Quotes from Dan Savage

The mistake that straight people made was imposing the monogamous expectation on men. Men were never expected to be monogamous.

My dad was a homicide cop in the gay neighborhood in the city when gay neighborhoods were desperate, depressing, sad places run by the mob. The only gay people he'd met when I came out to him were corpses.

I get letters every year from women who think Valentine's Day is an empty exercise, but are ironically pretty exercised when their boyfriends neglect or forget it.

A lot of kids are bullied because of their sexual identity or expression. It's often the effeminate boys and the masculine girls, the ones who violate gender norms and expectations, who get bullied.

Sometimes I talk to religious people about my column or what I do, and I ask them to, you know, read 20 or 30 of them and then come tell me that the message at the heart of every column isn't, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' In every possible sense.

It's going to take generations of gay people marrying before these things start to feel natural. We haven't had it long enough to remake it as our own, so it does feel like you're getting dressed up in straight drag to do it.

When you're young and queer and closeted, you can end up in this place where you regard your straight peers as the enemy.

To be a straight person and discover you're infertile is almost like discovering you're not a straight person.

The bullied straight kid goes home to a shoulder to cry on and support and can talk freely about his experience at school and why he's being bullied. I couldn't go home and open up to my parents.

Straight couples don't have to be monogamous to be married or married to be monogamous. Monogamy no more defines marriage than the presence of children does. Monogamy isn't compulsory and its absence doesn't invalidate a marriage.

When I was a kid, and I was odd, the default assumption was that I was odd, not that I was gay. Now when a kid is odd in a Greensburg, gay or straight, the default assumption is gay.

Straight people are everywhere!

We are social animals and any honest assessment of how sex actually functions in our lives would lead us to conclude that while its original purpose was purely reproductive, we long ago—eons ago—repurposed it in ways that conferred evolutionary advantages that weren't solely about passing on our genes. You were likelier to survive and your offspring were likelier to survive if you were liked, and you were likelier to be liked if you gave good head.

dogs or cats, 90 Day Fiancé or Selling Sunset. But they can't pause for a moment to ask themselves if this otherwise lovely person they're dating fucks them the way they like to be fucked, and fucks them as often as they'd like to be fucked, because that would make them shallow, sex-obsessed perverts.

Your boyfriend's cuckold kink is most likely a subconscious, erotic response to a sexually charged fear. While most of us don't eroticize our fears, a number of us respond to sexual fears or even traumas by incorporating them into our erotic imaginations. And what do many straight men fear most? Being cheated on. —DECEMBER 7, 2006

We're living through an age of irrationality and religious "fervor" I would call it religious idiocy. It's exhausting to year after year be on the receiving end of this demagoguery.

Owning a gun in America is one way for conservative white males to demonstrate their anger at crime, liberalism, feminism, and modernity.

Mother's Day is a torment if your mother is dead. Valentine's Day is a torment if you don't got one. And at some point in our lives, we will be tormented by Valentine's Day even if we're relatively lucky in love.

Ultimately life is disease, death and oblivion. It's still better than high school.

The cultural expectation should be if there's infidelity, the marriage is more important than fidelity.

How can you tell somebody whose is pursuing happiness that they're somehow not American when that was the very first promise that America made?

I got picked on a lot, even by teachers too. I liked to listen to musicals and bake, and my homeroom teacher found out and mocked me in front of the whole class for baking.

One man's blasphemy doesn't override other people's free-speech rights, their freedom to publish, freedom of thought.

The only way to get gay issues off the front pages of Canadian newspapers is to grant gay and lesbian people our full civil equality and leave it alone.