Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Premium: Dan Savage “The World Before Gay Marriage"

Transcript

Premium: Dan Savage “The World Before Gay Marriage" · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day, this is an abridged version of the episode that you can hear in full by signing up
• 0:04
  at uncomfortableconversations.substac.com slash subscribe. Enjoy the freebie.
• 0:11
  G'day, humans. Welcome to Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas.
• 0:15
  And I'm currently huddled in a nook at Nairport.
• 0:20
  Denver Airport in the beautiful Rockies, the Rocky Mountain of West.
• 0:24
  As we call it, or I call it that, someone else might as well.
• 0:28
  This is the kind of humiliation and indignity that I routinely endure in my service to you,
• 0:35
  my dear listener, even more dear if you're a paid subscriber. So yeah, I'm on holiday.
• 0:40
  Well, I'm really bringing my grandchildren to see their grandparents in the United States of America.
• 0:45
  And airports are not very easy places to find a quiet spot to record.
• 0:49
  So I'm huddled next to a big door that says trash only,
• 0:56
  solo basura underneath, no recycling, no reciclache underneath it.
• 1:03
  And a lot of very, very short, very friendly Latina ladies pushing enormous garbage carts past me.
• 1:11
  Look at me. They look at me with an inquisitive gaze as I said, huddled here,
• 1:16
  talking into my microphone, but they don't think that I'm a terrorist.
• 1:22
  I don't think that I'm a terrorist. You can't make jokes like that very loudly in an airport.
• 1:28
  So this is just between you and me.
• 1:30
  Great show for you today. Great show. This is one from the vaults, one from the archives,
• 1:35
  one you can't hear anywhere else in the world, this recording. And it's a bit of a time capsule
• 1:40
  because it's from an era prior to the legalization of gay marriage in the United States.
• 1:46
  And subsequently in Australia happened in 2015, thanks to the Supreme Court in the US.
• 1:51
  And 2017, thanks to a popular vote in Australia. And it's with one of the key proponents of gay
• 1:59
  marriage at an era at a time when it wasn't clear that it was going to happen anytime soon.
• 2:04
  Hearing him wrestle with that is, I think, fascinating. The man is Dan Savage.
• 2:12
  He's perhaps the world's most famous, respected, derided, infamous, provocative, and brilliant,
• 2:19
  sex-advised columnist, a gay gentleman himself. For more than 30 years, he's written an
• 2:25
  internationally syndicated relationship and sex-advised column called Savage Love. Get it? His name is Dan Savage.
• 2:33
  And for 17 years, he's been doing his blockbuster podcast, The Savage Love Cast,
• 2:39
  which is a telephone call-in sex-advised show. Wait, can you hear in the background
• 2:45
  one of these lovely ladies? I'm just going to stop talking so you can hear one of these lovely
• 2:50
  Latina cleaning ladies in my vicinity. Tell you what, there's a lot going on in the garbage
• 2:59
  disposal unit of Denver Airport. If you ever want a job that doesn't lack for interest and
• 3:05
  excitement, I wholeheartedly recommend applying for a garbage collection job at Denver Airport,
• 3:12
  because everything's going on right here. Nonetheless, let's get back to the important
• 3:16
  issues of Dan Savage and me sitting down on a couch in a television studio in New York City,
• 3:22
  because back in 2010, Dan created the It Gets Better Project to help teenagers,
• 3:29
  especially queer teenagers, understand that life gets better, when you grow up,
• 3:34
  and that project attracted It Gets Better videos from the likes of Hillary Clinton,
• 3:39
  even the then President Barack Obama. And when I had my television interview show in New York City,
• 3:45
  Dan was kind enough to stop by the Manhattan Studios for a chat. Now, if you do not hear the
• 3:50
  entirety of this episode and you are a paid subscriber, make sure you've got your own private premium
• 3:56
  feed by going on one comfortable conversations.substac.com slash podcast. Even if you haven't subscribed,
• 4:03
  now is your chance. I mean, really, if I have to endure the indignity of sitting by a trash
• 4:10
  receptacle in an airport waiting for my flight, and this is what I do for you, you can't be bothered
• 4:16
  pulling out your phone and going on uncomfortable conversations.substac.com slash podcast.
• 4:20
  Draw on a few shackles my way, pesos, as the case may be, in my current climate. I hope you
• 4:27
  enjoy the one, the only Dan Savage. He's the author of America's leading sex advice column,
• 4:36
  Savage Love. He's the host of the hugely popular Savage Love podcast and was co-founder of the
• 4:41
  Emmy Award-winning It Gets Better Project, the YouTube campaign that swept the internet in 2010
• 4:46
  and continues on to this day. Already a bestselling author, he's now out this week with a new book,
• 4:50
  American Savage, Insights, Slides and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love and Politics. I love the long
• 4:56
  subtitle Dan Savage is here, welcome out by his live. I'm going to call this segment Josh Sips
• 5:00
  and Dan Savage an intimate discussion about books with long subtitles. All my books have epic
• 5:05
  subtitles. I don't know what it is. It's a great book. I love it because it's so much in your voice.
• 5:09
  It's not a bio book. It's just sort of your rambling thoughts about a whole bunch of different
• 5:14
  things that can be at your heart. I'm interested in that. You don't pull any punches in terms of
• 5:19
  profanity. You write like you speak. Right. Was that a problem with your editor or anything?
• 5:24
  No, I mean they knew what they're getting into. I got a book deal, my first book deal because
• 5:28
  my publisher was reading my column, which was even more profane than this book or any book
• 5:32
  I've ever written. Yeah. I, you know, adult who's profanity. Fuck is in the New Yorker now.
• 5:37
  Yes. It certainly belongs in print. I hardly even think that it's a swear word anymore.
• 5:41
  Right. In such a common usage. We all need to grow up and use the language we actually
• 5:44
  use when we speak, which is what they tell you in writing classes. Use your voice, your actual
• 5:48
  authentic voice. People's actual authentic voices involve a lot of profanity. Fuck yeah,
• 5:53
  absolutely. You know, when I told people that you were coming on the show, we had lots of
• 5:57
  celebrities all the time. I've never had anyone come on Huff Post Live who has garnered more people
• 6:02
  coming up to me and saying, oh my god, I can't believe we've got Dan Savage coming on.
• 6:05
  Oh, wow. So when we have like a kind of support group, yeah, Tony winning stars coming on.
• 6:12
  And the guy who talks about sex all the time is the, is the number one catch. Did you have a dream
• 6:17
  that you would end up here? How did you get into this game? You know, I never, this is not my
• 6:21
  career path of choice. I, and it was an accident. I met somebody with starting a newspaper and I
• 6:26
  said, oh, you should have an advice column because everybody reads those. He said, that is excellent
• 6:29
  advice. I want you to write my advice column. And I never, I hadn't thought about it. I hadn't
• 6:32
  really wanted to do it, but I had rad in landers all my life growing up. And then in Xavier,
• 6:36
  a Hollander, the happy hooker in Panhaus Magazine, which I just steal from my brothers when I was a
• 6:40
  teenager. It's going all over my head, but it, but fun. Well, she used to write a dirty, dirty
• 6:44
  sex advice column a million years ago. Okay. And I just started writing it. And at first,
• 6:47
  it was going to be a joke. I was going to be a gay guy giving sex advice to straight people.
• 6:51
  And I was going to treat straight sex and straight people with the same revulsion and contempt
• 6:55
  that straight advice columnist had always treated gay people and gay sex with. Just ew,
• 6:59
  icky. And that was the joke. But straight people loved it and started sending me lots of
• 7:03
  letters because this being treated with contempt was a new experience for straight people as opposed
• 7:08
  to gay people around their sex sites. And the column just took off and ate my life. Does being
• 7:12
  gay give you any insight into that? Oh, I mean, did that concede to that kind of gag actually
• 7:15
  evolve into some kind of special insight? Or do you think it's irrelevant either way?
• 7:18
  No, I do think it's relevant. I like to say to piss off straight people that gay people are
• 7:23
  better at sex, no more about sex and have more sex, which is a double-edged sword that having
• 7:27
  more sex, particularly for a gay man can be a problem. But sex is what makes us not straight people.
• 7:32
  It's what sets us apart. We think about it. But also gay people are better at sex now because we're
• 7:36
  magic, although we are that too. But that's not the reason we're better at sex because we're forced
• 7:39
  to communicate. You know, when a man and a woman go to bed, usually they get to consent. Like,
• 7:44
  yes, let us have sex. And all communication ceases because vaginal intercourse is the default
• 7:48
  assumption. And somebody has to speak up if they want to do something else. When two dudes go to bed
• 7:53
  together and get to yes, they get to consent. That's the beginning of the conversation.
• 7:57
  What's going to happen? It's not obvious. It's not tab-a, slot-b. You know, I actually think a
• 8:03
  lot of straight people would be surprised to hear you say that because I think a lot of straight
• 8:06
  people would just think, well, obviously, you would just have sex. You would have penetrative sex.
• 8:09
  But who? Who's going to get penetrated? Even that has to mean negotiations. Right.
• 8:13
  And what also always blows straight a lot of straight people's minds, like something like 25 to
• 8:17
  25% or a third, 30% of all gay men never have anal sex. So there is no, for many gay men,
• 8:24
  there's no anal activity at all. Straight people go, then what do you do? We do all these other
• 8:28
  really fun things that you can do too that would improve your sex lives if you were doing it.
• 8:32
  And one of the things that you say in the book is that you think that a lot of the motivation,
• 8:35
  the anti-gay hysteria is actually anti-anal sex hysteria. It's anti, so if 30 or 40 percent of
• 8:41
  gay people aren't even having penetrative sex. And 40 percent of straight people are. Right.
• 8:46
  And when you look at the total numbers, gay people are tiny percentage of the population,
• 8:49
  somewhere around 5 percent. And if 40 percent of straight people have had or having anal sex,
• 8:53
  that means the vast and overwhelming majority of the butt-fucking that's going on in America is
• 8:57
  heterosexual butt-fucking. Most of the Santorum that's being produced in three runs in America
• 9:02
  is heterosexual. Okay. Now, some people will not know what the word Santorum means, other than
• 9:06
  our political junkies who know that, as a political person. So in the least but most graphic,
• 9:11
  in the least graphic way that still gets across what it is, just explain how you came to coin
• 9:16
  this phrase. It is now a dictionary definition phrase that you've been in. For a sexual byproduct.
• 9:21
  Yeah. So what did Santorum do? In 2003, Santorum gave this infamous interview to the
• 9:26
  Associated Press where he compared gay people in relationships, gay couples, to people who have
• 9:32
  sex with dogs or rape children. It made an equated gay people with dog sexers and child rapists.
• 9:39
  And my readers thought we should have a contest to redefine his name, to punish him for this so
• 9:45
  he could never escape from or forget these horrible comments. He said something vile about us,
• 9:49
  let's say something vile about him. And the winning definition was a sexual byproduct. And I won't
• 9:54
  give the winning definition because it's really gross. That didn't have a name but needed a name.
• 9:58
  And it's basically, you know, lube and whatever else is left in your rear end after you have anal
• 10:04
  sex. And this is now the official term for something. If you googled Santorum for a decade,
• 10:08
  if you googled Santorum, the first result was the new definition. It's still on the first page.
• 10:14
  And when he ran for president in 2012, all this writing everywhere about Santorum's googled
• 10:18
  problem because anybody who was like, oh, who's this guy is running for president? I think I'll
• 10:21
  Google him. The first thing that we're going to see was this new definition. Is that a source of
• 10:25
  pride? Absolutely. You know, we're no longer the LGBT community queers, straight people who are
• 10:31
  our allies. No longer just going to get punched in the face by bigots like Rick Santorum without
• 10:35
  taking a swing back. And we took a pretty effective swing back of Rick Santorum. One of the things
• 10:38
  that you talk about is how religious people will claim that you're sort of bullying them. You know,
• 10:42
  after you gave that speech where he's being a bully towards us. And you talk about the kind of
• 10:48
  weird inversion where merely criticizing a religious person is construed as bullying when all you're
• 10:53
  doing is standing up for the fact that they're bullying you. Yeah, they want to redefine self-defense
• 10:59
  as some sort of hypocritical retaliatory bullying. You know, if you're against violence, how can
• 11:05
  you punch that guy? But you said your anti-violence. But that guy was punching me. Yeah, that was
• 11:09
  self-defense. Violence and self-defense is permissible. When we get in the faces of people who are
• 11:14
  calling us sick, sinful, perverted, and also distorting and warping and harming us, you know, the
• 11:19
  lack of access to marriage rights for same-sex couples isn't just we don't get to have cake in a
• 11:23
  wedding. It's that on our deathbeds, our partners are dragged from our hotel rooms and handcuffs,
• 11:27
  which just happened. A lot of the cake in the wedding is a big bonus. It's nice, but it's the
• 11:31
  rights that are important that are denied us. And real-world couples, Edie Windsor, the woman
• 11:35
  is suing, in case all the other Supreme Court, real-world human beings suffer because of the
• 11:40
  lack of access to rights. And when we push back hard against that, they're like, oh my god,
• 11:44
  your bullies. Speaking of Edie is 2013 going to be the most important
• 11:49
  year for gay rights. I mean, the Supreme Court has Doma coming up. What's your prediction?
• 11:53
  I think we're going to get Doma overturned fingers crossed, but I think they're going to
• 11:55
  punt on prop aid. They're not going to legalize. We're not going to get a gay-rovy
• 11:58
  weighed for marriage where they legalize it and all 50 cents. Would you want that?
• 12:01
  I'm not sure. There's a lot of debate about whether that would be wise or honest.
• 12:04
  What's your take? I mean, do you think that moving too fast is a risk or do you, or do you
• 12:07
  want to let those people assay it? Look, a ride is a ride is a ride. You just give us a ride.
• 12:10
  I think I'm going to say both. The ride is a ride is a ride, but I think if I think we need to
• 12:14
  take the long view and wait 20 years. Not wait 20 years? Well 20 years for all the states.
• 12:19
  You know, if we overturn Doma, then gay couples who live in states that have marriage equality
• 12:23
  are have full-civil equality federally and at the state level.
• 12:27
  And you'd be cool with it taking 20 years to drag out of it?
• 12:29
  No, I'm not kicking it screaming into the 25th century. I am not cool with it, but I want the
• 12:33
  change to happen. And I don't think it'll take 20 years because the pace of change is so rapid.
• 12:37
  What I think is happening right now in 2013 is we've reached this tipping point
• 12:40
  on LGBT civil rights. We've reached pro athletes coming out. The pro soccer player who went in
• 12:46
  last week for the LA Galaxy and the pro basketball player who just came out and three states legalizing
• 12:52
  marriage for same-sex couples at the ballot box and then three in the legislature just in the
• 12:56
  last six months. We're reaching this tipping point. And we're going to win. And I'm just
• 13:01
  worried that a Roe v. Wade style decision on gay marriage would inspire such a backlash that
• 13:05
  there would be some reach some, you know, backsliding. Do you feel that 2013 is sort of the year?
• 13:12
  I almost feel like this is like this is the last moment. We've just we've just seen the end of
• 13:16
  the last moment at which it was publicly acceptable to be anti-gay. I feel like it's no longer
• 13:20
  acceptable among polite society or even in politics. Do you think that that's that we're at
• 13:26
  that kind of point? Yes. And I'm really old and really weird. I'm 48 and I remember when I was a
• 13:31
  kid watching firing line with my dad when I was like six, seven years old. And it was a time when
• 13:35
  you could still go on TV and argue against interracial marriage, argue against integration,
• 13:40
  condemn the Civil Rights Act, condemn Martin Luther King, and be welcome back next week because
• 13:46
  you're a respectable member of society and you had a legit political position that you wanted
• 13:50
  to argue. And then we reached a separate point. You couldn't argue that stuff anymore. The culture
• 13:53
  decided sort of on mass made up its mind that interracial marriage was okay and anyone who was
• 13:58
  opposed it was a bigot that integration was okay and anyone who posed it was a bigot. And you
• 14:04
  couldn't criticize Martin Luther King and call him a communist and an agitator and divisive
• 14:09
  anymore. And we're reaching that same tipping point on LGBT issues.