We took Dan Savage back to Berlin, the North Side bar where he used to slip in underage while in high school in the early ’80s and revel in his first moments as an openly gay man.
He explains it, “I was outrageously out at Berlin and not so out at home,” in Rogers Park, where his parents were going through a divorce. His last summer before college, he went to his first Gay Pride parade here and, after tippling too much champagne, wound up vomiting on the sidewalk near the intersection of Belmont Avenue and Sheridan Road.
Some role model, eh? But that is very much what he grew up to be, now in a stable relationship, parent of an adopted son and visibly out everywhere, known worldwide as a gay advice columnist with a heavy straight following. He lives in Seattle, where he also edits an alternative newspaper, and he doesn’t come home that often. His trip to Berlin was his first visit there in many years, and he smiled somewhat ruefully as he looked around at the mostly unchanged New Wave dance bar. This was the scene, he admits, of some pretty dirty adolescent deeds.
Now he chronicles and comments on the deeds of others in his column, Savage Love, published regularly in the Reader, the Village Voice, the Onion and more than 35 other publications. To wit:
“Question: Any tips for bondage beginners? My girlfriend and I are ready to give kinkier sex the old college try. But neither of us has tied a knot more complicated than the ones we accidentally put in our shoelaces. Any tips? Signed, New To It
Dear NTI: You’re in luck. A friend of a friend of a friend of mine just happens to be the editor and publisher of Bound & Gagged, which is, with the exception of Christian Family Today, the finest special-interest kink lifestyle magazine in America today.”
Strange talk from a nice, North Side Catholic boy, the son of a Chicago homicide cop. As a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the mid-1980s, he thought of becoming an actor. What happened?
“I loved theater, but four years studying acting in college made me never want to act again,” he said on a recent trip home to promote his third book, “Skipping Towards Gomorrah.” “College does that to a lot of potential artists. It destroys your love of an art form. I graduated not knowing what I wanted to do. I lucked into this job by accident.”
Words of advice
A few years after graduation, Savage wound up in Madison, Wis., with a (now former) boyfriend not long after graduation, and while working at a video store, met some people who planned to move to Seattle and start up a newspaper in 1991.
“I couldn’t understand why anyone would move to Seattle to do anything,” he writes in the introduction to “Savage Love,” the 1998 collection of columns. “This was just before Nirvana, Starbucks and Microsoft ate the world. . . . Then I made an offhand comment that forever altered my life: `Make sure your paper has an advice column.'”
Savage also told them the column ought to be written by a gay man. “I can give permission,” he says by way of explaining that appeal. “After all, I gave myself permission to be gay, and there’s nothing scarier than that. For a lot of straight people, a fetish or a strange desire is the mountain. For gays, kinks and fetishes are small potatoes. That’s why straights turn to gay friends for advice. `You gave yourself permission to be gay. Give me permission to tell my girlfriend I want to be spanked.'”
The newspaper became the Stranger, and the column became Savage Love, published these days in cities as far flung as Amsterdam and Bangkok. Savage has become a down-and-dirty Ann Landers — he not only read her faithfully as a kid but, as keepsakes, recently bought her desk (reportedly for $175) and typewriter ($200) at the Elgin auction of her possessions. And he’s something of a gay role model, writing on gay matters for publications as diverse as the New York Times and Out Magazine. The latter, he says, can be an albatross. “You’re attacked any time you roam too far from the rainbow revolution,” he says with a sigh.
“We’re a family of loud, argumentative people, and if you’re going to write, you’re going to end up a loud, argumentative writer,” says Dan’s olderbrother, Bill, a lecturer in English at Northwestern University, to whom Dan dedicates the new book. “We lived in a two-flat upstairs from our mother’s parents and three of our mother’s siblings, who were hippies. I can’t say I saw all this coming. When Dan told me he was gay at 18, I told him he just hadn’t met the right girl yet.
“But when he started getting syndicated and writing books and showing up on TV,” adds Bill, “it was cool. People ask how the family reacts. I say there are four kids (including another brother and sister) in our family, one of whom is fabulously successful, internationally famous, in a stable relationship rearing an adopted child. And that’s the gay one. The family is fine with it.”
“I think it’s funny and insightful,” says Dan’s mother, Judy Sobiesk, who divorced Dan’s father when Dan was 17, remarried and now lives in McHenry County. (His father also remarried and now lives in San Diego.) Savage has written that he often listened to his mom give advice over the telephone as a kid. “We laugh about that now,” she says. As to his subject matter, “I roll my eyes a lot. Sometimes I’d rather not read what he writes. I’ve learned a lot about anal sex I never needed to know.”
Lingering scars
His relationship with his father remains more strained, though more from lingering scars involving his parents’ breakup than his gayness. “It didn’t help that my father was a Chicago homicide detective whose beat included Chicago’s gay neighborhood,” Savage writes in “The Kid.” “Before I came out to my father, most of the gays he’d met were murderers.
“As things fell apart with his wife, my dad made a lot of promises . . . he seemed to break,” he adds, promising not to move out, divorce or move away, all of which he did. Despite a “perfectly cordial relationship” these days, Savage says, “a hesitation and tentativeness linger.” He’s no longer angry about the divorce, but “we were alienated from each other for so long . . . I’m not sure we’ll ever have the kind of relationship that he has with his other children.”
Meanwhile, saucy sex columnist always has been only one of Savage’s journalistic endeavors. Savage, whose grandfather was a Chicago sports journalist, always has written on various topics for the Stranger and a variety of other publications. With “The Kid,” his 1999 book about his and his lover’s son, Daryl Jude (a.k.a. DJ), now 4 1/2, he turned to serious memoir.
Now, with “Gomorrah,” he takes on a new role as defender of the Left, or, more precisely, as libertarian defender of the right to sin and let sin. To research the book, he went on a mission to commit every one of the classic seven deadly sins and then report his experiences in a way aimed at debunking the arguments of conservative moralists including William Bennett, Robert Bork and Bill O’Reilly.
“A lot of sex writers don’t think about politics, which is crazy, because in America, sex is so politicized,” he says. “Part of the reason the column works is that it’s written by someone who does think about things other than sex. Going around the country, trying to commit sins, is probably what a lot of readers think my life is like. It won’t surprise anybody that I met with a prostitute in New York. But it may surprise them that I go after all these scolds and conservative critics.”
Savage goes to Las Vegas to gamble (greed); visits a swinging married couple in Buffalo Grove (lust); promotes recreational pot as a way for overworked Americans to sneak some chemical downtime (sloth); and goes to Texas to learn to shoot a gun (anger). Some of the installments are sad or ironic. His sojourn on gluttony with members of the National Association for the Advancement of Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), ostensibly an “I’m fat and I’m proud group,” finds a mix of believers and heartbreaking, ambivalent skeptics torn over new surgical procedures promising genuine weight reduction. To Savage’s chagrin, no one eats very much at the group’s lavish buffets.
For envy, the tables are turned on Savage. He goes to a $500-a-day spa, only to learn it’s where the rich go to arduously hike, share a bland bedroom with a roommate and in general live like the middle-class so they won’t be distracted from the goal of losing weight. “Just my luck,” he writes. “I decide to go hang out with the rich folks for a week and somehow manage to pick the place where the rich go to get away from luxury.”
For pride, he takes on an issue that has won him some flack from gay activists: He debunks the notion that gays need to acquire “pride” anymore and should call the annual parade festivities what they are: a summertime Mardi Gras. (He wryly admits his own embarrassing Sheridan Road behavior years ago might be a slight factor on that one.)
Surprising his fans
Fans of his column, including the 75 or so men and women in their 20s who turned out for his reading at the Comix Revolution bookstore in Evanston recently, admit surprise at this political side.
But they respond: The question-and-answer session is more about the Iraq war (Savage is a supporter of military intervention) than sex.
Those acquainted with him in his Berlin days knew a bright, funny, fast-talking and opinionated teenager. Now, at 38, he’s a bright, funny, fast-talking and opinionated essayist on the Left.
With sinning so easy to come by in America, does he feel he’s preaching to the converted?
“We’ve won the cultural war but not the rhetorical war,” he says. “There are tons of right-wing scolds saying all adulterers are bad, all pot smokers are bad. America’s political rhetoric is so out of touch with the lives Americans actually lead.
“It’s time to put a little mettle into the spines of sinners.”
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Pursuit is simply poetry
Here’s an excerpt from the introduction to Dan Savage’s “Skipping Towards Gomorrah,” published in September by Dutton:
Some social conservatives, like Robert Bork, the author of the bible of social conservatives, “Slouching Towards Gomorrah,” go so far as to argue that our founding fathers were just kidding around about the pursuit of happiness (in the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence). It was, at best, a rhetorical flourish on Thomas Jefferson’s part, not anything we should take seriously, much less act on. Bork, ironically, is a leading proponent of the “original intent” movement in legal theory, which argues that judges should base their rulings solely on the intent of our founding fathers, which can be divined through a close reading of our nation’s founding documents. Except, of course, for the first lines in our nation’s first document. That “pursuit of happiness” stuff? That’s just poetry. Americans shouldn’t be free “to choose which virtues to practice or not practice,” Bork argues, as that would entail, “the privatization of our morality, if you will, the `pursuit of happiness,’ as each of us defines happiness.” (Morality is apparently the only thing social conservatives don’t want to privatize.) The pursuit of happiness is so rank and unpleasant a concept for Bork that he sticks it between quote marks as if he were holding it with a pair of tongs.
