Daniel
Keenan Savage (born October 7, 1964is an American author, media pundit,
journalist and newspaper editor. Savage and his husband, Terry, have
one adopted son, and were married in Vancouver, BC in 2005

This
is the eighty-seventh post in a series highlighting the best gay and
lesbian authors from the 20th century (with a few before and after that
period) who have recorded in fiction, and nonfiction, the history of gay
people telling what life is, and was, during an important time of
history.

Savage
writes the internationally syndicated relationship and sex advice
column Savage Love. Its tone is frank in its discussion of sexuality,
often humorous, and hostile to social conservatives, as in the Santorum
controversy. Savage, who is gay, has often been the subject of
controversy regarding some of his opinions that pointedly clash with
cultural conservatives and those put forth by what Savage has been known
to call the "gay establishment". He has also worked as a theater
director, both under his real name and under the name Keenan Hollahan,
using his middle name and his grandmother's maiden name

 

Early life and college

Dan
Savage was born to William and Judy Savage in Chicago, IllinoisHe is of
Irish ancestry. The third of four children, Savage was raised as a
Roman 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 is now "a
wishy-washy agnostic" and an atheist, he has said that he still
considers himself "culturally Catholic."

    

Savage Love


In
1991, Savage was living in Madison, Wisconsin, and working as a manager
at a local video store that specialized in independent film titles.
There, Savage 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.[6] Savage "made the offhand
comment that forever altered [his] life: 'Make sure your paper has an
advice column—everybody claims to hate 'em, but everybody seems to read
'em'." Savage typed up a sample column, and to Savage's surprise Keck
offered him the job.

Savage stated in a February 2006 interview
in The Onion's A.V. Club (which publishes his column) that he began the
column with the express purpose of providing mocking advice to
heterosexuals.“    Forever, I'd read letters that had been written from
straight advice columnists to gay people. Sometimes the advice was okay,
but often it was clueless about gay issues or gay people or gay sex or
gay rights. And I just thought it would be funny for once if there was
an advice column written by a gay person where straight people had to
get slapped around or treated with contempt.”


Savage wanted
to call the column "Hey Faggot!" 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. According to Savage:“    When I started writing this column
in 1991, there was a debate raging in hellish homosexual circles about
words like faggot. The idea was that if we used these words
ourselves—Queer Nation, Dyke March, "Hey, Faggot" — straights couldn't
use them as hate words anymore. I chose "Hey, Faggot" as my salutation
in joking reference to this lively debate about reclaiming hate
words.    ”


In his February 25, 1999 column, Savage announced
that he was retiring the phrase: "Lo many columns later, it feels
strange to begin every column with a joke about a debate that ended
years ago."



In addition to maintaining his weekly column and authoring four books, Savage has been involved in several other projects.

From
at least September 1994 until 1997, he had a weekly three-hour call-in
show called Savage Love Live on Seattle's KCMU (now KEXP). 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 Stranger's editor-in-chief.  Savage is currently a contributor to
This American Life, an hour-long radio show on Chicago's WBEZ syndicated
by PRI, as well as a frequent contributor to Out magazine and a "Real
Time Real Reporter" on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher.



In
2010, the Savage Love iPhone App was released. The app features a
"Question of the Day" pulled from "Slog," the Stranger's blog, as well
as archived and indexed advice from Savage Love's archives. The app also
provides access to The Savage Lovecast podcast and videos of Savage's
speaking appearances, among other features.

He often encourages
readers to get involved and/or voice a positive or negative opinion
about a politician or public official. After Rick Santorum, then a
United States senator from Pennsylvania, made comments to a reporter
comparing homosexual sex to bestiality and incest, Savage assailed
Santorum in his column. Later, he sponsored a contest that led to the
term santorum being used to refer to "the frothy mixture of lube and
fecal matter that is sometimes a byproduct of anal sex". Savage
continued the tradition in 2009 by having his readers vote to define
saddlebacking as "the phenomenon of Christian teens engaging in
unprotected anal sex in order to preserve their virginities", as a
protest against the vocal support given to California Proposition 8 by
Rick Warren (pastor of Saddleback Church), and President Obama's
invitation to Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration.




On
December 3, 2002, Savage announced in an article that he had purchased
columnist Ann Landers's desk; she died on June 22 of that year. Savage
has facetiously referred to Landers as his "college roommate" and said
"I like to think of myself as a gay Ann Landers."


Savage's
home state of Washington allows same-sex couples to adopt children and
enter civil unions, but does not legally recognize same-sex marriage. In
March 2004, Savage wrote about an action that he took to highlight what
he saw as being indicative of same-sex couples' lack of legal right to
marry. After his co-worker Amy Jenniges was denied a license to marry
her girlfriend Sonia, Jenniges and Savage obtained a license to marry
one another. He wrote at the time, "We emphasized to the clerk and her
manager that Amy and I don't live together, we don't love each other, we
don't plan to have kids together, and we're going to go on living and
sleeping with our same-sex partners after we get married. So could we
still get a marriage license?" According to Savage, the
license-department manager replied, "Sure. If you've got $54, you can
have a marriage license."


Publications
Savage Love:
Straight Answers from America's Most Popular Sex Columnist (October
1998) (ISBN 0-452-27815-5), a collection of letters from his column.
The Kid (1999) (ISBN 0-525-94525-3), relating how he and his boyfriend adopted a baby boy through open adoption. (June 8, 2000)

Skipping
Towards Gomorrah: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Pursuit of Happiness in
America (2002) (ISBN 0-452-28416-3), which describes his exploration of
the seven deadly sins (September 1, 2003). The title is a satiric
reference to Robert Bork's book Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern
Liberalism and American Decline, which was in turn a satiric reference
to Joan Didion's 1968 book Slouching Towards Bethlehem. That title was
taken from a line of William Butler Yeats' poem The Second Coming.
The
Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family (2005) (ISBN
0-525-94907-0), a memoir of his life, relationship and family and a
commentary on the gay marriage debate. (September 27, 2005)

Things
I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me (February 2008) (ISBN
0-446-58069-4), edited by Ben Karlin, Dan contributes information
acquired about women along with such people as Stephen Colbert, Andy
Richter, and Will Forte.

For more information--a lot more--and many of his noted quotes--go to www.wikipedia.com