Hi Katie, Hi there, Brian. We should warn listeners that our podcast today should probably get an R rating. If you have young children in the room, you may want to have them listen to something else. Our guest today is an expert on relationships and sex. In fact, it's something of a living legend on those topics. For over twenty five years, Dan Savage has dished out sex advice, love advice in his syndicated Savage Love column. He's also written several books about his own family and relationships, dance writing, and well. Dan himself actually is, by turns withering, empathetic, hilarious, brutally honest, a little dirty, and always always fearless. And for Dan, the personal is definitely political. He often writes about abortion law, contraception, gay rights, HIV and AIDS, and he's no stranger to taking on politicians as well, most notably Rick Santorum. And you're gonna have to google that one because I really am not going to describe it. We covered a lot of ground in this conversation, from Dan's childhood to how he became a columnist, his love affair with Ann Landers, which is fascinating, his It Gets Better campaign, how he feels about Donald Trump and by the way, not very kindly, all sorts of things in between. So here's our conversation with Dan Savage. With all due respect to the Dosac case. Man, I think you're the most interesting man in the world. You have done so many things. Just reading about you, I think, what hasn't Dan Savage done. You've written books, you've hosted podcasts, you've led advocacy campaigns. We're going to get into all that in a moment, but first we want to talk about your long running advice column called Savage Love. You've been doing it for twenty five years. When your column first came out, it was a very new phenomenon, wasn't it a gay man giving frank sexual and relationship advice to mostly straight people. Yeah. At first, the idea, you know, the concept originally was it just gonna be a joke, and I was gonna do it for six months or a year, and I was going to treat the straight people, uh and straight sex with the same contempt and revulsion that hetersexual straight lady advice comments had always treated gay people and gay sex with, you know, an landers who I loved back in the day, the Playboy advisor. These people would occasionally take a gay question and you know, hold it with tongs and wrinkled their noses, but then give a little advice. Uh. And I thought I should do that to straight people and see how they liked it. And it turned out that they really liked it. Why they liked like, how gross is straight sex kind? It was the first year of it was I can't believe you would do such a disgusting thing. Your poor mother must be heartbroken. Here's some advice that's so funny. And it took off. And I think it was because, you know, straight people have never been treated this way before. And it was, you know, humorous if you were straight, to be treated as if you were powerless, which you weren't. Um and the advice was I guess good because the letters started just pouring in, and this kind of joke advice column under my feet within the first twelve months became an actual advice column. I'm sure the only person who could turn you away from being gay was a lands. Now, what up with that? Dan? How did you become obsessed with of all people and landers? Instead of by the way her sister Abby, I grew up in a newspaper house. My grandfather worked for the Chicago Daily News in Chicago Star, both now closed unfortunately, And so we got all the papers when I was a kid living in my grandparents house of my family, um MultiGen household, and so really the comics and the advice columns were the entry point for young you know, for the kids who looked at the newspapers were spread out over the dining room table. Uh. And so I just started reading and Landers, and we were liberals and Dems, So we got the Suntimes after a while stopped gtting the Tribune, which is where Abby was. So I grew up reading and who you know, grew and learned over the years and you know, changed her position on uh, gay people and a right to exist and why we exist. But what I was reading in Anne when I was, you know, eight eleven twelve wasn't very positive. But that's you know, she was over generation and we can't judge her through the light of right this minute. We have to look at her in the context of them, and she was compassionate in ways that other UH folks in the culture at that point weren't. In fact, you bought her desk at an auction. Is that right? I did? Uh? I got her daughter, Margot Howard's her daughter, one of the original dear Prudences. It's late. So she wrote an advice came for many years. And I called her when I heard about the auction of a Landers effects and got her permission because I didn't want it to be spun in the media as if I was being somehow disrespectful to the memory of a Landers. You're doing something that might upset her daughter. Uh. And got Margot's permission. And Margot and I are now friends and we chat all the time. And so I write my very dirty, very different sex advice column at the same desk. Grand Landers wrote her column for forty five years. We want to give our listeners a feel for your column and your podcast. So let's go over some of the signature savage love acronyms and catchphrases. Rapid fire, You ready, I'm ready? Are your listeners ready? I don't know, I don't know. I hope. So what's the Campsite rule? The Campsite rule is that if there's a large age difference or experience gap between two people who are hooking up or or friends with benefits or even dating that it is on the onus is on the older or more experienced partner to leave the younger or less experienced partner in better shape than you found them, which is the rule for when you camp. You should always leave your campsite in better shape than you found it, and we should all and it should apply generally like you should always leave people that you've dated or been with, hopefully in better shape than you found them. But in this context, you know the older younger. It means uh, you know, no sexually transmitted infections, no one planned pregnancies, no needless pain, no promises that you know you can't fulfill uh and that you help this person learn and grow while they're with you, and you don't leave them in worse shape than you found them. The camp say rule, what about g G good giving in game? That's what we should all be for our sex partners, UM good in bed. You know you want to acquire some skills. A human means a lot more complicated than a violin, and no one can play the violin the first time they pick it up. You gotta practice UH giving, which is sometimes you give pleasure UH in your indulgent without an expectation of an immediate return, that everything doesn't have to be instantly and equally reciprocity in the moment that sometimes you give. It doesn't have to be good for everybody. Well hopefully it's not. You want it to be traumatic for anybody or or unpleasant for anybody. But sometimes you are giving UM and not getting at that moment and that's okay. And game means sort of up for anything within reason. That sex should be an adventure that you two are on together. UM, and you know it's like good improv. You never say no in improv. And you want to, you know, be the person for your partner, particularly if it's a sexually exclusive relationship, Be the person who makes things happen for your partner. Be the person they come to, UH, who's going to welcome their fantasies or interests or kinson and celebrate them and make that stuff happen dot dot dot within reason. You know, being G G G good. Giving a game doesn't mean you do anything that your partner asks or wants and no, but he gets everything they want out of a relationship. UM. And sometimes you pay. It's another thing that to call them the price of admission is kind of grows out of G G G. And the price of admission is, you know, the price you pay to be with somebody. You know, if you're desperately into sex act X and that's not something that your partner will ever do, then the price of admission that you pay to be with that person as you never get to do that. And what about c posts that stands for cheating piece of shit? Uh? And do you have a lot of people call you dan or write to you and and they are writing about their c pos Mostly I get letters. When people use the acronym in a letter to me, they're using it to describe themselves. Really they you know, they say that I feel terrible, I'm a CPO s I'm a cheating piece of ship uh. And talking about non monogamy is not to tear down people who value monogamy, who want monogamy, who want a monogamous commitment, creating a universe where people who don't want monogamy and can't honor a monogamous commitment can go make commitments to people who also don't want monogamy and don't want a monogamous commitments. That makes people who end up in monogamous relationships. That makes those monogamous relationships safer and stronger, just like not having gay men mary straight women makes marriage stronger. Not having people who can't do monogamy making commitments to people who demand monogamy makes those monogamous commitments that are ultimately made stronger if the non monogamous and monogamous sort themselves. You're an early podcast adopter, and I'm curious, what is the podcast offer you that the column doesn't. Uh, you can really get into the nuance in a podcast the columns um and you really have to boil everything down to the nut. And on a podcast you can. You can digress, and I can get people on the phone and instead of it just being here's the letter, here's my response, we can have a conversation. I can bring in guest experts and and interview them at great length about an issue or a problem. Um. It just allows for more. Although now, because my podcasts have been around for so long, when I was podcasting so early, people like, oh my god, you were an early adopter of this new format. You must be a you know, a genius and you had such foresight, And it's like no, no, no, no, there were I call them the tech savvy at risk youth. There were people that I worked with who are young and tech savvy, who are like you were going to start doing this podcast whether you like it or not, and they kind of forced me to do it. I was very resistant. What are most of the calls about so situational ethics? You know? Twenty six years ago when I started writing Savage Love, half the questions were, you know, what's about plug? Or where's the swingers club in my area? Two words I never thought i'd hear on this badcast and now, and this may be helpful to you, Katie. Now, butt Plug has a wiki page, so you don't have to write into me to ask what it is after you overheard someone talking about one of the bus and swingers clubs all have their own website, so you don't need sort of specialized magazines with you know, referrals to p O boxes to find a swing club and Dallas, just google Dallas and swingers clubs and they pop right up. So all the questions I get now with the podcast and the column are I did this, they did that, I'm mad about this, they're mad about that. Who's right, who's wrong? And you have to kind of way in on these situational ethics, that the situation of ethics of this problem in this conflict. And it's a lot harder now to write an advice column than it used to be because you don't get I used to call them definitions and referrals. I don't get defined this, what is this? And I don't get referral questions anymore because the Internet does that. All I get are this is what happened. We need a ruling from Solomon about how we're going to cut this baby in half or whether we should. When when did you realize you were good at giving people advice? I mean you were a little bit of a of an outcast in in high school. You were the only out gay person in your class. As I understand it, and so did you did you sort of always feel a little bit separated from the back. It's just the way women. I think, I think more about gender because it impacts them more severely, you know, gender based discrimination, and people of color think more about race. I think when you're gay, you think more about sex because it's what makes you different. It sets you apart and complicates your life, and you have to be a little bit more thoughtful about it, and I realized early in life, and I was rare for gay out of my generation. I'm fifty two years old. It was rare for kids to be coming out in high school who are my age. But I did come out in high school and instantly became kind of the go to guy for my straight friends who had relationship problems or sex questions. UM, because I think they just intuitive that I was thinking more about these things than they were, because I had to think more about these things. Uh. And I think that's true for a lot of gay people. We talked a lot of gay men, lesbians, uh, even very young uh and recently out or out in college, and they'll tell you that they're the person that their friends confide in about their sex and relationship problems. I think because you know, they figure, you gave yourself permission not to be gay, but to be out, and maybe you'll give them permission to be whoever they actually are and help them let go of normal, which plagues a lot of people. You know. I was. I was struck that you came of age as a gay guy in a conservative Catholic household and during the height or the depths of the aids epidemics. I'm just curious how those two experiences shaped the sort of journalist and columnist you later became. Well, I got a Catholic education, educated by Jesuits, and you know, my parents were evangelical Catholics before that was a hip thing to be, which seems to be now. Um. And my mother would joke later, you know, after she came around on the gay thing, which she did pretty quickly after I came out, that the values that they had imparted to us, part of sort of their interpretation of the Catholic tradition was one of the reasons that I was out to them. And so it kind of blew back and bit them on the ass because they were very much about, you know, the importance of being honest and loving the people in your life and being truthful, uh, and not being deceitful. And yet I felt myself, you know, when I was young and Catholic and I thought about being a priest. I thought about, I could never come out. It would kill my parents. Um. I thought about, you know, I'll need to find a woman that I can lie to for fifty years and marry her. And then that was just so in conflict with what I had been taught about right and wrong uh, in Sunday School, at my Catholic grade school, at my Catholic high school, to to lie to someone all their life like that, to mislead someone, and it just forced me to to be out. It just felt like it grew out of my sort of education. Even though my faith didn't survive my coming out and I actually came out before the AIDS epidemic. I came out in and then uh into that buzz saw UH and watched a lot of my friends die in their mid twenties and early thirties, and that was really rough, and there was you know, there were moments there at the beginning of the HIV AIDS epidemic where I watched people that I knew to be gay go back in the closet um or or renounced their homosexuality and who were already infected and then died anyway, Uh, and it it, you know, the AIDS epidemic forced us to start telling the truth. Um. People were outed because they you know, suddenly had Carposi sarcoma UM. And it also forced us to tell the truth about about how we were having sex. You know, it used to be. You know, before HIV AIDS, there was the sex that everybody agreed that everybody ought to be having, even though everybody kind of knew that everybody wasn't having necessarily that kind of sex. And what AIDS force was a conversation about the sex people were actually having, not the sex that we all agreed people ought to have, which was the kind of sex that most advice columnists specialized in, like what you ought to be doing, And it was different about savage love. When I started, it really did grow out of my experience in the HIV AIDS epidemic, um the crisis, the worst years of it was let's talk about what we're actually doing, because that's where the risk comes in. As as I'm listening to Dan, I'm thinking how ironic it is that in some ways the AIDS epidemic accelerated the acceptance and tolerance in it, certainly in some quarters of gay people in general. Absolutely, you know, before the AIDS epidemic, we were just you know, gay people started coming out on mass after the Stonewall riots in nine and there was this kind of you know, bakan knowledge, youthful, exuberant adolescence of the movement where people were just so thrilled to be out and open and able to live openly, love openly, and it was just kind of a party. And that was the you know, the hedonism that people like Jerry Fallwell pointed to um and condemned. And then the AIDS epidemics slammed into the community and you suddenly saw that, you know, we suffered and died, and we suffered and died and loved and took care of each other at a time when even our own families refused to take care of us. Plus the activism, I think that that grew out of the AIDS epidemic. I think made a lot more people aware and exposed to the fact that there were a lot of gay people in the world, right, and it put put them front and center in some ways, obviously under terrible circumstances, but gave them much greater attention. And if people don't have awareness, obviously it's hard for them to go from awareness to acceptance. Right. It was a terrible circumstance in some ways. To borrow a phrase, also our finest hour, because we didn't collapse. You know, people forget what was being said that I remember it all very distinctly, you know, William F. Buckley saying that gay men should be tattooed on the arm and the buttocks. You had people talking about mass quarantining of openly gay people on islands. Um Pat Buchanan floated that in columns that ran in the Washington Post. It was a perilous moment, and we did feel like everything, that what little visibility and little security that we enjoyed, was going to be ripped away from us. And instead of uh, you know, I mentioned you know, a few people I knew who went back into the closet, that's not the reaction that uh, the overwhelming majority of gay people had. People who were not out yet came out and came out fighting, and people who are already out refused to see an inch of the ground that we had secured for ourselves. And it really was a war, and it was a war that we won. It's interesting. Jerry Folwell, whom you mentioned earlier and other key figures on the religious right, basically said this was punishment for the sin of being gay. Why do you think you were able to win that battle in the public consciousness against all of these figures who you know, had a lot more history and maybe credibility among millions of Americans than sort of unknown gay activists, maybe because it was such a disgusting, despicable comment and observation, Maybe that they had that going for We did have that going for us. We also had our secret weapon, which is that gay people are randomly distributed through the population, that we are born into straight families, and that was we were embedded in the heart of straight America. Even though many of us have been rejected by our families when we came out and we're exiled from them, we were still a part of them. And when people got sick, when people were dying, Uh, when lives are online, it really like pulled people up short. And some families failed their queer kids who are suffering their gay relatives or something. But some families came around, and eventually more and more of our families came around. I'm old enough to remember when p flag parents and friends of lesbians and gays would come up the street at the Pride parade. Everybody lost their minds. You know, I'm gonna cry talking about it even now. Uh, people standing a gay amend of lesbians standing on the side of the street watching the preade. Go by would see these people, other gays and lesbians Marsham Street with their parents, their parents who loved them and were willing to love them publicly in March and the Pride parade, and everybody would cry when p flag came down the street because almost no one had that kind of support from their parents, from their families. It was so rare. I bet that was incredibly moving. And you know, I just spent the weekend I was in the pines in Fire Islands, so as you can imagine, I was for this show. So my my husband's brother Tom is gay and he's been with his partner Andy for twenty plus years, so we always go to see them for a weekend in the summer at their beautiful home and Fire Island. And I was just thinking, as I was watching all these gay couples, how much things have changed? Dan, And I'm just I think in terms of social transformations, if you will, or progress, societal progress, I'm sure it doesn't feel that way for a lot of gay people. I remember my dad talking who I think was slightly homophobic, uh, you know, talking about some gay person who worked in his office, and kind of in hushed tones, and you know, I think and not flattering and not a flattering way. And my father was the most fair minded person I know, but this was a blind spot for him. But I think culturally it was so people were so closeted, and then you go to Fire Island and you see everyone just out and about and it's just it's just amazing to me how much things have changed. Amazing. Yeah, oh absolutely. And you know the P flag point P flag with Marchtown Street thirty four years ago everyone would sob Now P flag marches down the streets, priparate. We're all happy to see P flag, But most of us at the parade, most of the people there have families that love and support them now, so it's not as impact. It's not as emotionally devastating to see people with parents who love them, because you probably have parents who love you, uh now, and there's there has been such a change, you know. I talk frequently about the right wing myth and the left wing myth when it comes to progress, and the right wing myth is we can risk no progress if we give women the vote. Society will collapse, family will fall apart if we uh you know, pass the civil rights Act or the Voting Rights Act. Everything's gonna end if we'd let gay people serve opening in the military. The military is going to collapse. If we get people get married, family is going to collapse. It's always, you know, do this, there will be a catastrohe And that's the right wing myth, and they're proven wrong again and again and again and again. There their dire predictions never come to pass. The left wing myth is there's been no progress, that we're as racist, as homophobic, as anti semitic, as transphobic a culture as we have ever been, and that's demonstrably false. We are not free from racism or sexism, or homophobia, or transphobia or anti semitism, but we've made tremendous progress. And on the left we shouldn't. We shouldn't propagate a myth. It's in some ways as damaging as that right wing myth that we can risk no progress because we want to be able to point to the progress we've made and be able to say, look, we've done this, We've taken all of these steps, and it hasn't just you know, the sky hasn't fallen and the country hasn't fallen, and anything, we've gotten better and stronger, uh, and more just as a society for having taken these steps. So the left should always be pointing to the progress that we've made to argue for more progress, to refute the right wing myth that we can risk no progress. And what about the nature versus nurture argument? You know, it's funny because I thought it was pretty established that it was nature that people are born gay. But then other people seem to come out and say, well, it is a choice. I think Cynthia Nixon not that long ago, didn't she create some controversy about that and it was a choice. Yeah, And I'm just curious about your take on that. Well, it shouldn't matter. The people who say it's a choice are arguing that gay people, queer people shouldn't have any civil rights, be allowed to marry, be allowed to adopt, because they don't have to exist. Um, well, Mormons don't have to exist. Faith is a choice. That's why there are street preachers and proselytizers and Jehovah's witnesses knocking on my door this morning. Religion is a choice. It's also a protected class, as it should be. Um, and you're not allowed to discriminate against someone based on their chosen faith. So there's just this dishonesty at the heart of the way so many people of faith, it's usually religious people who make this choice argument about sexual orientation. They're saying that because this thing is a choice, you deserve no protections. Um. I experienced my homosexuality as not a choice at all. Uh. It shouldn't matter whether it was a voice or not. But certainly for me felt born. And there is a body of sort of evidence. No, there's no one gay gene out there, but there are genetic factors at play. You know. The most famous thing is the twins studies that show that if an identical twin is gay, Uh, the other twin is likelier to be gay, but not automatically gay. So that there are it seemed to be a multicausal thing. But the way, you know, most gay people don't, you know, we dread being gay. When I was thirteen years old and realizing that I was gay, it was a catastrophe. It wasn't a choice I made to destroy my life, to you know, up end my relationship with my parents, to estrange myself from my siblings and the faith that I had been raised in to live every day in terror of being caught or found out or scrutinized in such a way that I might be outed, and then to police my behavior and try to act straight, even had sex with girls like I desperately wanted to be straight. I desperately wanted to be anything other than gay. That was not a choice I made to p saw my dad, which is the argument that a lot of people who don't know what they're talking about when they talk about homosexuality like to make. Can I say something about Jerry Fallwell, who came up a couple of times, Um my dad. Uh was for Anita Bryant was for Jerry Follows, kind of a conservative guy. He said things that were anti gay in front of me when I was ten and eight that I remembered that just pierced me like kind of new then. And the argument that the Fallwells and Brian's used to make was that, Uh, gay people were a threat to the family because we didn't get married, because we didn't have children, because we didn't settle down. We lived for the moment and for pleasure and the next do orgasm, and that was why we were terrible. Well that's the only way that we were allowed to live. We couldn't get married, we couldn't have children. Then once gay people were freer, there were gay people who wanted to get married. There were gay people who wanted to have children and and did marry and did have children and do and continue to just as there are straight people who don't want to get married, don't want to have kids, and don't that. There was nothing gay about the gay lifestyle that fall well condemned, and nothing straight about the straight lifestyle. Uh. In the end, there was something straight about it. And what we see now is kind of this great cross pollnization where you know, gay people live as you know, the quote unquote gay lifestyle until they settled down and then live the straight lifestyle, and straight people kind of do the same. Like straight people borrowed a lot from gay culture and just renamed it. Uh. You know, we used to can I use a swear word? Yeah, We used to talk about funck buddies, and now straight people talk about friends with benefits. We used to talk about tricking, and then straight people called that hooking up. And there's so much in like young straight life and culture and young people, young adults straight people's second life. That's just gay stuff renamed and reappropriated. So we still marriage from you, You still fun buddies from us, and I think we're even Yeah, me too, I think we're definitely even. That. That said, Dan, you know you are a major proponent of this concept called monogamish, which is a sort of a modified open marriage concept where you you don't believe that for a lot of people, lifelong monogamy is realistic, and so if both partners can consent, you believe that there there can be extramarital relationships. Can you talk about that both in concept and also in practice in your own life? Well, I actually coined the term monogamist to describe my own, uh life with my husband. Um, we're not monogamous. When you're a gay couple, particularly gay couple who are parents, and you're saying you're not monogamous, people picture uh, you know a degree of promiscuity or recklessness that just isn't us, um, And so you know, we were more monogamous than not you. We're mostly overwhelmingly having sex with each other and occasionally a very special guest star. So I started saying, like the three of you are just like you go out off on your own. I'm getting a little nervous here. Both. The question I put to Stephen Colbert once that made him have to stop his show was, you know, he said, I asked me if I cheated on my husband, And I asked him if it was cheating if I'm cheating at one end of a guy while my husband cheats at the other end of the same guy at the same time. Are picturing that everybody out there in podcast and we'll see if that makes Yes, Yeah, we got that. You're painting quite a picture. But do you also do you also when you say you're monoga mish, Dan, would you also have a sexual encounter with a with a guy and that your husband doesn't know? And he's okay with that? Because I would not be jiggy with that, Dan, if my husband wanted to do that. What we do, and what I think all people who are engaged in ethical nonmonogamy is we do what we both agree is okay. You know, when I talk about monogamysh though in the context of the column or the concept that I that are promligated like it's been embraced by a lot of people who are monogamous. But what they you use monogamous to mean is, of course we're still attracted to other people. You know, we're told a lie about monogamy and about long term relationships and love and commitment when we're kids, which is you know, one day you'll fall in love and you won't want to have sex with anybody else, and you will be monogamous. And the truth is, you grow up, you'll make a monogamous commitment. You'll still want to have sex with other people, but you're not going to because you've made a monogamous commitment and you should honor that commitment. Um. If two people are policing each other in a monogamous relationship for evidence of what both should just assume to be true, that's exhausting and it generates a lot of conflict, like, oh, you looked at that person. You're attracted your personal trainer. Um, you checked out the baristas, But well, of course your wife's attracted to a personal trainer. No one in the whole long history of personal trainers has ever hired a personal trainer they didn't want to fuck. It's the question with monogamy is whether or not I don't want to do that with my personal trainer names Larissa and I. You're the exception that proves Earle um By and large broadly speaking generally, um So, of course you're both attracted to other people, and if you're making a monogamous commitment, then you don't sleep with other people. But if why bust each other and give each other grief for the fact that you will sometimes perceive your partner to be attracted to someone else. Of course they're gonna be attracted to someone else. If you can diffuse that in a in a monogamous relationship that source of conflict, you're gonna have a more stable monogamous relationship. I deal with it by just giving my husband a lot of free passes, knowing that he's not going to use the free passes, but acknowledging that if I gave free passes out, those people would be a part of the free pass system. Yeah, but your free processor a little bit unrealistic. It's like, oh, yeah, john if you could convince Gwyneth paltr to sleep with you, go right ahead. Hey, I'm not going to tell Johnny you said that, Brian, But here's I was just gonna ask Dan. You know, you and your husband adopted a son. I think a lot of people say that it's important to be monogamous for the sake of the kid and a stable family unit. Is your son aware of the fact that you're monogamish, not monogamous, And what effect, if any, do you think that would have on him? Well, he doesn't like to hear about his parents sex life anymore than anyone else wants to hear about their parents sex lives. Uh. You know, he's read some of the stuff that I've written. He knows, and we have generally acknowledged it without how old into details. He's nineteen years old, he's an adult. Uh So I often say to people, ask the questions, if your parents were swingers, would you want them to tell you? Probably not, because there's two different kinds of monogamy. There's social monogamy and sexual monogamy. And there are people who are socially monogamous, perceived to be monogamous, who are not actually monogamous. And I think Terry and I would be socially monogamous if I hadn't written what I had written, even I hadn't told these truths, and I felt like we should tell to de stigmatize and demystify, Uh, non monogamous relationships. Um, So we don't go into it with great detail with our kid, nor does he wish to discuss it with us in any great detail. Uh. Nor would I want to talk with my parents about their sex life in any great detail. And if they were not, all wouldn want to hear about that from them either. I remember when my parents used to lock their door, and I would be like gross, because I you know, every once in a while, my dad would lock the door and I'd be like that going on in there. Anyway, on that note, we're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, Dan, we want to hear more about your podcast and some of the weird questions or interesting questions you get about Donald Trump and his so called commitment to l g b t Q issues that he talked about on the campaign trail, and your campaign with your husband, the It Gets Better campaign. So we're going to talk about all those things right after this, and now back to our conversation with Dan Savage. Let's talk about what Donald Trump has done visa v. Gay rights, and of course the recent transgender band which caught so many people in the Pentagon by surprise. Um, were you hopeful that he would be more supportive and what has your reaction been to some of the moves that he has made. I wasn't hopeful. Um uh. Donald Trump crawled into bed with Mike Pence. That was his first big act as the nominee, was picking Mike Pence, who is one of the most rapidly anti gay Republican politicians in the country. Mike penncey redirected funds from HIV prevention education to X gay therapies, including shock treatments. Rather than educating you so you don't contract HIV, We're going to electrocute the gay out of you. That's Mike Pence's platform on gay rights. And Trump picked Pence to be his running mate. Uh. Trump allowed um, Tony what's his face from Family Research Council Perkins from the SPLC certified anti gay hate group Family Research Council to basically right the Republican platform again. Um. You know. Trump touched a Pride flag at a rally, and a bunch of right wing gay people, a handful that exists out there, pointed to that as evidence that he would be the most pro gay president ever and then appoints Neil Gorcus to the Supreme Court, who's already uh issued anti gay rulings when he was involved in lower courts, And now the transpan which is looks like it's going to go into force, And when you have the Justice Department reversing an Obama air interpretation of an anti gender discrimination statue as covering sexual orientation, and the DJ now weighing in and say oh, no, no no, no, no it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't, and inserting itself into a lawsuit that it did not need to insert itself into into a litigation it wasn't involved in, like aggressively going after gay rights. So yeah, I didn't look at Trump and think, oh, this is going to be a sunny new era of Republican pro gay anything. It was more of the same. Having said that, though he did tweet out in two thousand and sixteen, thank you to the LGBT community. I will fight for you while Hillary brings in more people who that will he should have said, who will threaten your freedoms and beliefs, And even at the r n C he said, as your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBT citizens. From the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology. Yeah, the keyword there is foreign ideology. We're not going to get thrown off towers by ISIS in the United States while Donald Trump is president, but he is not going to protect us from a domestic hateful ideology. He's going to empower domestic haters of LGBT people as he has. Yeah, he was trying to make the political argument that he's tougher on ISIS, or he was tougher on ISIS than Hillary and therefore gay people should vote for him. And you know, I don't think that was a very successful political pitch, but it came across his hypocrisy as he made this decision to ban trans people from the military without even consulting the generals who would have to oversee and implement that policy. The scariest thing about that announcement he made on Twitter about banning trans people from military without consulting his generals was that that was three tweets, and the first tweet ended without the announcement about what the hell he was talking about, And there were nine minutes between that first tweet and the second tweet where the Pentagon thought that the Trump might be announcing an attack on North Korea. And you know the North Koreans are monitoring Trump's Twitter feed, so they might have thought the same thing. We have a dangerous lunatic in the office of the president right now and paralleling us all not just where people. How many trans people are actually in the military. I've seen the numbers really very wildly. They do not all people who are trans or out. So we're going to have perhaps witch hunts like they used to do for closeted people in the military, for closet gaze and lesbians and bifox in the military. But there are reportedly thousands although like you, of the numbers I've seen very widely, but reportedly thousands of trans people already serving in the military without incident, without it being a problem. The Pentagon supports allowing trans people to serve openly and continuing to serve openly in the military. So you you started a project called I T m f A. Do you want to say what that stands for? It stands for, Well, first, we have to know that. Uh. In my advice column, I frequently use the acronym d T m f A because so many people right in and the advice they need is to dump the motherfucker already. They're like in a terrible relationship and they're asking for help, and the only help they need is the push to dump. And so sometimes I use that shorthand to save space in my column. D T. M F A. And you're trying to give the nation similar advice exactly. It stands for impeach the motherfucker already. And we've sold thousands and thousands of T shirts, mugs, very tasteful of pel pins that you can wear on a tasteful suit if you're going on the cable news program to talk about the President UH and other merch and donated whole bunch of money to Plan Parenthood, the International Refugee Assistance Project, and the a C l U. All proceeds go to those three organizations. And you've raised over a hundred thousand dollars. Is that we sold a lot more than a hundred thousand dollars. That's what we were able to donate after buying the merch, shipping the merch, paying the taxes, a hundred thousand dollars to those organizations. We're getting ready to make another big donation to those organizations based on sales since that donation. Um, And what's fun about I t m f A is, as you know, you wear the T shirt I t m f A and people look at you or the red hat that has I t m f A on it instead of make America Great Again, and people say what is I t m f A stand for? And then you get to tell them, And at that moment it's like it's like the sorting hat in Harry Powder. You're gonna know whether you're talking to a good person or a bad person in my opinion, because they lie there, laugh and think that's hilarious and want the T shirt themselves, or they'll luf off and on. It's interesting you just said that because there are a lot of people, a few million in fact, who voted for Barack Obama in and then voted for Donald Trump in. Are you saying that they're all bad people, that the sixty two million people who voted for Donald Trump were all bad people? Or is there some shift that needs to happen in the society where the Democrats or commentators like you need to make a stronger case to those people about why and how Donald Trump is bad for them. Yes, I agree that They're not all in the basket of deplorables. I think there definitely are some who are in the basket of deplorables. That statement Hilary made that was just so problematic for her, in such a burden for her, is really kind of true. You know, in politics, you can't win over everyone. You have to work at the margins. And there are people who support for Trump was marginal and conditional. You've seen his poll numbers dropping. You've seen a lot of people even in the base, the GOP base and his base, regret their support for him, including one of his highest profile queer supporters, who's Peter Teal, the Silicon Valley investor billionaire uh now thinks that the Trump administration is incompetent in a disaster. Thinks now what we all could see coming plainly before he was elected. So, yeah, you want to work on reaching those folks. And you know the message I think the Democrats need to send us that the Republicans are lying to you about cause and effect. They're pointing to the fact that people of color it's not legal to discriminate against them anymore. That you know, women are empowered in the workforce, and gender discrimination is wrong that like there's all these openly gay people around, and you know, there's more people causing more Mexicans, there's more immigrants, and they say, look at these things, this is why you don't have a living wage job, and actually those things, you know, there's correlation perhaps there, but there's not causation. You have a living wage job because we've destroyed the union movement, because we've shredded the social safety net, because we don't invest in schools and communities and transportation and housing the way we once did. That's that's why it's tougher for you. That's why college is primitively expensive for your kids now. It's not because gay people are open. That didn't cause that to happen. It's not because there are more Mexicans now than there were thirty forty years ago. What the problem now is that there's not a union. The problem now is that we've shredded that social safety net, that we've done away with living wage jobs, but that we don't that the rich don't pay their fair share, and then we invest that money into programs that benefit anyone. That's the cause of your misery, not these those people, whether you're talking about people of color or queer people or trans people or whoever the scapegoat of the moment is that they're pointing to. You know, I have to point out, though, I thought it was interesting, Dan, that you launched this I T M F A campaign during George W. Bush's presidency and which and he, the president Bush must seem like Nelson Mandela at this point in time to you, you know, in retrospect, you know, Bush launched you know, a disastrous war and tank the economy. Uh. We got out of the Bush era alive, Uh, most of us, not all of us. And he also got reelected in part on an attack on gay people in gay marriage in particulars. That's true. So now we can look back on the Bush air thinking, well, it didn't kill us. Right now in the middle of the you know, out the beginning of the Trump hopefully not era, hopefully the Trump twenty four months, Uh, he might get us all killed. And it's a little bit you know, you want to like return to the president who you know, in retrospect didn't get us all killed, but might have at the time Gondness all killed. How realistic do you think it is that Donald Trump will be impeached. If Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, he would have been impeached twenty three times already. H If Chelsea Clinton was filling in for Hillary uh in an official capacity in any way, there would be no end of screaming and yelling, complaining, um, the corruption, hypocrisy, the double standards UH are are appalling. So you know, realistically, he's probably not going to get impeached as long as Paul Ryan is sitting there and a Speaker of the House. I'm hopeful that the Dems can take at least the House and hopefully the House in the Senate. Uh in. But if the Democrats do take the House in, do you really want Donald Trump to be impeached? Given what you just said about Mike Pence? People ask that question a lot, like, oh my god. But if we impeach him, then it's Pence. And my feeling is as awful as I think Pence is. Pence oscillates in a predictable band of Republican awfulness, whereas Trump, you don't know what's going to happen next, and it's a bit of an existential terror living with that man in the Oval office. You're highly critical, obviously of Republicans. But you also get annoyed by liberal Democrats. What do you think they get wrong? And why are they why do they seem to be struggling, you know, and having a bit of an identity crisis. Democrats are just so bad at messaging. You know, the word goes down from some you know, the Republican death star, that we're going to call these partial birth abortions, that we're gonna call them death taxes, and we're gonna talk about a death panel and or fake news, and then every Republican marches in lockstep, every Republican as behind whatever the message is, until even liberals can't think of uh, that abortion procedure without thinking partial birth abortion, or can't think of estate taxes without thinking death taxes, and Democrats can't seem to uh make that same sort of effort. Democrats can't seem to unite, for instance. And this isn't my idea of suggested years ago by a Republican operative who walked away from the right wing movement because he was so disgusted by what he had witnessed and his name escapes me, because marijuana is legally here where I live, and he he said, why are you calling them entitlements. We don't like people who are entitled. No one's entitled to anything, right, that's the American myth. You have to make it happen for yourself. What they are is and what you should be calling them are earned benefits, Social Security, medicare earned benefits. You paid in. You earned this, not you're entitled to it. And this has been floating around now for like a dozen years, this advice. And yet every time you see a Democrat on television talking about Social Security, it's entitlement, entitlement, entitlement, entitlement. Even though that's it's right wing rhetoric to call it an entitlement, it undermines social security. Every time a Democrat lets the word entitlement fall out of their mounds and you see it on I think single pair is not a term that Democrats should embrace. And Democrats are just terrible messaging. So what should it be? Universal healthcare? Everyone is pro universe, everyone's pro healthcare. When you hear single pair, And what the what the ours will do when already are doing, is they'll say to an individual voter, you know who they mean when they say a single pair, they mean you you're going to be paying for their healthcare for those people. So they really need sort of new branding, don't they. They need to hire a consultant to come up with better terminology. I think he's talking about kind of like a Frank Lence for the left. Frank was a guest on this show, and he's of course famous for coming up with words and catch phrases that Republicans can use to defend and promote their ideas, and the Dems desperately need more. And I think there's an example in gay marriage when it comes to messaging. Um. You know, even advocates of of same sex marriage, advocates of marriage equality like me and other folks who you know, pushed the movement, Mary bon Otto and Evan Wolfson and Andrew Sullivan a lot. Everyone was using gay marriage, gay marriage, and then there was this shift on a dime one day where everyone started using marriage equality because gay marriage put gay first gay for a lot of straight people, who are the people we are trying to convince is a negative. It conjures up negative mental images of frankly, of gay sex, gay marriage. It's like gay sex marriage, this is butt sucker marriage. And that made people uncomfortable because not everyone is for gay or that's okay with gay sex. And then marriage equality, everyone's for marriage, everyone's for equality, universal health care not single payer, because everyone's for the universe and everyone's for health. That's so interesting, isn't it? How much that changed the perception and ergo the progression of of gay marriage or marriage equality, right, and that happened a dime where everyone started using marriage quality. Why twelve years after uh this, I think kind of seminal op ed was written about. Stop calling them entitlements, call them earned benefits. Our Democrats still going on CNN and MSNBC sometimes even Fox and saying and having the word entitlement come out of their mouths. It's political malpractice at this point, speaking of Fox, does your dad still watch Fox News only twenty four hours a day so he's limited himself. That must be a fun dinner table conversation. I mean, because you do. It's it's amazing to me. You watch the different networks and it's like a parallel universe, it is. You get a completely different perspective given who you're watching right now. Do you have a hard time even discussing things with him? Yeah, we don't talk about politics. We can't we we we don't have the same language, we don't live in the same universe. And you know, my dad, like I think a lot of people exist in kind of hermetically sealed right in universe. Although he claims he's an independent, and yet he only votes for Republicans and U except says, fact, a lot of the crap that is shoveled out out of the television screen every day by Fox News and Hannity and all the lying liars over there, how can we ever come together if people are getting their worldview from two such disparate places. I mean, I think we're probably overblowing the number of people who watch cable news, which is not that many. You know. I think sometimes if you watch it, you feel like everybody is. But it seems to me that it's it's only I think, exacerbating this divide in the country. It is. And but but we're never going to bring everybody together. There was never a moment where we were were all together, um and there never will be. You know, what you want to do is as symbol a majority, and sometimes that means looking at the people you can't persuade and not not trying to persuade the unpersuadable, is not not expending that effort. Uh. And to not fast effort on those who cannot be persuaded, you have to first be able to identify accurately those people who cannot be persuaded, and identify accurately those people who can be moved. And maybe the people you cited earlier who voted for Obama eight years ago or four years ago and voted for Trump this year, that those are the people that Dems should be really digging into and figuring out how to speak to and how to what language and what sort of words and phrases that best encapsulate and communicate Democratic policies which are better for those people, uh, will work and to bring them around. But the hardcore Donald Trump can do no wrong. Dear leader Dan, you were introduced to many Americans through the It Gets Better project, which you started in with your husband, and the idea was to have adult submit videos assuring gay teenagers that they can go on to you know, have good lives even after being bullied as teens or feeling bad about themselves for being gay. How did how did this idea come about? Well, there was this kid in Indiana named Billy Lucas who killed himself. Uh and he it's a it's a horrible story, but you know, he was very brutally bullied all through middle school in high school, never came out to anybody, may not have been gay, but was perceived to be gay. And after he died, a Facebook memorial page was created for him by his family. Were the same kids who had been bullying him uh in school went They went to that page to say they were glad he was dead and to call him faggot one last time in front of his grieving parents. And I wrote about that, and I was just so furious, as we're all the commenters except one who wrote a comment on my blog on the thing I wrote about Billy's death and that Facebook page where she said I wished I had known you, Billy, and being able to tell you it makes me cry. I've been able to tell you that things get better. Rest in peace. And that really leapt out at me, because things do get better, often on the personal level, on the macro level, for the queer community, things have gotten much better, and we need to be able to share that with kids. And I just was thinking about things get better. And you know, particularly the kids who have parents would never allow them to talk to a queer adult or go to an LGBT youth support group or join the g s A in their school. Those kids need to hear from queer adults about how it gets better, um and how to make it better for themselves, what we did to make it better for ourselves, And we wouldn't get permission to talk to those kids, right, And it just occurred to me that, oh, there's the Internet, there's YouTube, there's Twitter and Facebook. We don't need permission to talk to those kids anymore. That there are queer kids out there who can't get to a queer youth support group, but we can bring the queer youth support group and the adult perspective to them using these new tools. Because when you think about you know, people have said to me, you know, it's not just gay kids who are bullied, like absolutely true. The kid is bullied at school because of his race or her faith or his class goes home to parents with the same race, faith, class that they can open up to and expect support. A kid who's queer or gender nonconforming or gay goes home to parents who aren't queer, and sometimes disastrously are there. We're the worst bullies in their lives are bullying them too, and they have no one to turn to. You know, a kid of a kid who's uh, you know, an African American kid goes home to his parents and can talk about what he's encountered, what he's seen. The parents will share with their kid how they navigate living in a society with the plague by systemic racism, how you know, how they survive. And the kid who's gay goes home to parents who can't impart that, who can't share that. Even if the kids openly gay and the parents are supportive, they don't know how to illuminate that path. And what the Gets Better campaign did was it allowed LGBT adults to share what they learned navigating that often all by themselves, um with queer kids who are just starting out, who are just figuring out who they are, and also straight people who are were supportive of or are supportive of the community. They participated as well. You had people like Stephen Colbert, for example, in Janet Jackson and all sorts of people, Barack Obama, Barack Obama exactly, and Joe Biden. They all contributed videos to this effort, which was really, I I imagine, also very important. It was important, you know, for my money, Uh, I think the most important videos are the videos by LGBT folks that no one's ever heard of, not celebrities, not famous. There was one by a lesbian dairy farmer in Vermont talking about even living in this world community, how it got better for her, and how she's loved and accepted by her family and uh and her community, and that's really important. What wasn't great about the videos from straight folks? Uh? You know, as re Kline from Box made a really wonderful it gets Better video was an important message for a lot of young queer kids who are being bullied by their families and by every straight person that they know. Is the message that there are straight people out there in the world who will love and accept you for who you are. You may not know any of them right now, but they're out there, you know. I hate to end things on a pessimistic note, but I can't help but wonder, which makes me sound very much like Carrie Bradshaw. But with all the things that are going on in the country and some of the things that the Trump administration has done so far. Are you concerned about the strides that have been made and about going backwards and about some of the members of these communities who are going to really suffer as a result. I am, I'm very concerned. But you know, circling back to when we were talking about HIV AIDS, things were dark and things looked really dire, and there was you know, we've made progress, but then that was halted in some places reversed, uh, and then we got into the fight and that fight and having to defend what we'd already uh secured. Um, that fight made it better in the end. That fight wound up creating more progress and more forward momentum. So right now there's a fight on and people have to jump in and get engaged. But that's how it gets better because you got out there and fought. That's how the Act up generation made it better for the generations of where people who have come after by engaging in the fight, by defending ourselves and fighting for what we know to be right. So this is galvanized the community in a way exactly. You know, the we talked about the transpan and it's being used politically by this Republican administration. George Bush, like Brand said, George Bush too thousand and four helped get reelected by running anti game marriage initiatives in eleven states that passed in each and every state, and a decade later, we have marriage equality in part, not despite those campaigns, but because of them, because the anti marriage campaign force us to have an ongoing conversation about marriage rights and about gay relationships and straight relationships, and about love. And even though we lost those sort of snapshots in time in two thousand and four, we were winning the argument. The more we had the fight, the more we had the argument, the more the needle moved in the direction of justice and fairness toward us. And we're having that fight now about trans rights. You know, their weaponizing anti trans bigotry at this moment. They may win at this moment, but the conversation they're starting and the fight that we are now in is going to move the needle in the direction of progress and justice ultimately and in the end. Well, Dan Savage has been such a pleasure to talk to you about so many different things. We really appreciate your coming on the podcast, and you know, I look forward to talking to you in the future. It was my pleasure. Thank you so much. A huge thank you to our podcast team are indemfatigable podcast team, our producer Gianna Palmer, our production assistant Nor Richie, our audio engineer, Ryan Connor in l A and Shared O'Connell, who mixes the show. Hi, Jared, he's just waiting at me now. Plus Alison Bresnick on Keys just kidding, Alison Bresnik on Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, everything social and Emily Beena on snares I mean, who keeps things moving at Katie Kirk Media, Mark Phillips, By the way, thank you for writing our terrific theme music. I still think it's extremely catchy. I give it a ninety five for dancing. Katie and I are the executive producers of this show, and as we keep reminding you, you can email us at comments at currect podcast dot com or you can leave us a voicemail at nine to nine, two to four, four, six, three seven. We really love hearing from our listeners, good, bad, and ugly, well maybe not ugly, but you know, constructive criticism, nice feedback, all of it. We appreciate it, and we really do make this show free you not for the money, so thank you for that's for Dave. Sure. If you can't get enough of us, I'm Katie Curic on Twitter and Instagram, Katie dot Curic on Snapchat. You can find me on Facebook as well. Brian meanwhile, is at Twitter at Goldsmith b. So here's the part where we appeal to the better angels of your nature, just like Abraham Lincoln. Won't you please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and subscribe as well. Your support helps make this show possible. So thank you very very much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.