Dan Savage

Dan Savage – Life, Work, and Notable Quotes


Explore the life of Dan Savage — writer, advice columnist, activist. Learn about his background, career (including Savage Love), activism (notably the It Gets Better Project), and some of his most provocative and influential quotes.

Introduction

Dan Savage (born October 7, 1964) is an American author, journalist, media pundit, and outspoken LGBT rights activist. He is best known for his long-running advice column Savage Love, his podcast Savage Lovecast, and his co-founding of the It Gets Better Project. Through his writing and public voice, Savage has influenced conversations around sexuality, relationship norms, queer lives, and public policy in provocative, direct, and often controversial ways.

Early Life and Education

Daniel Keenan Savage was born on October 7, 1964, in Chicago, Illinois. He was raised in a Catholic family and attended Quigley Preparatory Seminary North in Chicago, a high school for boys considering the priesthood—an experience he later described critically.

Savage later went on to study theater and acting at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.

After college, he lived in West Berlin from 1988 to 1990, before eventually moving to Seattle, Washington, where his career as an advice columnist and activist would take off.

Career & Major Achievements

Savage Love and Advice Work

Savage began writing Savage Love in 1991 for The Stranger, a Seattle alternative weekly newspaper. The column offers blunt, candid, often humorous advice on sex, relationships, identity, and social issues. Over time it became syndicated and reached a large national and international readership.

In addition to the print column, Savage also launched the Savage Lovecast, a podcast version in which he answers listeners’ questions live over the phone.

He is known both for pushing boundaries (especially regarding sexual norms) and for coining or popularizing terms and ideas that entered more mainstream discourse (for example, monogamish).

Activism & The It Gets Better Project

In 2010, Savage and his husband, Terry Miller, co-founded the It Gets Better Project, a campaign to support LGBTQ youth and offer hope against bullying, harassment, and the crisis of teen suicides.

Through video submissions and public statements, the project encourages queer young people to hold on through difficult times, with the message that life can and often does improve.

Savage has also been a vocal commentator on various social and political issues—sexual freedom, reproductive rights, religion, and censorship among them.

Publications & Literary Work

Savage has authored several books. Key among them:

  • Savage Love: Straight Answers from America’s Most Popular Sex Columnist (1998)

  • The Kid (about parenthood and adoption)

  • Skipping Towards Gomorrah: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Pursuit of Happiness in America

  • The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family (2005) — in which he and his partner examine the decision to marry and their life as a queer family.

His books often mix memoir, social commentary, and provocative arguments about norms and taboos.

Philosophy, Style & Influence

  • Candidness & bluntness: Savage is known for his no-nonsense, sometimes abrasive style. He does not shy away from taboo subjects or uncomfortable truths.

  • Sex positivity: He argues for sexual freedom and consent, pushing against moralistic or shame-based approaches to sexuality.

  • Queer visibility and rights: As an openly gay man and public figure, he has used his platform to advocate for LGBTQ equality, particularly in challenging contexts.

  • Critique of rigid norms: He questions monogamy, traditional marriage structures, religious dogma, and social taboos in favor of more flexible, realistic models.

  • Humor & provocation: He often uses satire, irony, and direct language to provoke reflection and even discomfort, believing that discomfort can spur change.

His influence is felt not only in sexual and relationship discourse, but in culture at large—through language (e.g. monogamish), activism, and shaping public conversations.

Famous Quotes

Here are some representative quotes from Dan Savage:

“Straight couples don’t have to be monogamous to be married or married to be monogamous. Monogamy no more defines marriage than the presence of children does.”

“We can learn to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about gay people. The same way we have learned to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation.”

“The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness means that each of us is free to go our own way, even if the ways some of us may choose to go seem sinful or shocking to our fellow citizens.”

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

“I treat people who write me the way my friends and I all treat each other when we go to each other for advice, which is sometimes with supreme cruelty.”

“The Bible is only as good and decent as the person reading it.”

These quotes reflect Savage’s approach: unflinching, irreverent, and unafraid to question entrenched beliefs.

Lessons from Dan Savage’s Life & Work

  1. Speak truth with boldness
    Savage models that sometimes the most important conversations are ones many avoid. Confrontation, when respectful, can drive progress.

  2. Challenge norms, but with purpose
    His debates about monogamy, marriage, and sexuality push us to question “accepted” definitions and create space for diverse lives.

  3. Use humor and provocation as tools
    Savage shows that satire and bluntness, when wielded well, can puncture complacency and prompt introspection.

  4. Engage visibility as a form of activism
    His own identity and openness became part of his advocacy—making personal life public as a political act.

  5. Combine voice and accountability
    Being a public figure comes with responsibility. Savage often engages with controversy and critique, not retreating from it.

  6. Advocacy can scale from individual advice to global impact
    His work evolved from a local advice column to a movement (It Gets Better) that reaches millions. Small voices can grow into platforms for change.

Articles by the author

Christmas can have a real melancholy aspect, 'cause it packages itself as this idea of perfect family cohesion and love, and you're always going to come up short when you measure your personal life against the idealized personal lives that are constantly thrust in our faces, primarily by TV commercials.

Dan Savage

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

Dan Savage

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

Dan Savage

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

Dan Savage

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

Dan Savage

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

Dan Savage

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

Dan Savage

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

Dan Savage