is free to go our own way, even if the ways some of us may choose to go seem sinful or shocking to our fellow citizens.

A lot of people are living their lives online in much more public ways with Facebook and Twitter.

You can't pray away the gay, but you can torture a conflicted closet-case to death.

First off, LARDASS, you neglected to include a sign-off, forcing me to create one for you. I tried to create one that captured the spirit and tone of your letter, and I think I did pretty well. [] I am thoroughly annoyed at having my tame statements of fact-being heavy is a health risk; rolls of exposed flesh are unsightly-characterized as "hate speech."

TV commercials make parenting look like there are going to be good days and bad days - like, it'll be this gentle wave, like you'll have a blissed-out, really wonderful day or two, and then, you know, then you'll have an issue. And what parenting is, is kind of earthquake.

The moment you begin to believe you're worthy of the good things in your life - God gets all Old Testament on your ass and does something vicious, something insane, something totally uncalled for. He gives you lupus or He allows Satan to slaughter your children and cattle or He delivers Ohio to George W. Bush.

There are so many people out there with less shame talking about their problems.

We all have our scars. That's what falling is love is all about: revealing your scars to somebody who then loves you anyway.

I got picked on a lot, even by teachers too. I liked to listen to musicals and bake, and my homeroom teacher found out and mocked me in front of the whole class for baking.

The kind of relationship I had with my mother didn't make me gay. I had that kind of relationship with my mother because I was gay.

I don't understand how real Christians let that little f
ker get away with that.

Preaching to the choir actually arms the choir with arguments and elevates the choir's discourse. There's a reason the right does it and does it well and triumphs.

I don't think it's the responsibility of gays and lesbians to reinvent the family.

I think the 'South Park' guys are brilliant.

Children have a right to some stability and constancy from the adults in their lives.

Terry cooked for me, but I resented having to do dishes. As I saw it, Terry liked cooking-he enjoyed it, he told me so. Well, I didn't enjoy washing dishes- I hated it, and I'd told him so-and didn't see why I should have to do something I hated after he got to do something he liked. I mean, that wasn't fair, was it?

Straight people are everywhere!

A certain tiny percentage of everyone is gay.

Is it adultery if I'm committing it at one end of a guy and he's committing it at the other end of that same guy?

Straight couples don't have to be monogamous to be married or married to be monogamous. Monogamy no more defines marriage than the presence of children does. Monogamy isn't compulsory and its absence doesn't invalidate a marriage.

For me, my discomfort with gay weddings was articulated by a close friend, who observed that gay people getting married is like retarded people getting together to give each other PhDs. It doesn't make them smarter, and it doesn't make us married.

See, I'm a subverter at heart.

I feel like I'm a compassionate guy, but I also feel if somebody's grip on life or sanity is so tenuous that a joke in an advice column that usually is nothing but jokes pushes them over the edge, then if not me, it would have been a leaf blowing past them that did it, or something else. You almost have to feel that way, doing this.

One man's piss-soaked sadomasochistic orgy is another man's poetic ecstasy.

You know, my problem is I can't say no to people, especially people who want to write me checks to do things.

Mother's Day is a torment if your mother is dead. Valentine's Day is a torment if you don't got one. And at some point in our lives, we will be tormented by Valentine's Day even if we're relatively lucky in love.

Like it or not children are being raised by gay and lesbian parents all over America - as many as 10 million children. And it does nothing to make their lives more stable and secure to attack their families, to attack their parents to prevent us from marrying each other.

One man's blasphemy doesn't override other people's free-speech rights, their freedom to publish, freedom of thought.

Really, when it comes to gay rights, there's two wars going on. The first war is political. But the culture war is over.

Whether you're talking about boners, infidelities, late rent, or the Democratic primary: a single plausible excuse will sound like a credible explanation while a basket full of excuses - even a basket stuffed with equally legitimate, plausible/probable excuses - will sound like a desperate/unbelievable lie.

The truly revolutionary promise of our nation's founding document is the freedom to pursue happiness-with-a-capital-H.

If what you want is a life where your homosexuality is not an issue, move, as many have done.

Today's unspeakable perversion is tomorrow's kink, is next week's good clean fun

Bisexuals need to recognize that their being closeted is a huge contributing factor to the hostility they face.

It's going to take generations of gay people marrying before these things start to feel natural. We haven't had it long enough to remake it as our own, so it does feel like you're getting dressed up in straight drag to do it.

I think it's better to have limits. My limits are different from other people's limits. I'm all for freedom, I'm all for people doing what they want. I'm also all for people shouldering the consequences of their behaviors, and not being assholes, and not lying unless they need to, and being honest except when you shouldn't, and being faithful except when it's okay to cheat. I guess I'm just a mass of contradictions.

Every relationship you are in will fail, until one doesn't

Books are magic: you never know where they're going to end up.

Kids are like heroin, a little heroin addiction. When it's bad, you've never been so miserable, but when it's good you've never been so high.

Sedaris, in his essay in the It Gets Better book, writes that when he was growing up nobody called him gay because you might as well have called him a warlock. Nobody knew what gay was.

So while gun owners are always saying that owning guns is about defending freedom, the only freedom gun owners seem interested in defending with their guns is the freedom to defend their freedom to own guns.

We can learn to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about gay people. The same way we have learned to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation.

I have a thick skin, but I have a heart.

When I was a kid, and I was odd, the default assumption was that I was odd, not that I was gay. Now when a kid is odd in a Greensburg, gay or straight, the default assumption is gay.

Shouldn't homophobic politicians and anti-gay bullies be presumed to be gay until they get caught up in a straight sex scandal?

Even if gay marriage were legalized there would still be gay men who didn't want to marry, gay men no other gay men would want to marry, and gay men who didn't want to leave the priesthood in order to marry.

The only way to get gay issues off the front pages of Canadian newspapers is to grant gay and lesbian people our full civil equality and leave it alone.

Ultimately life is disease, death and oblivion. It's still better than high school.

Pride became this dogma which meant you couldn't criticize anything gay - if you were the least bit critical of gay culture or people or any gay person doing any gay thing, that was an insufficient display of pride. You were suffering from internalized homophobia. As opposed to external homophobia.

You want to help gay kids, you have to reach them in middle school and high school, when they're being bullied.

One person simply can't be all things to another person – sexually or otherwise - and unmet needs, unfulfilled desire, and unexplored possibilities are prices we pay to be in LTRs (long –term relationships). Monogamous, polyamorous, Femdom, or whatever: All couples people walk around feeling a little unfulfilled. (Single people, too). Because no one gets everything they want.

It really did take Billy Lucas's suicide to wake me up to, kind of, the damage of the success of the LGBT civil-rights movement - higher-profile LGBT people - has done to LGBT youth who are trapped out there in those shitholes. But I don't think we need Pride. I am still opposed, on philosophical grounds, to the flap of the rainbow windsock and the damage that does to us intellectually.

You could fly under the radar a little bit. You could be a weird kid without defaulting to gay, without everyone assuming you must be gay - that was literally the last place many people went.

My husband Terry and I are mostly monogamous ... There are times - certain set and limited circumstances - when it is permissible for us to have sex with others.

I'm searching for some exit poll data from California. I'll eat my shorts if gay and lesbian voters went for McCain at anything approaching the rate that black voters went for Prop 8.

The successes of the LGBT civil rights movement and the more prominent role openly gay people are playing in the public eye has actually turned up the temperature in middle schools and high schools for queer kids.

The cultural expectation should be if there's infidelity, the marriage is more important than fidelity.

No, I'm not good looking.

I'm one of those gay people who's constantly reminded of how fortunate I am to live now and not to be Ennis and Jack [from Brokeback Mountain] or whatever - not that I'd mind being Ennis for half an hour. But it's been so much worse recently. It still is terrible. In Iran, they're hanging gay teenagers. I'm grateful for how far the United States, even with its crazy Christians, has come on a lot of issues. And the fact that I get called a faggot occasionally by a crack addict, while annoying, certainly isn't a lobotomy and prison.

School is very conformist, and one of the very first conforming that goes on in preschool and kindergarten is gender.

Actual gay people can make many others feel uncomfortable and paranoid because they don't know and can't articulate what makes a person gay, and they worry that maybe they themselves are gay.

I believe it's in the best interests of a child to be in a stable environment.

I'm not good looking. I'm very strange - a very bony face on an enormous skull, and I don't like to be naked because I don't like how I look naked. And - no, no. I own a lot of my house, because I'm Irish and from people who never owned anything. So I could have a lot more trappings of wealth if every time I had 20 extra dollars I didn't pay off more of the mortgage.

I don't think that sin and pursuing happiness are not necessarily the same thing.

How can you tell somebody who is pursuing happiness that they're somehow not American when that was the very first promise that America made?