Dan Savage
Daniel Keenan Savage is an American author, media pundit, journalist, and LGBTQ community activist. He writes Savage Love, an internationally syndicated relationship and sex advice column. In 2010, Savage and his husband, Terry Miller, began the It Gets Better Project to help prevent suicide among LGBTQ youth. He has also worked as a theater director, sometimes credited as Keenan Hollahan.
Born in Chicago to Catholic parents, Savage attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in acting. After living in West Berlin from 1988 to 1990, he moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where he befriended Tim Keck, co-founder of The Onion. When Keck moved to Seattle, Washington, Savage moved as well to become an advice columnist for The Stranger, which Keck founded; he had offered Savage the position after Savage wrote a sample column which impressed him. Savage has since become a sex columnist and a vocal proponent of LGBTQ rights in the United States, voicing his advocacy through Savage Love, and a podcast version titled the Savage Lovecast. In 2001, Savage and his readership coined the term pegging to describe a woman anally penetrating a man with a strap-on dildo.
Outside of his writings and podcasts, Savage has advocated for progressive politics and advancing the rights of LGBTQ youth to prevent suicide in the community. He has opposed laws restricting pornography and the sale of sex toys, and founded the It Gets Better Project with his husband Terry Miller, whom he married in 2005. Savage has been featured on numerous television programs and news outlets, including Countdown with Keith Olbermann and Anderson Cooper 360.
Savage has attracted controversy over his comments and actions related to LGBTQ issues. He promoted the term santorum to define a by-product of sex after former senator Rick Santorum made anti-LGBTQ comments in 2003, and condemned the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for its support of California Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California. His activism and public speaking has brought praise from celebrities and politicians, including former president Barack Obama.
Early life and education
Dan Savage was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Judith "Judy", who worked at Loyola University, and William Savage Sr. He has German and Irish ancestry. The third of four children, he has two brothers and one sister. Savage was raised Catholic and attended Quigley Preparatory Seminary North, which he has described as "a Catholic high school in Chicago for boys thinking of becoming priests." Though Savage has stated that he considers himself "a wishy-washy agnostic" and an atheist, he continues to identify as "culturally Catholic".Savage attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he received a BFA in acting. He lived in West Berlin from late 1988 to 1990.
Career
''Savage Love''
In 1991, Savage was living in Madison, Wisconsin, and working as a night manager at Four Star Fiction and Video, a local video store that specialized in independent film titles. He befriended Tim Keck, co-founder of The Onion, who announced that he was moving to Seattle to help start an alternative weekly newspaper titled The Stranger. Savage "made the offhand comment that forever altered life: 'Make sure your paper has an advice column—everybody claims to hate 'em, but everybody seems to read 'em'." Savage wrote a sample column, and to his surprise, Keck offered him the job.Savage stated in a February 2006 interview in The Onions A.V. Club that he began the column with the express purpose of providing mocking advice to heterosexuals, since most straight advice columnists were "clueless" when responding to letters from gay people. Savage wanted to call the column "Hey, Faggot!" in an effort to reclaim a hate word. His editors at the time refused his choice of column name, but for the first several years of the column, he attached "Hey, Faggot!" at the beginning of each printed letter as a salutation." In his February 25, 1999, column, Savage announced that he was retiring the phrase, claiming that the reclamation had been successful.
He has written in a number of columns about "straight rights" concerns, such as the HPV vaccine and the morning-after pill. In his November 9, 2005, column he wrote that "he right-wingers and the fundies and the sex-phobes don't just have it in for the queers. They're coming for your asses too."
Theater
As a theater director, Savage was a founder of Seattle's Greek Active Theater. Much of the group's work were queer interpretations of classic works, such as a tragicomic Macbeth with both the title character and Lady Macbeth played by performers of the opposite sex. In March 2001, he directed his own Egguus at Consolidated Works, a parody of Peter Shaffer's 1973 play Equus which exchanged a fixation on horses for a fixation on chickens.Letters from the Earth, also at Consolidated Works, was Savage's most recent production. Letters was a trimmed version of Mark Twain's The Diary of Adam and Eve. It received scathing reviews, including one from The Stranger - "My Boss's Show Stinks".
Media appearances
In addition to writing a weekly column and four books, Savage has been involved in several other projects.From 1994 until 1997, he had a weekly three-hour call-in show called Savage Love Live on Seattle's KCMU. From 1998 to 2000, he ran the biweekly advice column Dear Dan on the news website abcnews.com.
He is now the editorial director of the weekly Seattle newspaper The Stranger, a promotion from his former position as The Strangers editor-in-chief. Savage stars in Savage U on MTV, contributes frequently to This American Life and Out magazine, and acts as a "Real Time Real Reporter" on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher. He has also made multiple appearances on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann and CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, to discuss LGBTQ political issues, such as same-sex marriage and Don't Ask Don't Tell.
In 2014, he participated in Do I Sound Gay?, a documentary film by David Thorpe about stereotypes of gay men's speech patterns.
In 2016, he was the first guest of Twice Removed, a family history podcast hosted by A. J. Jacobs. In the episode, Savage's lineage was traced to Nan Britton, Paul Popham, and others.
In 2017, Savage was featured in Monogamish, a documentary directed by Tao Ruspoli exploring contemporary attitudes toward monogamy, marriage, and alternative relationship structures within American society.