Anyone heard of Dan Savage and the column Savagelove?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

…or is it just a Hong Kong thing?

This fellow gives no-holds-barred advice and opinions on sexual matters in HK Magazine, the local equivalent of London’s Time Out, i.e. a bit more racey than most other English-language print media.

In his most recent piece, he was responding to a letter from a guy who ‘was cruising for sex online’ and met two guys for anonymous sex. One of those two guys wanted the others to have sex with him bareback. One was willing, the correspondent was not. The correspondent felt uncomfortable that the bottom was willing to have unprotected sex with the other fellow (a top), and left the apartment because he didn’t ‘believe in taking part in unsafe sex’. He was seeking Dan’s advice because he felt he should have been more assertive, more forceful in his attempts to prevent them indulging in such a dangerous practice. “Should I have done more?” he asks.

In reply, Dan is pretty unequivocal about things, accusing the fellow of wimping out. He mocks him for accepting at face value the bottom’s claim that he was HIV negative, and notes that if in the correspondent’s opinion the top ‘looked HIV positive’, as he did, then he was even more irresponsible. Third, he chides him for indulging in anonymous sex in the first place.

Dan then addresses the fellow’s question and says that he should certainly have been more assertive, saying something like: ‘You would be an idiot to let someone come in your ass just because he tells you he’s negative’. To the top he should have said: ‘You look like you’re positive. Are you lying about your HIV status?’

So far, so good. It’s what Dan writes next that took my attention. Here it is:

‘I wrote a couple of months ago that positive guys didn’t have an absolute right to expose other people to HIV’.

This struck me as bizarre. People who are HIV positive don’t have a right to expose other people to the danger of contracting AIDS? They have the responsibility to do no such thing.

Is this aberrant advice from one lone ranger, or is this reflective of mainstream gay thinking?

2

Oh, sure, he’s one of leading columnists here. Savage Love also appears in The Village Voice, the leading American countercultural paper, and has for some time; it’s probably syndicated to many other papers. Here’s the link to the same column in the VV–it sounds a bit different from what you posted. Are you sure your version isn’t edited?

3

Yeah, he’s pretty popular here in the city, especially the gay community :slight_smile:

4

He’s in a lot of alternate newspapers over here. I read him on-line in the Onion, and buy the collections of his columns as they’re released. IIRC, he lives on the West coast somewhere, I think either Washington or Oregon. He’s also written a book about the adoption of his son, which is an amazing book. There’s a bit at the end, when they’re getting the kid christened, that made me choke up when I read it. I highly recommend it.

As for your question, I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking. There is a portion of the gay community who confuse “gay rights” with “the right to fuck anyone I want how I want, and damn the consequences.” These people fall somewhere between “stupid fucking morons” and “evil scumbags,” but they tend to act like you’re oppressing them when you call them on their idiotic and reprehensible behavior.

Of course, this behavior is hardly unique to gays.

5

Savage’s column is syndicated in various newspapers around the US, the Chicago Reader among them.

As for your second question, which I quoted, I’m afraid I don’t see the confusion. He’s being understated in his commentary, perhaps that’s the issue?

6

Dan Savage gives great advice, I’ve been reading him for years.

As for your second point, I don’t get what you’re talking about at all.

7

Wasn’t his column responsible for the launch of Spreading Santorum?

I don’t think he himself coined the term, but I think he was the one who made it popular.

8

Yes, he was. In response to the dishonorable Senator’s remarks about gays, he held a contest asking people to turn the name Santorum into a new word with a disgusting, sexually “deviant” definition. Anal froth was the winning suggestion.

9

His column appears in Now Magazine here in Toronto.

10

I heartily recommend his book Skipping Towards Gomorrah.

11

Mehitabel, yes, the HK Mag version’s been expurgated of swearwords, but otherwise, it’s pretty much the same.

In particular, the part I quoted is the same:

‘I wrote a couple of months ago that positive guys didn’t have an absolute right to expose other people to HIV’.

This strikes me as bizarre for the following reason: if I were HIV positive, then I would have the responsibility not to have unprotected sex with other people (men or women). Rights wouldn’t come into it.

Again, is the idea that it’s a matter of rights, not of responsibility, not to have unprotected sex when you are HIV positive, reflective of mainstream gay thinking?

12

Roger, Savage is just saying that some HIV+ people act like they have the right to fuck whoever they want however they want, when of course they do not. Some guys, like the one in the column, think it’s their “right” to keep their status to themselves, but that is definitely not reflective of the thinking of the gay community in general.

You misunderstood the sentence, that’s all. :slight_smile:

13

Yeah, he’s being snarky. Put the words “believe it or not,” in a really sarcastic tone of voice, right after the words “do not”, to get the proper tone.

14

I love Dan Savage and have been reading his column for years and years. You can get it online at the Onion’s AV Club or the Stranger. He also has a book titled “Savage Love” which is a best-of collection of his past columns.

I’m a big fan.

15

Savage Love started out in an alternative weekly in Seattle called The Stranger. I used to read it there on occasion before I moved away. It’s always a little strange to see something from my old hometown make it big in the rest of the country. (And, apparently, the world. I had no idea it ran in Hong Kong.)

Dan Savage also used to be part of a theater troupe there called Greek Active that did “recontextualizations” of classic plays. In their version of Romeo and Juliet, the Montagues and Capulets were rival lesbian softball teams. My friends raved about their version of The Importance of Being Earnest, but I didn’t catch that one.

16

He lives in Seattle and is an editor of the alternative paper here The Stranger. Savage Love is syndicated to the Village Voice and the Onion.

The column’s been around for years.

17

This is exactly what Dan Savage is saying.

18

It appeared in Seattle but he initially wrote it in Madison.

19

I read Savage Love every Wednesday at The Onion web site. I love it! And I also have Skipping Towards Gomorrah.

20

Well, I’m glad I’m with Dan and seemingly almost everyone else on this. The non-congruent wording of that one sentence does chafe rather, though, with the tone of the rest of the piece, which will inevitably cause some confusion. All this ‘fucking’ and laying it on the line no holds barred, and then then such opaque language. Quite a disjuncture.

Sounds like The Stranger the spiritual descendant of the Berkeley Barb that flourished down the coast in the mid/late 1960s. That featured sex - all known kinds…some unknown too - pretty heavily too.