Dan Savage Quotes

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. ~ Dan Savage

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. ~ Dan Savage

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. ~ Dan Savage

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

No, I'm not good looking. ~ Dan Savage

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

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. ~ Dan Savage

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

I have a thick skin, but I have a heart. ~ Dan Savage

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? ~ Dan Savage

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." ~ Dan Savage

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. ~ Dan Savage

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

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? ~ Dan Savage

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

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

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. ~ Dan Savage

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. ~ Dan Savage

Relationships are monuments build on lies ~ Dan Savage

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

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. ~ Dan Savage

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

I think the 'South Park' guys are brilliant. ~ Dan Savage

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

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. ~ Dan Savage

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. ~ Dan Savage

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

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

A certain tiny percentage of everyone is gay. ~ Dan Savage

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

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

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

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. ~ Dan Savage

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? ~ Dan Savage

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. ~ Dan Savage

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

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. ~ Dan Savage

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

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. ~ Dan Savage

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

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

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. ~ Dan Savage

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. ~ Dan Savage

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. ~ Dan Savage

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. ~ Dan Savage

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

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. ~ Dan Savage

I think abortion should be mandatory for about 30 years, ~ Dan Savage

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

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. ~ Dan Savage

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. ~ Dan Savage

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

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. ~ Dan Savage

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

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. ~ Dan Savage

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

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

Bullies are almost always outnumbered by the bullied. We just need to organize. ~ Ivan E. Coyote

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

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. ~ Dan Savage

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. ~ Dan Savage

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. ~ Dan Savage

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. ~ Dan Savage

See, I'm a subverter at heart. ~ Dan Savage

the truth is often a mixed message ~ Dan Savage

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. ~ Dan Savage

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

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

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. ~ Dan Savage

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

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. ~ Dan Savage

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. ~ Dan Savage

Straight people are everywhere! ~ Dan Savage

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. ~ Dan Savage

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

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. ~ Dan Savage

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. ~ Dan Savage

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. ~ Dan Savage

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

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. ~ Dan Savage

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. ~ Dan Savage

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

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

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. ~ Dan Savage

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 ... ~ Dan Savage

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

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

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

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. ~ Dan Savage

We're immersed in the spirit of God all the time. We just don't notice. ~ Dan Millman

Are the Democrats going to dance the mandate Macarena? ~ Dan Rather

It's like, you write a book, you want it to be well received, you want it to be at the top of the bestsellers list, but you have limited control over what happens. You can hire a publicist, you can do every interview, you can be prepared, but you have very little control over the marketplace. So you put it out there without attachment, so it has its own life. Everything is like that. ~ Dan Harris

We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter. ~ Mark Twain

It's tough to make funny films. And the truth is, with this process, especially if you write your own movie, then you're giving three years of your life to it. And so, I just have to be sure that when I embark on it that I'm happy to think that in three years' time I'm going to be sitting in a room on the tenth floor of an odd office building at Ginsberg Libby talking about it. So I'm keen not to jump into it too quickly and just make sure it's something that I really want. ~ Dan Mazer

I respect and empathize with reporters and editors who must compete in today's environment. And I know full well that when I've been covering campaigns, which I still do, I've made my mistakes and have been far from perfect. ~ Dan Rather

Bad people don't go to hell, they are already there. ~ Dan Millman

Dan Harmon has this idea that characters on TV are allowed to talk about their favorite movies and TV shows and songs. ~ Gillian Jacobs

Generally, if you could picture a bunch of rock and roll momentum behind a song and it was particularly melodious, maybe the Pornographers would do it. If it was kind of moody and more lyrical, then maybe it would be a Destroyer song. Anything that's really lyrically driven I would keep for Destroyer. ~ Dan Bejar

I think there are two keys to success. One is to show up. The other one is to keep going. Most people don't keep going. ~ Dan John

Imagine how different a world might be if more leaders took time to ponder the finality of death before racing off to war. ~ Dan Brown