Salon.com > Mark Oppenheimer

How Dan Savage lost it

Sat, 25 May 2013 19:00:00 +0000

Even in childhood, Dan Savage was learning how to negotiate the straight and gay worlds. He was born in Chicago in 1964, so his earliest memories coincide with the birth of gay liberation. Gay life in the big cities was about to pass from being secretive to being flamboyant. As if sniffing the change in the air, Savage accepted his homosexuality early, at least by 1970s standards. “I was 12, maybe 13,” he tells me when I visit him in Seattle. “Both of my brothers wanted to be in Boy Scouts and run riot and run around and beat shit up, and I wanted to sit home with my mom and bake. At four.”

Savage’s mother was a homemaker, and his father, a Chicago-Irish cop, patrolled the rough Area 6, which in the 1960s was the gayborhood before gayborhoods were trendy and chic and Starbucked. The elder Savage was not a mean guy nor a particularly bigoted one, but he believed the worst about gay life. “All he saw of gay life was squalid,” Savage says. Yet while neither of Savage’s parents had positive feelings about gay life — almost no parents did back then — they did not evince the kind of homophobia that drives a son deep into the closet.

Dan Savage: “It was going to be a joke”

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 22:00:00 +0000

Dan Savage is a public-radio personality, a leading anti-bullying activist, a star of MTV and a prominent tormentor of Republicans. But in the beginning he was a sex columnist. His column "Savage Love" made its debut in the first issue of the Stranger, the Seattle alt-weekly, on Sept. 23, 1991, and soon would change the world of sex advice — a world dominated, at the time, by the relatively timid Dr. Ruth and the once-popular “Ask Isadora.” Now that "Savage Love" is over 20 years old, it’s worth looking back at what the self-described "faggot from Seattle" has wrought.

“At the beginning, it was going to be a joke,” Savage tells me, when I visit him in Seattle. Our day-long conversation has moved from his office at the Stranger, where he sits at Ann Landers’ old desk, which he bought at auction, to the cafe in the back of the Elliott Bay Book Co., a Seattle institution where other customers nod at Savage hopefully, hoping he will recognize them. “We weren’t getting paid. I was going to do this as a lark for a few months then move back to Berlin” — where he had been living with his boyfriend. In the first column, the readers’ letters were written by colleagues at the Stranger, and they all began with the jokey address “Hey, faggot.” That was the last time fellow staffers had to write the letters; soon there was steady mail from readers, who picked up on Savage’s preferred salutation.

The true meaning of prep

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 19:00:00 +0000

You may have heard that the director Whit Stillman, whose fourth movie, "Damsels in Distress," opens Friday, is a chronicler of preppy culture. It’s not true. Stillman makes delightful movies, featuring light, witty scripts spoken by perfectly cast actors. But to consider Stillman an ethnographer of prep is to misunderstand both prep and Stillman movies.

It’s true that Stillman’s characters often wear stereotypically preppy clothing. They can be found in madras plaids, blue blazers, Lacoste shirts and other clothes historically associated with our country’s most selective colleges and the private schools that prepare — hence “prep” — students for them. They mention Brooks Brothers and Sag Harbor in casual conversation. But prepdom, as I understand it, and as I learned it in my own prep school and college, is only partly about clothing. It is more properly understood as an orientation toward power.

Mike Daisey and the inconvenient truth

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 12:35:00 +0000

I can’t be the only listener who thought this past weekend’s edition of “This American Life,” the public-radio show, was among the most compelling work Ira Glass and his team of producers had ever done. As I sat in my rental car stuck in Los Angeles gridlock listening to the radio, I felt certain I was part of a community of people across the country listening to the radio thinking Unbelievable.

Episode 460, “Retraction,” was an hour-long correction to Episode 454, “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” which aired January 6. That episode was a special hour-long condensation of Mike Daisey’s one-man show, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.” In that show, which ended Sunday in New York and heads next to Washington, D.C., Daisey recounts his trip to China to interview workers in the Foxconn factory, which makes Apple products. And in fact that episode — in which Daisey describes meeting workers who had to sleep in prison-like barracks; whose hands shook from the neurotoxins in cleaning solutions that Apple forced them to handle; whose arms were mangled from industrial accidents for which they were not compensated — had also been among the most compelling hours of radio I had ever heard. It launched Daisey into a role as a nationally prominent critic of Apple, appearing on MSNBC and elsewhere.

The making of gay marriage’s top foe

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:00:00 +0000

In September 1978, Yale freshmen would not have voted Maggie Gallagher the member of the Class of 1982 most likely to get pregnant before graduation. Gallagher was the third of four children from a close family in Portland, Ore. When she was young, her parents, an investment banker and a housewife, had been active in their local Catholic parish, and Gallagher and her siblings spent some years in Catholic elementary school. As Gallagher got older, her parents began to drift away from the church, and Gallagher’s mother became something of a spiritual seeker (“She once took me to an Up With People concert,” Gallagher now recalls, ruefully.) But Gallagher herself moved to the right in high school. Like many precocious girls, she fell for Ayn Rand’s novels, including “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” and for Objectivism, Rand’s capitalist, acquisitive philosophy. (Gallagher’s other formative influence was the science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein.) When she got to Yale, she only gingerly embraced the secular mores, the drinking and the drugs and the hookup culture, that defined life on liberal campuses in the late 1970s. She tried marijuana once and did not like it. She smoked cigarettes but, afraid of becoming addicted, never inhaled.

The great debate

Mon, 10 Apr 2006 11:00:00 +0000

In late March, when the 64 teenagers gathered at the World Individual Debate and Public Speaking Championships in Lakeville, Conn., were asked to debate the topic "Resolved: This house believes in abstinence before marriage," their silver tongues promptly deserted them. Kiran Dhillon of Winnipeg, Canada, argued, "Mr. Speaker, sex is the reason people are raped!" Judah Taub, of Jerusalem, was overheard saying, "The reason why youth have sex today is because of their instincts." Shakir Rahim, of Vancouver, boldly stated that "sexual intercourse is being more widely practiced in society than ever!" (He also added that "not having sex is beneficial because of the negative ramifications that accompany sex at this time.") But my favorite bit of wisdom, again from Taub, was surely, "Let's look at the cycle of life: childhood, school, marriage, children. The question about sex is, where along that line do you slip it in?"