American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics Read online

  American

  SAVAGE

  ALSO BY DAN SAVAGE

  Savage Love: Straight Answers from America’s Most Popular Sex Columnist

  The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant

  Skipping Towards Gomorrah: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Pursuit of Happiness in America

  The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family

  It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living (ed.)

  DAN SAVAGE

  American

  SAVAGE

  INSIGHTS, SLIGHTS,

  and FIGHTS

  on

  FAITH, SEX, LOVE,

  and POLITICS

  DUTTON

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com.

  Copyright © 2013 by Dan Savage

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Sections of “At a Loss” first appeared as “Our Man of Perpetual Sorrow” on This American Life (May 1, 2009). “Crazy, Mad, Salacious” first appeared in slightly different form as “My Other Dog’s a German Shepherd” on This American Life (March 16, 2007). “The Straight Pride Parade” first appeared in different form as “Happy Heteroween” in The Stranger (October 29, 2009). “On Being Different” first appeared in slightly different form as the foreword to On Being Different: What It Means to Be a Homosexual by Merle Miller, Penguin Classics edition, 2012. “Extended Stay” first appeared in slightly different form as “In Defense of Dignity” in The Stranger (October 9, 2008). Sections of “It’s Happened Again” first appeared in The Stranger (November 4, 1999).

  Additional permissions appear on page 299.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Savage, Dan.

  American Savage : insights, slights, and fights on faith, sex, love, and politics / by Dan Savage.

  pages cm

  ISBN: 978-1-101-62422-7

  1. Savage, Dan. 2. Gay men—United States—Biography. 3. Gays—United States. I. Title.

  HQ75.8.S28A3 2013

  306.76’62092—dc23

  [B]

  2013001374

  Designed by Nancy Resnick

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity.

  In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers;

  however, the story, the experiences, and the words

  are the author’s alone.

  For my father, who lives in a red state, watches Fox News,

  and votes Republican—but loves me and mine just the same.

  And if my ways are not as theirs

  Let them mind their own affairs.

  Their deeds I judge and much condemn,

  Yet when did I make laws for them?

  —A. E. Housman

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. At a Loss

  2. It’s Never Okay to Cheat (Except When It Is)

  3. Sex Dread

  4. The GGG Spot

  5. The Choicer Challenge

  6. My Son Comes Out

  7. Crazy, Mad, Salacious

  8. Folsom Prism Blues

  9. The Straight Pride Parade

  10. Four Closet Cases

  11. Mistakes Were Made

  12. On Being Different

  13. Extended Stay

  14. Rick and Me

  15. Still Evil. Less Evil. But Still Evil.

  16. It’s Happened Again

  17. Bigot Christmas

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Introduction

  This book? The one you’re holding in your hands?

  I built it. Or wrote it. Or whatever.

  Pretty much everything I wanted to say in this book is in the book—the one you’re holding—but they tell me I have to write an introduction before I can tell people I’ve finished writing this book. They tell me books like this always have introductions. But here’s the thing: Anything I might want to say here (in the introduction), I’ve already said there (in the pages that follow).

  My editor—to whom I’m very grateful—tells me not to stress out too much about the introduction. Very few people read introductions, as it turns out, so she tells me not to sweat over the introduction too much. It seems that most readers skip the introduction and go straight to the first chapter and start reading the actual book. So it doesn’t matter what I say here. I could libel and defame people, reprint my favorite cookie recipes, or try my hand at writing erotica and no one would ever know.

  It’s freeing, in a way, to think that I could write anything I want to here, on the pulped trees set aside for the introduction, because it’s the appearance of having an introduction that matters, not the introduction itself.

  This is the first book I’ve written in a while. It used to be easy to find the time to write a book. “Finding the time to write a book” is not to be confused with “actually sitting down and writing a book.” Whether writers actually sit down and write is a complicated thing. But finding the time to write used to be pretty simple. Basically, whenever you weren’t writing articles or columns, you worked on your next book. But now that all writers everywhere are contractually obligated to blog and tweet all day long, who has time to work on a book? Unless you’re Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly and you can pay someone else—just guessing here—to write your books for you, or you’re a high-functioning meth addict who doesn’t need to sleep, finding the time to write a book these days is pretty much impossible.

  I’m not Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly. And I’m not a meth addict. I managed to get this book written without meth or ghostwriters. (I did have an assistant, though, and her name is Ingrid and she’s been calling me every day for two weeks yelling, “WRITE THE FUCKING INTRO SO WE CAN BE DONE WITH THE BOOK AND GET PAID ALREADY!”)

  Did you know that the intro is the last thing someone who’s writing a book actually gets around to writing? And by the time a writer sits down to write the intro, he or she—some of my favorite books are by lady writers—is a complete fucking mess. Writing a book is hard. Finishing a book is murder. I’ve been up for days. I haven’t gotten a decent night’s sleep for weeks, let alone eaten anything in which the first two ingredients aren’t corn syrup and food coloring. Decent food, human contact, and proper hygiene are always vague and fading memories at this stage of the book-generation process.

  Don’t get me wrong: I’m grateful for this gig. If I weren’t writing—columns, blog posts, tweets, and books—I�
��d be waiting tables somewhere (which I actually enjoy) or working at an office job (which I do not enjoy), instead of working at home most of the time, in my pajamas, surrounded by empty bags of Oreos and sticky bottles of Boylan Black Cherry soda.

  Two more pages to fill, Ingrid tells me. I think I’ll use this space to reassure Mike Huckabee that I’m okay.

  Mike Huckabee, the Fox News host, former governor of Arkansas, and onetime GOP presidential hopeful, worries that I’m unhappy. Mike told Tony Perkins, president of the anti-gay hate group Family Research Council, on his radio show—on Mike’s radio show—that I’m “unnecessarily rude, vile, and angry,” and he suspects this is the case because I’m “not a happy person.” Mike said he sincerely wants me to be happy, and then Tony threatened to sue me, and Mike didn’t point out that being sued doesn’t make people happy, which leads me to doubt the sincerity of Mike’s concern for my personal happiness.

  But Mike Huckabee is a man of God—an ordained Baptist minister—so I’m going to take him at his word.

  Hey, Mike? I’m happy. I’m fine. Yes, I can sometimes be rude, vile, and angry. But I strive to be just rude, vile, and angry enough to get my point across. And there’s a lot out there to be rude, vile, and angry about, Mike, from income inequality to our never-ending health care crisis to candy-corn Oreos. And if I ran around the country calling your love sick, sinful, and perverse, Mike, you’d be angry too.

  But you can rest assured that I’m a happy person, Mike.

  Have you seen my husband in a Speedo? I’ll send you a picture, if you’d like. No gay man with a husband who looks like mine in a Speedo is unhappy. At least not all the time. Sure, I’m unhappy sometimes, but who isn’t? But I actually have a lot to be happy about. I have a great job! Giving sex advice, running my mouth on television, getting paid to be rude to vile and angry assholes like your buddy Tony Perkins. I also live in a pretty nice town, close enough to the offices of my newspaper that I can walk to work, and that—having a short commute—turns out to be a big contributing factor to happiness.

  “When you look at Americans’ day-to-day activity,” the author Dan Buettner told NPR, “the top two things we hate the most on a day-to-day basis are, number one: housework and number two: the daily commute in our cars. In fact, if you can cut an hour-long commute each way out of your life, it’s the [happiness] equivalent of making up an extra forty thousand dollars a year.”

  I don’t own a car. I don’t even know how to drive, and again, I live close enough to my not-at-home office that I can walk to work. So no commute for me. And there are two bars that I love—shout-outs to the bartenders at Liberty and Smith—between my office and my house, so the hour most Americans spend in their cars commuting, I spend at Liberty or Smith imbibing. As for housework: My husband is a stay-at-home dad, and he takes care of most of that. In a Speedo.

  Other things that correlate strongly with happiness: friends, marriage, and a cause. I have friends (lots), I’m married (same guy, eighteen years), and there are lots of causes I care passionately about. Carl Jung said that to be happy, human beings need “good physical and mental health,” which I’ve got, and “the faculty for perceiving beauty in art and nature,” which I do. And—don’t mean to get graphic here but—research has shown that semen is a natural antidepressant, Mike, and there’s no shortage of that in my life either.

  So, yeah, I’m pretty happy, Mike, don’t you worry about me. But I appreciate your concern. It’s very Christian of you to worry about my happiness.

  Oh, hey, they tell me this is long enough to fill the pages allotted for the intro. So I’m going to get out of the way. Thank you for buying my book. I hope you enjoy it. If you don’t, you might want to pick up Neil Steinberg’s You Were Never in Chicago, Alice Dreger’s One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal, or Daniel Bergner’s What Do Women Want? They’re all great reads.

  1. At a Loss

  My dad was in the first class of the ordained permanent diaconate. This sentence may require some unpacking for my non-Catholic readers. So here you go, heathens: Before a man could become a Catholic priest, he would typically spend a year serving as a Catholic deacon. Deacons are to priests as novices are to nuns—or they used to be. In the 1980s, to address a growing shortage of Catholic priests (a shortage that has since gotten worse), the Church created the permanent deaconate. Ordained deacons could do almost everything priests do—pass out wafers, preach sermons, baptize babies—and so my dad was up on the altar of our church every Sunday when I was growing up. Which makes me something of a rarity among Catholics: I am a preacher’s kid. (Technically I’m the kid of two preachers, as my mother was a Catholic lay minister.)

  As the son of a Catholic preacher man—just one of his four children—I attended Catholic grade schools, and yes, I was an altar boy. But, this isn’t a story about being sexually abused by a priest. Because I wasn’t sexually abused by a priest. Looking back at my childhood, I can identify a couple of close calls—a priest from our parish once took me and another boy skinny-dipping at a Catholic school’s indoor pool after hours—but the experiences were creepy, not abusive. In addition to being a Catholic deacon, my father was also a Chicago cop—a cop who loved his children and wore his service revolver wherever he went—and that fact may have given pause to any rapey priests who crossed paths with his children.

  I am no longer a practicing Catholic. If I had to apply a religious label to myself, it would be “agnostatheist,” an awkward hybrid of agnostic and atheist. I don’t believe in a higher power, but I do cross myself on airplanes. I once blew up at a friend who thought he was being funny when he inverted one of the crucifixes in my “ironic” collection of Catholic kitsch. And when I take the Lord’s name in vain—when I mutter “Jesus Christ” through clenched teeth as my lead-footed husband passes someone going ninety miles an hour—I am seeking the protection of a higher power.

  But I go right back to not believing once my plane safely lands or once Jesus or Joseph Smith or Xenu safely delivers us back to the right-hand lane. Which makes me a hypocrite and an ingrate, I suppose, but not quite an atheist or a believer. Not quite.

  I wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. I went to the same Catholic grade school my mother and grandmother did; I had the same fourth-grade homeroom teacher—Sister Mary Amadeus—at St. Ignatius as my mother. I was baptized as an infant; I had my first communion at age seven; I was confirmed at age thirteen.

  But even at age seven—the age of reason, according to the Catholic Church—I was having trouble reconciling this “loving father in heaven” I’d heard so much about with this “eternal damnation” thing the nuns were constantly threatening us with. But the fatal blow was the realization that I was gay. This realization came at roughly the same time I entered a Catholic high school for boys who were thinking about becoming priests. It was a bit like realizing you’re an alcoholic on your first day of work at the Budweiser bottling plant.

  Despite all those years of Catholic schooling, my first reaction to the realization that I was gay wasn’t, “Holy shit, looks like I’m going to find out what that eternal damnation thing is all about.” Instead I thought, “What the Church says about homosexuality—that can’t be right. They must be wrong.” This intuitive sense that the Church was wrong about homosexuality—this unshakable conviction that the Church was wrong about me—led me to wonder what else the Church might be wrong about. Virgin births, maybe? Transubstantiation? Resurrection? Masturbation? It didn’t take long to arrive at the biggest doubt of all: the existence of God.

  I transferred to a public high school and stopped going to church—except for the odd family wedding, baptism, or funeral. (And they are all odd, aren’t they?) For most of my adult life I was likelier to walk into a Planned Parenthood clinic for a Pap smear than to walk into a church.

  Then my mother died.

  A virus can lie dormant in your body for so long that you can forget you were ever infected. Then something happens that weakens
your immune system and the virus seizes its opportunity. For more than two decades the Catholicism I’d contracted at St. Ignatius had lain dormant, manifesting itself only in airplanes and passing lanes. But the seeming immunity I’d long enjoyed was weakened by my mother’s death. Because after that sunny, awful day in Tucson, Arizona, when my mother’s life ended, I started slipping into Catholic churches.

  Not for weddings or funerals, but on totally random days of non-holy non-obligation. Tuesday afternoons, Friday mornings. And I wasn’t just going to church. I was going out of my way to go to church. There’s a Modernist Catholic chapel near my office in Seattle. The Chapel of St. Ignatius at Seattle University—I think St. Ignatius is stalking me—won a big architectural award (the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects honored it; a scale model of the chapel is now part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York), but I think it’s ugly. All Modernist Catholic churches look the same to me—like someone slapped a crucifix on the living room wall at the Brady Bunch house.

  St. James Cathedral in downtown Seattle, which is a much longer walk from my office, looks like a Catholic church should. It looks like St. Ignatius, actually, the parish church attended by four generations of my family. Acres of stained glass, rows of marble columns, crowds of plaster saints. St. James is open for “private contemplation” seven days a week. In the months after my mother’s death, I found myself slipping into St. James on more weekdays than I care to recall. The church was usually empty, aside from one or two volunteers straightening up the hymnals and offering envelopes in the backs of the pews—or that’s what they were pretending to do. I think they were really there to keep an eye on the homeless people that sometimes come in to get out of the rain. Every once in a while a priest would hurry through, taking care to avoid making eye contact with me or any of the other bums.