Isaac Mizrahi chats with Dan Savage about how he handles trolls, how gay and straight culture have impacted and informed each other, underwear parties and more.
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(Recorded on August 30, 2023)
It's funny how if you're gay in my age, you look at a lot of what straight people do now, and what you see is what gay people were condemned for doing forty years ago. Just renamed we had fuck buddies, you have friends with benefits. You know, we had tricks and you have hookups. It just straight people took everything gay people were doing and renamed it.
This is Hello Isaac, my podcast about the idea of success and how failure affects it. I'm Isaac Musrahi, and in this episode, I talked to sex advice columnist, podcaster, author, and activist Dan Savage.
Hello, Isaac, it's Dan Savage. Can't wait for our conversation. Can wait to be on your podcast. Really looking forward to it. I've always wanted to meet you, followed you forever. Excited about this. Thanks for having me.
The thing about talking to someone as incredibly smart as and Savage is that you know there's so much to learn. And when I say smart, I don't only mean smart, I also mean incredibly intuitive and sensitive to where our culture was going thirty years ago when he started his career to where it is today. He was in the forefront of moving that Mountain and where we are today is in great, great part due to his vision about the way people need to communicate about the subjects of love and sex. And what I adore about his work is that it really is about both those subjects, sex and love. Love and sex. He talks about them separately, he talks about them together, and I just think it's so incredibly smart and really really for the most part reassuring. And by the way, he's not just smart when it comes to his column, you know, the sex column. He also talks about art, he talks about politics, and by the way, I am hoping we will touch a little bit on the subject of politics, and so if you're a little squeamish about that, you might want to skip that part. But anyway, I have never been so excited to get started talking to a guest. So buckle up, Buttercup, here we go. Dance Savage, let's get into it, Dan Savage. Could this actually be the first time we're meeting?
It is?
I live in Seattle, which is a little bit like living in a box at the bottom of the.
River, I know, but anything but think of how many parties we've been to in common, and like forget about galas. I'm talking about like you know, foam or underwear parties that we probably attended in the same bars in New York City or Seattle, and we manage meet.
I don't go to underwear parties.
You don't know if you've only like even the nineties.
Even in the nineties, I'm too shy.
What how is this possible? This is the whole other side of Dan Savage. I mean, I'm reading your column now for like, what thirty years? How long have you been writing that column?
And thirty two years?
Well, that's a long time. And the subject matter leads me away from this idea that anyone keeping that column could be possibly shy about underwear parties.
I'm very pro other people going to underwear parties, and I want to hear about them. Like my husband goes to underwear parties, so I like to hear about the underwear party when he gets home. But I'm an introvert. I don't want to go to the underwear party myself.
Well so am I. I mean, I'll tell you what, I want to go to the underwear party, but I'm not leaving with anybody usually at the underwear party, especially not since I'm married, But we'll get into all of that in about a second. I want to talk to you about your history, Darling. I want to talk about your education. Where did you go to you I.
Went to the University of Illinois in Champagne or Banna, but I studied theater. So I graduated knowing how to fence, but not knowing when people fenced.
How funny well they usually they fenced in like a Shakespeare play or like a you know, like a Bernard Shaw play. Maybe there's a little fencing. Was this a plan to become a sex columnist and a political pundit?
No, no, it was never the plan. I wanted to make theater, and I did here in Seattle. I had a really successful small theater here called Greek Active, which is a reference some people get, but most people don't. Greek Active used to be how people communicated in papers, are beaming a top or a bottom? Greek Active met you were the person who did the penetration during a course in Greek passive met you were at the bottom during anal And we named the theater Greek Active, just because I loved seeing Greek Active in headlines with the theater reviews that we would get with the newspapers not knowing what they were printing, and that's what I wanted to to do. But I stumbled into writing the sex advice column for this paper that was just starting. It was nineteen ninety when I met the guy who was starting the paper and looked at him and said, oh, tell me about your paper. And then I said, you should have an advice column because everybody reads those. You see the Q and a format, you can't not read the column. And he said, great advice. Write the advice column. And I was a gay guy, and it was nineteen ninety and it was a different time to be a gay guy. And this idea that I was going to write a sex advice column and a straight newspaper for straight people about straight sex was bizarre.
And the other thing.
That made the column stand out was I let people use the language they used when they talked about sex with their friends, imprint, which no one at that point had done. Everybody had to use a kind of sexual sanskrit. You could say, you know, I performed balatio. You couldn't say I sucked the dick. I let people say I sucked the dick, and the column just took off. But theater is what I wanted to do. I ended up editing the paper, and I think my theater background.
At that time.
You know a newspaper, you know, it had a curtain, it had the cover, and then you know, the curtain went up and you moved through the paper. And when the theater kids were running The Stranger, there was a lot of like theater bags running The Stranger. At the time, it was a performance. The paper was the show. And so I think my theater background and my education really contributed to how I worked as an editor and a writer and a creator of this print product called The Stranger in Seattle.
Right, and which is hilarious also play on words the Stranger right. Yeah, okay, but I do want to talk to you about sex language, and I want to ask you, Dan. This is not like I'm blowing smoke up your butt, but like, do you realize how you pushed us as a culture. I think about this. I think about your column. I think about Candace Bushnell's column a little bit too. And the show really more than the column, you know, Sex and the City. I remember watching that show and thinking, you know, this is not the way when and talk or think this is the way gay men talk and think, and it was sort of like, you know, the gays were kind of training straight people to actually open up and share stuff, you know, and in the same way, your column was training straight people to like open up and you know, and I think gays taught people a lot of stuff about how to have an open relationship. For instance, asking for a friend, darling, you have an open relationship with your gyeship. Okay, just for a friend who really wants to know that?
Who really wants to get into my husband's pants? It's probably in my husband's dms on Instagram right now.
I want to get anyone with a little cleft in their chin, darling, please, Okay, I do love ass but no, but but get back to this idea about sex language for a minute, right. What was the first column that you published that went viral for the time in which we're talking, which was the nineties.
Well, the first one I wrote that went viral nationally because my column began to be syndicated pretty early and appearing in different publications in different cities. But there was this sense in each of those cities that my column ran that, oh, this could only run in here. In San Francisco. This is a San Francisco writer. This is a San Francisco column, and Vancouver and Chicago and New York everywhere my column was. It could only be here, and then people would find out my column was in all these other.
Papers and be shocked.
Like a lot of people in my column ran in the Village Voyce, New York thought I lived in New York and I didn't.
I did, but I never did it. I thought you lived in New York.
But the first column I wrote that kind of broke nationally. And when viral was called Cockering magic Ken, the Earring magic Ken Doll came out. I was so thrilled that Earring magic Ken was in the Barbie movie. The Earring magic Ken Doll came out in the nineties or early nineties, and it was, you know, club Ken. They wanted him to be like Clubby, and so he had a purple mess shirt, he had a lavender sleeveless leather jacket, tight black trousers. But he also had this thing that was just like, oh my god, do they have any idea what they've just done? It was a gay men in the eighties, late eighties into the early nineties. It was a fashion thing at first. I'm sure I don't have to tell you about fashion, but gay men started wearing cockrings on the epulets of their leather jackets and act up demos and stuff, and it was a way of saying sex is still here for us, and we're still sexual. And then people started wearing the clubs on a chain around their neck, just a silver chain with a steel ring hanging on.
Right, and it was a way of size that you can't mistake, right, right.
It was a way of telegraphing to people or how big your dick was, right, how big your cock ring was. And sometimes people's cock rings told the truth, and sometimes people's cockrings on the.
Chains run their necks told lies.
And it was on this doll for little kids, and I was just like, they know not what they do. And I called Mattel and I got a pr flack on the phone who said the immortal words, we are not in the business of putting cockrings into the hands of little girls. Of course, opened the piece with that quote, and it just took off. And the piece was really about how the mainstream culture was sort of commodifying and consuming what it meant to be gay. But repackaging it in a way where they didn't want straight people quite to realize exactly what this was. And this was thirty plus years ago that this happened, right, And it was the first time I wrote a piece that came to national attention. You can still go to the Earing Magic Ken wiki page and read about me. Yea even wait, the most successful Kendall in history.
And they pulled it.
Hooray.
They never they pulled it from the market.
Because you see, by the way, okay, like we love the Barbie movie, we love it, we love everything they did, but it's still the evil empire that we're promoting. I'm sorry. We'll get into that as a separate conversation if you want to do part two of this podcast, because I really loved the movie and I love what they did, but it is a little bit like that here.
In there say one thing about the movie, Yes, please do. I loved the movie. The last line in the movie, not to spoil it for people who haven't seen it, is amazing.
It's amazing.
I think credit Carwig is amazing. There was one person who.
Was left out. The idea is that these Barbie.
Dolls come to life in this alternate universe because of the love and play of the children who are playing with them, right, and that animates these dolls. The movie didn't need to be about little gay boys who played with Barbie dolls, but little gay boys played with Barbie dolls and were all astonished, bullied, yes by they're on families. Little gay boys who loved Barbie paid a price for loving. We did we And I wish I just needed a moment in the movie where Barbie loved one of those little boys back.
I know, I will say that I did also think that thought. I swear to God, it's like if you were doing a Golden Girls movie or something all these years later and you didn't acknowledge that it was gay men who sort of like made Golden Girls. Okay, moving on, because I do want to talk for a minute more about you know, your column all these years and how what I thought was so smart about this column was that it wasn't just about sex, and it wasn't just about like soundbites about sucking dick or something. It was also about the subject of love. I think I just read your most recent co and there was this idea about this couple who were trying to find love again in their lives, and how sex we kind of integrated into that love. And I feel like that's a really, really big important thing. It almost makes me choke up to think that this is also a really great lesson that the gays teach about.
Yeah, there has been an amazing you know, I'm fifty eight years old and came out forty years ago. I'm one of the rare gay men of my generation who came out in high school, and I've watched how gay culture has changed and also how gay culture has impacted and informed straight culture, and straight culture has really impacted and informed and changed gay culture in I hope, mutually positive directions. It's funny how if you're gay in my age, you look at a lot of what straight people do now, and what you see is what gay people were condemned for doing forty years ago. Just renamed we had fuck buddies, you have friends with benefits. You know, we had tricks and do you have hookups?
It just straight people.
Took everything gay people were doing and renamed it and live now gay lives. I'm sure you remember there used to be a kind of whole novels movies about the midlife crisis, and it was something that usually happened to straight men in their forties, and it was because they didn't have lives because they got married. People got married like my parents did when they were twenty and started having kids, and then by the time they figured out who they were in their thirties, it was too late. They were locked into being who they thought they were supposed to be when they were twenty. We don't have these amazing John Updike novels anymore about the midlife crisis because straight people have lives now before they get married, before they settle down, and the lives they have before they get married and settled down are gay lives.
That's really what you see it you.
See on the gay side is us getting married, having our gay lives in our twenties and thirties, and then getting married, maybe having kids, not all of us, some of us. And it's like there was nothing straight about the straight lifestyle. It was all straight people were allowed to do, and there was nothing gay about quote unquote the gay lifestyle. It was all we were allowed to do. Once you allowed people to marry or not mary when they wanted to and stay married only if they wanted to.
It was a revolution.
It was a revolution, and what we saw was straight people proving nothing gay about the gay lifestyle, gay people proving nothing straight about the straight lifestyle. It was just the borders were so violently policed, and what gay people do is we tore those borders down, and our lives were examples to straight people because they were Monogamy was a choice a gay couple made. It wasn't a default setting that some allowance for outside sexual contact that can actually stabilize a relationship over time.
We were able to do.
And there are studies now that back up things I was saying thirty years ago that non monogamy people regarded as a threat to a relationship. It actually gay men are the least likely to be monogamous, right Saban's most likely to be monogamous. Straight couples right there in the middle. You know whose relationships are the most stable overtime, gay men's relationships.
Boom.
Now, I'm monogoma be correlates with relationship strength. It doesn't undermine.
It, Okay, But can I say something about the converse of what you're saying too, Like, you know, why did I get married? I don't know what. I still don't know why I got married, but I did. I married my husband like in twenty eleven, when it was possible, and I thought, you know what, all these years I've been thinking, ah, you know, marriage, blah blah, Now we can, you know, and I will just because we fucking can't. That's why I got married. And when I googled your husband, Terry Miller, who's this gorgeous specimen? The first thing that came up was should a dad look this hot? And it was him in the honest, with like a jobstrap, and I thought, you know what, it's a good question. First of all, why did you have a kid?
It was a long time ago.
Terry was twenty five when wow, we had a kid, and I was thirty two.
I'm seven years older than he.
Is, and we wanted to make a family together and it was something that was important to me, important to him. We spent a lot of time thinking when we were adopting, we wanted to make sure we weren't doing this just because we were told we weren't supposed to or we shouldn't, right, because that's a terrible reason to have a child right now, not the.
Worst reason to get married.
By the way, not the three to get.
Married, because it is terrible reason to have a kid, But people have kids for worse reasons every day. People they do, as I said in my book, people straight people fall down drunk and get up pregnant. Gay people can't do that. We have to think about it and plan for it. And that's what we did. And the question of you know, is Terry.
Too hot to be a dad?
We get to be the people that we are, including still be sexual people. It's kind of funny that I'm saying that, you know, straight people now they have their lives. They live in their twenties, and they don't have mind life crisises because they knew who they were. Terry kind of had his twenties in his forties because in his twenties he was a dad. In his forties, he was not a full time parent anymore, and there was a moment in a relationship where it was like, well, what do we do now? And ter and I been together a long time and we had moments in our marriage where it was like okay, or our relationship because we weren't married for a lot of it, because we couldn't be where we were like Okay, we're gonna love support and leave each other now, or we're gonna love support and let each other.
And we chose overleave.
Like I let Terry do his thing, and he lets me do my thing, including sometimes you know he has a boyfriend. I have a boyfriend. That's how far other things go. But also like I love him, support the person that Terry is and wants to be, and he wanted to be an underwear model in his fifties and made that happen for himself.
And God, that's an incredible, incredible and inspiring answer to that question. I'm going to go one step further and ask you about your child. Is it a he or a shira? They we have a son.
You have a son who doesn't like his dad with the Filthy podcast to do too many interviews abou him because he's a very private.
Person about it. Okay, But as the father of this person, do you feel like he's better equipped or you feel like he has more obstacles because of this background.
There were certainly challenges for him in having gay dads in the nineties UH and the early aughts. It was important to us as gay parents at that time that we not use him as the tip of the spear. We let him be a child, and that meant for us. You know, we sought out schools where he wouldn't be the only kid with gay parents, which was hard then because there were many few gay lesbian couples having children then, so that he wasn't the only one, and so that he wasn't utilized in the school as an educational tool to inform other parents or other kids about kids with gay parents. We also let him decide in certain circumstances when he would tell people and whether he would tell people. So, you know, he went away to his summer camp a few times, and it was up to him if he talked about his family or if he felt comfortable talking about his family. We didn't insist that he talked about his family. It's a bit of a burden for him that, you know, he's the straightest kid ever with the gayest parents possible. The gay sex advice columnist and the underwear model are your dad's and he is very straight.
Let's talk about queer of culture for a minute, because I feel like, again, you've been in the forefront of all this and I can really, I can really learn a lot from you. You know, we were talking a minute ago about how the whole gay thing has helped straits and we've learned so much from the gays. Have we learned something from the queers.
Well, we've learned that there are more pronouns that we could ever hope to keep track of. We've learned that the pride flag is infinitely variable. They're literally pride flag generators on the Internet where you can go and create a bespoke identity and have it crap out a flag.
Just for you.
First of all, let's talk about the word queer. There's some gay men, you know, James Kirchick, Andrew Salivan, both gay writers and thinkers that I respect, who and our friends and who very vocally object to queer as this label and frame it as somehow imposed on gay men against their will. If you look at the founding document of Queer Nation, which was passed out at the New York City Pride Parade in nineteen ninety, it talks about how queer is this term that unifies us, and by us they mean because they listed just gay men and lesbians. It was gay men and lesbian rights. I adopted this term.
I would call myself queer. Often I don't say much anymore because I'm not really sure about what it means.
And I call myself queer still with the thought it's just like genus and species Homo sapien. Homos the genus sapiens, the species queer is the genus. Gay is my species? Right, Yeah, so I'm yes queer gay And knowing someone's queer now, then forty years ago you knew that they were gay or lesbian, and then you knew that they were gay, lesbian, or by then you and they were gay or lesbian, bier, trans. Now, knowing someone's queer, well maybe they're just straight and polly, or maybe they're just kinky, or maybe they're asexual or a romantic or demiseexual. It's not as useful a term anymore because it's so broad as to near have been rendered meaningless. So that's what I think about queer now. I agree with that comfortable identifying is queer. It'll be interesting to see because we're living through a political moment where things are getting very dire for gays, lesbian's, bisexual, and trans people, and there's a lot of people who crowded in under the rainbow merch umbrella when it was hip to be queer, Who are going to be faced with? Are you going to stick around as it gets harder as we have to fight right back against the Matt Walsh's of the world.
Yeah, exactly, as we reidentify each other and ourselves. What I've gathered is just ask, just ask, you know. It's like, instead of offending someone, just go like, hey, what do you want to be called? Or what are you? That's just a better question than just presuming someone is a he or a she or a they or whatever it is. You know, would you maybe agree with that?
Yeah, I mean we do have to ask knowing somebody's straight, you know what that means, knowing someone's queer. You have no idea. I do think that the lgbt Q I A plus Q again kink Polly idea of clear. I think it's created some odgitass where everyone fears that they're going to get a pronoun wrong, an orientation wrong, a gender wrong all the time.
I literally fear it all the time, Dan, And this is not this is not good for us. I know it's not.
We've got a lot of.
Straight people to work through their homophobia by saying to them, if you can get past your homophobia, look at all these great gay friends you can have now. The queer thing is is not like you could have all these amazing friends if you were over your queer phobia. The queer thing is, this is a pop quiz every day, and you're going to fail it, and it makes people anxious about being around us.
I've had queer friends since I'm in high school. I had a very very religious upbringing up until the eighth grade, and then I went to performing arts high school and some of those kids were trans, and one of them was out and trans, and we were very close friends, you know, and it was never an issue, and she liked to be called she, you know. And I'm not kidding you. It's like, sometimes what you're saying is so true. There's so much kind of like anxiety around it, and there's so much anger around it, and I don't exactly understand that part.
You know, there are some people with control issues who are shipping their control issues out under the banner of queerness and a demand on everyone else's part, not just for clairvoyance to just know who they are, when that may not be something that you can read. There was just a big piece in the CBC by an assigned female at birth femme presenting non binary person who is offended at being perceived to be a woman and misgendered constantly. And it's like, I can't move through the world.
No, it's very very hard. Let me ask you, this is all that a product of social media? You think? Is it all product of yelp where people can just go like, I hate this restaurant because I have the right to hate this restaurant, you know what I mean.
I think social media has definitely feeled it. Also, social media is a reality distortion field where we begin to think, because we spend so much time on social media, yes, that it's the real world and the world is full of queer people who are just waiting for us to like script a pronounce so they can blow the fuck up. And that actually isn't the world. No, that isn't the world, And it's the world of trolls. It's the world of trolls on the Internet. And so like I feel like maybe to have this conversation again on part two of this podcast, we should separate the world from the world of trolls. You know, Yes, and there are trolls on the right and the left. There are queer trolls, there are straight trolls, there are there are spy trolls. Sure, people who live to be outraged, to live to be offended. And you know, you knew trans people thirty forty years ago. One of my oldest friends in Seattle, Kayley, she's a street photographer, she's amazingly talented, is trans, and is not a person who's just waiting for the opportunity to blow up. Now, not all fans people are that person, but some of everybody is that person. And you know, I knew gay people forty years ago who were just like laying in wait to be offended, right, And it's it's a constant. But adding that like laying in wait to be offended to mixing that up with words can be violence and harm.
Oh my gosh, darling. If we've ever learned that lesson in history, we're learning it right now. And I kind of want to open this up a little bit. I know we're speaking about something very specific, but you talk about non queer politics a lot too, Like you know, what's going on in Washington, d C. With Congress, in the Senate and with you know, the President of the United States and all of those subjects. And I had this incredible podcast with this person called Betty Hallbrush who's ninety five years old. She's been a friend of my Frindred years and I said, is there any hope you know for the world, you know, forget about politics? And she said, you know, when I was a kid, we pulled together. And when she said that, I nearly burst into tears because I thought, is it too late for this country to pull together? You know, is there any way to close not only the queer gap, but is there any way to close the gap politically? Well?
The sense that we pulled together, I think is hindsight bias almost. You know, if we come through a crisis, we remember what people did that got us through it, and we kind of forget about people who worked against getting us through it.
We worked against FDR and the New Deal in all of that.
Right, or American fascists, the American Germans, bunned whatever it was that.
Was about it about Jil McCarthy exactly.
Yeah, And so we we look back and we forget what didn't work or what was working against what ultimately triumph. Because everybody wants to be a part of the heroic narrative. I think this is a truism. I've read this. I can't remember where I first encountered it. That the right seeks converts and the left hunts heretics.
Interesting, the right.
Wants to bring people over and seduce them, and the left looks at somebody who identifies as a lefty, who votes as a progressive, who contributes to lefty causes, and scrutinizes them for any evidence of an intellectual transgression that would get them erased, you know, kicked out, because we want this purity that is impossible when you're talking about a movement, because a movement involves a.
Lot of people in a lot of people, a lot of different ideas and social things. Yeah, I mean, by the way, to relate it to what we were talking about in the queer world before right. And you know Alan Cumming. You know he's brilliant, do you know Alan? Yeah, he's so smart. And he was on this podcast and he said this incredible thing that I'd never thought of. You know, he's Scottish and even they have ten parties. How many parties do they have in Scotland? I don't know. We have two parties. Did you ever think of we.
Have two parties and we've had the same two parties for more than a century.
And they so don't worry those anymore.
Right, Emil Macron, the president of France, he founded his party.
Unbelievable what he ran fore.
He created a brand new party and ran for office and one we haven't seen a movement like that here since.
Ross Perrot, who remember, got.
Like thirty percent of the vote in nineteen ninety two. But he was like a billionaire meglomaniac. How many of those do we have kicking around now? He's a billionaire meglomaniac who couldn't stick. The found a party dismount by making it not about him and not a cult of personality, which is what he did. And maybe Macron's party won't outlive him. It'll be a cult of personality. Maybe it will outlive him. But yeah, we are locked into a two party system, in part because we're not a parliamentary democracy where a winner takes all, so whoever gets the most votes gets it. You know, look at the Green Party, which drives me fucking crazy because it's a it's a syops operation for right wingers. Whenever you like peel back where the Green Party is getting its money, it's always from Republicans. But the Green Party, you know, if they run a candidate for office, for a local office, not for fucking president. You know, if they take twenty percent of the vote, they don't get twenty percent of the seats. In a parliamentary democracy, a party can get right. And there's a downside. Well, you get seats based on the percentage of the vote, so you don't have to win. You don't have to get fifty percent plus one to get a seat, You only have to get like seven or eight percent. The downside of this is it empowers fringe parties, as we're seeing in Germany with the Alliance for deutsch Land, which is a right wing fascist party that is moving because they've gotten seats. They've gotten into parliament because they didn't need that many votes. They'd seen to the votes of the assholes, and now they're on a track if they continue to grow the way they're growing, to becoming to one day perhaps being the ruling party in Germany, which would be a real disaster for queer powers from Germany, and for people of color in Germany, and for Muslims in Germany.
Well, Darling, can I just say where this society, the American political we're one feather away from something like that. It's the most terrifying thing.
Again, you know, right to pick your poison into parliamentary democracy. It can empower fringe parties and bring them into government and make them seem palatable. It can sort of legitimize them. Here, our problem is we have only two parties and one or the other is going to win, and one has completely been taken over by lunatics, which is their fucking fault. Republicans have been playing to a racist base for fifty years, the Southern strategy, Nixon. They assembled this mob that is now booing Mitch McConnell off the stage. Fuck Mitch McConnell. He deserves it that we saw Lindsey Graham running through an airport in terror because these people, his people, the mob he summoned, was coming for him. He deserves there that we don't deserve it. But the risk with the two party system is one party is taken over by corrupt, fascist, authoritarian lunatics. It's a danger to all of us.
God, well, I have to tell you something now that you're cursing, and you have a cleft in your chin.
You were the.
Sexiest person in the entire world, Darling. I want to bring this back down to you for a second. Okay, Because you had this big success as a columnist and now as a podcaster and as a person that is constantly out, there was there a moment when you had a giant failure that you kind of learned something from. I.
You know, I've done some writing for television. TV is heartbreaking. I went into a major network, pitched a show, they bought.
It in the room. Yeah.
I didn't feel confident enough to write it, and so they brought in other writers who did not the show.
That I pitched that was bought in the room.
Parallel lives, Darling, we have parallel experiences in parallel lives.
And is that that was got a decade ago?
Okay?
And I don't want to name any names.
A lot of talented people involved, the actors were amazing and deserved better. But the failure was mine because they were like, do you want to write it? I was like, oh gosh, no, no, I'm not worthy.
I'm You're a.
Libra, right, you're a leaga. Yeah, this is a libra thing. We go No, no, there's someone better. I am just this person. You do that job, I do this job. We collaborate in a great way. Doesn't work that way, dann, No, it doesn't.
And I wasn't ready for Hollywood. I came from newspapers and magazines at that point. In books, and you when you write a book, when you write a magazine article, when you write a column, you rely on your editor to say, this doesn't work, you need to take another run at this. I literally shut production down for a day because I said, this isn't this doesn't work. And in Hollywood, as I'm sure you know, you can't ever just give a criticism like you would in books, magazines, newspapers. You can't say what you think. You have to wrap every note up in cheese, like until you're giving a dog exactly, and disguise it as a compliment. This is beautiful, it's working, it's amazing. I've done such amazing work. It would be even more amazing if maybe you did. And it was just like, I don't have that, And so I didn't realize Hollywood was a compliment based economy. When I first did something in la and it was a Bumpy, Bumpy, and what did you learn? Well, now I know I've done some other things. I co wrote the screenplay for spoiler Alert, the Jim Parsons movie based on Michael Oscilla's Trip.
I love that movie. I mean, yeah, I really love that movie. I didn't know you wrote that. That's a beautiful movie.
Oh my god.
The dirtiest anal sex joke came out of Jim Parsons's mouth and I wrote it, and I was so uh. Jim Parsons blows up at a nurse because they don't have a bed for his husband for his first chemotherapy treatment, and he throws down and is in charge, and you know, Kit looks at at Michael and says, are you like that at work?
I think?
And and Michael says, I'm a top at work and I can't.
I can't. I'm not.
I'm not the actor Jim Parksons justice. The line reading that Jim gave it was just like exactly what I wanted it to be, because what he was saying was I'm a bottom at home. I get fucked in my ass, And the like spin he gave it was like, you're my lovery, you're my partner, you know who I am, but at work, I'm the opposite of who we both know that I am at home. And it was shot through with like gay esthetic, gay attitude, gay everything, and a matter of factness about like gay and and it was all packed into like seven words. And it was all because of what played on Jim Parsons face that landed And I'm so proud of that.
I don't know about you, but I wake up every day feeling like a big impostor. You know does that?
Everybody does?
Do they?
It's the people without impostor syndrome who are the impostors because they're pretending to be human. All humans struggle with impostor syndrome. Who doesn't I want to meet the person who doesn't feel like a fraud. My late friend, I think you knew him. David Rakoff.
Oh he was David Rakoff too, funny, amazing, smart guy. I commissioned him to write this article for this little magazine I had for one second where he took fabric and actually, never having so own anything in his life, he made himself some genes and it's the funniest and the genes were kind of beautiful, like he actually made these beautiful jenes but he.
Was such a crafter there was nothing he couldn't do with his hands.
And also the fun person in America, right, And he wrote a whole.
Book about imposter Systrom called Fraud, which is about no one was more talented, funnier, more of a beloved friend than David. And if David Rakoff moved through the world being as talented and beloved as he was and felt like he was a fraud, everybody feels.
Like everybody does, you might be right about that, except my mother, Like I don't think she ever had a fraudulent moment in her life. But wait a minute, now, getting back to social media and failure, right, Like that's one thing. I log on and I feel like a big why does that person have three jillion followers? Like what did that person ever? Do you know? By the way, I just followed you on Instagram? You better follow me back or I will unfollow you and you have a two day grace period. No, but I mean that whole the whole thing. Like thinking a lot about teenage girls and how shitty it is for them, and it makes them feel so shitty darling, what about sixty one year old like gay men. I have really bad, terrible, you know, more imposter syndrome when every time I log onto social media.
I just followed you, by the way, I just followed you while I was listening and following at the same time.
I could do that.
How shameless was that? Okay, that was shameless.
Start you have more followers on Instagram than I do.
I have to say, wait a minute, but you have to get more trolls than I do because you say things that are like really troll inducing, Right, how do you deal with them?
You know, I have a very thick skin, but also an advice column when you think about it, like the way Ann Landers did it. I very consciously modeled my column on ant Landers. It was like a blog before blogs existed, because there was this feedback loop with the readers. You would write something, you'd give some advice, respond to a letter. People would write in with what you should have said, with critiques telling you were wrong. You would print those letters and then respond to those letters. And in a way, if you look at old advice Calus before the Internet came along, it looks like a blog if you read enough of them side by side. And so I was getting like scale critiques from people and hate mail in the nineties before email came along, and I was used to like opening these things, reading them, putting some of them in print, putting them out there myself responding to them. And so when email came along and Twitter came along, I was like, Oh, this is not new to me, right, this is it I was. I didn't have the like shock of entry into this new universe that other people did because I was used to being dragged often by queer people.
Do you delete them? Do you post well? Because you use them as kind of a currency, right, Like it's a thing in your world, rights.
Less and less.
I used to like respond to more of them and like bait the trolls.
Sometimes I'll do a.
Quote tweet and like respond to someone who's being particularly dickish if I think there's something in it for me, if I think it's amusing, if I think that my followers would enjoy seeing this. Also there's the I'm not bothered of it, Like somebody sends me a note about me being a disgusting, perverted faggot and I should die or whatever, right, And then I put it in my own column and jokingly respond to it. Like somebody writes, you know, wrote you go fuck yourself, and my response was I have people for that.
Ah, nice, right, nice one.
The implication is you don't.
You don't right exactly, and if either of us has to go fuck themselves, it's you. Now.
Well, I's so funny how people conflate this whole thing about how drag queens are so dangerous to kids is something. It's just a ridiculous thing. They don't assume that we understand what part of drag shouldn't be put before kids. They want to tell us what we think, Like I made this one little tiny thing about how it wasn't dangerous. What's dangerous is saying it's dangerous without knowing what the fuck you're talking about. And everyone, like even nice people said, no, darling, you're off the mark here. And by the way, Matteo Lane and who he is, hilarious, Yeah, Lane, He said to me, you just delete them, delete, delete, delete, block, block, block, you know, And I started because it's just so dumb to get those kinds of comments when you're trying to say something smarter, and that must be a thing for you, Like, oh.
But the other skill besides block and delete is just don't look like I've been to the rodeo a couple of times, attacked on Brightbard, dragged on box News for a week.
It blows your phone.
It blows your phone up right right, Like people pour into your mentions to issue death threats and to say shitty things about you.
You don't have to read those.
It's like the bully saying, come to this place in the school yard after school because I'm going.
To beat you up.
And then you you don't have to go. You lead by another door.
The truth.
So when people are furious at me on Twitter and I'm like, oh, it's going to be one of those days, I don't look at it right, and it passes.
It passes. It passes so quickly.
I swear that's a very necessary message for us. I mean that. Okay, I'm going to ask you one last question, which is what does your obituary say? What is the headline, and what does it say?
Really?
Wow? Okay, remind me never to play the proofs questionnaire with Dan Savage.
Ever.
No, I'm just like trying to think. I wasn't snoring. I wasn't like, oh, that's a boring question. I was like snorting, like oh my god.
What I take everything really personally. That's why I don't don't trash me on when if you followed me, but don't trash me, I won't.
I won't trash you. I did want to say.
But basically what you're saying earlier about like there's that expression comparison, it's the death of joy, and that's a skill that you need to to not compare. Like there are tons of guys with better bodies than mine all over the internet. There's guys with better bodies than mine walking around my house. If I I have to not feel bad about that, right, and I like to live in a world where there are beautiful men. I've never felt like I was one of them. That's false modesty. Some people think I'm hot, that's okay, But like, yeah, I fat kids syndrome because I was fat high school.
Me too. I was fat my whole life, Darling, my whole life. I'm still fat. I'm still fat. And that's one thing Me and Arnold said that to each other. I'm not going to be the fat one. You know, when you're about to eat like three three cakes.
I hired a personal trainer who said, who took one look at me and said, you're what we call skinny.
Fat nice devastated here, did you no? No?
Like?
Of course I hired him, But this is me avoiding the question with them.
What's on my tombstone?
Santorum, Rick Santorum. Here lies Rick Antorum's political hopes and career because my readers, full credit to the genius of my readers, redefined Rix Santorm's last name to mean the frothy mix of lubin fieicle matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex. In two thousand and I think three, he gave an interview infamously to the Associated Press comparing gay people wanted to marry to child rapists and people who fucked dog to the AP and a reader wrote to me and said, he should never be able to live this down. We should redefine his last name. And it was kind of a genius idea, because Santorum sounds like the Latin name for something. Rix Santorm had a Google problem because the first result when you googled Rix Andtorm's name was the frothy mix of lubin fiegle matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex. When Rix Andorm ran for president. My reader was so precient. He ran for president, he came in second. Remember when he ran for president the first time, second for the Republican nomination. My reader was so precient because he was like, he should have to answer for this interview for all time and never escape it because the scandal was kind of dying down in two thousand and three after he said it, and when he ran for president, everywhere he went he was asked about his Google problem. Everywhere he went, he was asked about that ap interview because my readers turned his name into a dirty joke.
That is beautiful. I love you even more for that. Wow. Next time I see it underwear party, I'll go like, Hi, Dan, nice to see you.
You will have to be facetiming the only way you'll see my face at an underwear parties on FaceTime.
All right, Well, is there something you want to promote?
Go to my website Savage dot Love. My podcast Savage Love Cast is there. Every Tuesday. I do a bonus podcast called Sex and Politics where I get a bit wonk gear with political guests and my column Savage Love, which has been running for thirty three years. I am now giving sex advice to the adult children of people I was giving sex advice to you when they were adult childless people.
Still write it every week.
There's another column called Struggle Session, where I respond to people's critiques of my work and me every week at Savage dot logow.
I love it. Well, thank you so much. This was amazing.
Thanks. It was really fun.
I can't believe I'm much a good out of them in to view with Dan Savage Dot was just beautiful. I mean, that man has so much to say say. I feel like he's got the best opinions in the culture that we live in, you know, of all the people who speak, whether they are blue or red, or right or left, like, he really puts it together in such an incredibly smart, open minded and appealing way. I've been a big fan of his forever. I can't believe we've never met, and now I feel like we're besties. I feel like, especially since like he follows me on Instagram. Now, wohoo. That was like the big kind of fabulous, brazen thing that I accomplished with this interview was I got the fabulous Dan Savage to follow me on Instagram. Hooray. Well, anyway, I love you the tuning in. Thanks a million, darlings. If you enjoyed this episode, do me a favor and tell someone, tell a friend, tell your mother, tell your cousin, tell everyone you know. Okay, and be sure to rate the show. Love rating stuff. Go on and rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts so more people can hear about it. It makes such a gigantic difference and like it takes a second, so go on and do it. And if you want more fun content videos and posts of all kinds, follow the show on Instagram and TikTok at Hello Isaac podcast And by the way, check me out on Instagram and TikTok at. I Am Isaac Msrahi. This is Isaac, Missrahi, thank you, I love you and I never thought I'd say this, but goodbye Isaac. Hello Isaac is produced by Imagine Audio Awfully Nice and I AM Entertainment for iHeartMedia. The series is hosted by Me Isaac Mssrahi. Hello Isaac is produced by Robin Gelfenbein. The senior producers are Jesse Burton and John Assanti. It is executive produced by Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Karl Welker, and Nathan Chlokey at Imagined Audio, production management from Katie Hodges, sound design and mixing by Cedric Wilson. Original music composed by Ben Wilson. A special thanks to Neil Phelps and Sarah Katanak at i AM Entertainment