It’s celebration time! Major Supreme Court victories for marriage equality have Christopher and Eric dancing around the dinner table. Real-life married gay couple Alec Mapa and Jamie Hebert bring some hilarity to the party. But the festivities aren’t enough to stop fairly imbalanced newsman Breck Artery from making pointed points about Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden. Back from the newsbreak, Alec and Jamie grill Christopher and Eric on who they’d each like to gay marry. Twan, “Queen of the Stars,” reads the signs before they read you. Relationship expert Miss JoNell Samms has a few things to say about spines and the women who don’t have them.
Outspoken and ferociously articulate activist and journalist Dan Savage joins the party to respond to questions from the show’s Party People. Unfortunately for him, the famous advice columnist is introduced to The Dinner Party show’s resident relationship expert, Miss JoNell Samms. Finally, critic-at-large Jordan Ampersand and Eric fight over Henry Cavill.
What you want to be for your partner and what you have a right to expect from your partner. Good in bed, you got to acquire those skills. Giving, sometimes you give pleasure without an expectation of an immediate return, you bank it. And you have to be game for anything, within reason...DAN SAVAGE
Christopher Rice: Welcome back to The Dinner Party Show. I'm Christopher Rice.
Eric Shaw Quinn: And I'm Eric Shaw Quinn.
Christopher Rice: And we are so excited about our next guest.
Eric Shaw Quinn: So excited.
Christopher Rice: If you've been anywhere near social media in the past few years, you've probably heard of the It Gets Better Project, a series of videos intended to prevent suicide among LGBT youth. That project was started by internationally syndicated relationship and sex advice columnist, Dan Savage, and his husband, Terry Miller. But for many years now, Dan Savage has been one of our most ferociously articulate and outspoken gay activists, known for his no-holds-barred responses to anti-gay public figures and politicians, wherever they may surface.
Eric Shaw Quinn: Well done.
Christopher Rice: Exactly. He also hosts the Savage Love Podcast, and he's currently on the road promoting his new book, a collection of his essays and columns entitled American Savage, which we currently have for sale on our website at thedinnerpartyshow.com. Dan Savage joins us now on The Dinner Party Show. Welcome.
Dan Savage: Thank you so much for having me. Champagne and tea and cookies. I'm in heaven.
Eric Shaw Quinn: Welcome to The Dinner Party.
Christopher Rice: We really rolled out the red carpet.
Eric Shaw Quinn: Well, we try and have a nice dinner party when we invite guests over. You put on the dog a bit, right?
Dan Savage: Yeah, right. Absolutely.
Christopher Rice: Absolutely. We're also a little bit starstruck, I have to say.
Dan Savage: Oh, you're too easily starstruck if you're starstruck by me.
Eric Shaw Quinn: We're pretty excited.
Christopher Rice: We really are. And you know, we were talking at lunch about where we wanted to start this interview, and I guess we were curious about the moment for you when you went from being columnist in Seattle to gay activist on the national stage. Was there a moment that you could pick out?
Dan Savage: Well, I was a gay activist before I started writing Savage Love. I was in ACT UP, I was a gay activist at college and before college many, many years ago. And it occurred to me when I was writing this column when it turned into a real job because at first, it was just going to be a joke. I was going to write this joke sex advice column for six months or a year where I treated straight people and straight sex with the same contempt that straight advice columnists had always treated gay people and gay sex with.
Eric Shaw Quinn: Perfect.
Dan Savage: And I thought it would last six months or a year, this one-note joke, but straight people really liked being treated with contempt. It was a new experience for them.
Christopher Rice: Really?
Dan Savage: And so, the column took off…
Eric Shaw Quinn: Presaging the whole 50 Shades of Gray thing, right?
Dan Savage: Yeah, apparently.
Eric Shaw Quinn: Yeah.
Dan Savage: And eventually, it occurred to me that, "Oh, I have this much better platform now for the activism I want to do, because I've conned all these straight people into reading me." Because the column is almost always about straight sex and straight relationships. But then, if I pivot and I get on gay marriage, or I get on HIV, or I get on trans issues, or anything else, the straight people read out of habit because it's usually about them. So they'll just read these things that they would never read at any other time, and then every once in a while, I call them my flying monkeys.
Eric Shaw Quinn: Sneaky.
Dan Savage: I can call my readers out and say, "You should do this. You should redefine Rick Santorum's last name. You should make a video and upload it talking about how it got better for you."
Eric Shaw Quinn: My favorite.
Dan Savage: And it's sort of like this is my activism now.
Eric Shaw Quinn: Right.
Christopher Rice: Right.
Dan Savage: My sex advice column is sort of sneaky activism where I trick straight people into doing things, and gay people into doing things I want them to do.
Christopher Rice: Right.
Eric Shaw Quinn: But it wasn't the plan, it just sort of evolved in that way.
Dan Savage: Yes.
Eric Shaw Quinn: But there was a point at which, surely, where it became apparent, "Wow, I'm attracting considerably more attention than the greater Seattle area?"
Dan Savage: Yeah. Well, the column, after about 12 months, other papers started calling, asking to pick it up. So it's been syndicated for 21 years now.
Eric Shaw Quinn: Wow.
Dan Savage: I'm getting letters now from people whose parents were reading my column before they were born.
Christopher Rice: Oh no.
Dan Savage: Who are now old enough to have sex problems of their own, which is just really depressing and makes you feel really old.
Christopher Rice: My original intro was going to be one of those awful, I remember you when, things that celebrities hate. But I do remember my first boyfriend…
Eric Shaw Quinn: My mother used to take me to see you.
Christopher Rice: Well, it wasn't that long ago, but my first boyfriend brought me your writing and was like, "This is the guy. This is the guy who is out there fighting for us." Because at the time, there were two really visible gay journalists. It was you and Andrew Sullivan. And at the time we weren't all pretending Andrew Sullivan wasn't a conservative. So it was a choice between the two.
Dan Savage: Right. Andrew Sullivan was right.
Christopher Rice: Yeah.
Dan Savage: That was Andrew Sullivan's problem. He was right, but he was right too soon on issues that were really important.
Christopher Rice: Right.
Dan Savage: The things he harped on and was absolutely right about was, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," was military service, and marriage. And eventually, the gay rights movement caught up with Andrew and now he sort of basks in this affection that when he first started writing, people pilloried him. People hated Andrew. And I was always a fan, I always really liked Andrew. I'm still a fan.
Christopher Rice: I always thought he was a beautiful writer as well. And Love Undetectable was a gorgeous book.
Dan Savage: Absolutely.
Christopher Rice: But yeah, one of his first essays on gay marriage was called A Conservative Case for Gay Marriage.
Dan Savage: In The New Republic, in 1989, before anybody else was arguing it.
Christopher Rice:
Yeah.
Dan Savage:
He is really the intellectual father of this movement. We wouldn't be here but for this Brit ex- patriate, conservative marriage guy coming here and starting to make these arguments and articulate them in ways that really moved people.
Christopher Rice: Right. But you were a lot more fun back then I'd have to say. You were talking about throwing stuff through the stained-glass window at the Pope.
Eric Shaw Quinn: You were the fun dad.
Dan Savage: I was.
Christopher Rice: You were getting really riled up.
Eric Shaw Quinn: You were the fun dad.
Dan Savage: And I was talking about fist fucking, and you know...
Christopher Rice: Right. Yeah.
Eric Shaw Quinn: Yeah.
Dan Savage: Somebody's got to. I can swear, right?
Christopher Rice: Oh yeah.
Eric Shaw Quinn: Oh yeah.
Christopher Rice: We're the internet, babe. It's the wild, wild west on our show.
Eric Shaw Quinn: We couldn't do a radio show if there was no swearing. It just wouldn't work. We just couldn't sustain it. My head would explode or something.
Christopher Rice: What is it you do when you do other radio shows? You go, "Don't say fuck. Don't say fuck."
Eric Shaw Quinn: Oh my God, I walk down the hall... Yeah, "Don't say fuck. Don't say fuck. Don't say fuck." And then you go in, "So how the fuck are you? Oh, fuck."
Christopher Rice: I know. We were originally going to call this The Fuck Show. I want to talk about…
Eric Shaw Quinn: [inaudible].
Dan Savage: But that's my podcast.
Christopher Rice: Right, we don't want to intrude on your turf.
Eric Shaw Quinn: Yeah.
Christopher Rice: There is a surprise or something that I found surprising in your book, which was the first essay included in American Savage, is about your mother. And it is about how your feelings for your mother have inspired this kind of longing in you to return to the Catholic Church in a manner of speaking.
Dan Savage: And I have returned to the Catholic Church, I just haven't returned to the sacraments or belief in imaginary friends or miraculous birth narratives. After my mother's death, I was just sort of drawn back into these spaces where I could feel her presence....
